What?, by Mark Kurlansky (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
How must Mark Kurlansky (author of Cod and Salt) have felt when he saw that his book composed (almost) entirely of questions was beaten to publication by a better book composed entirely of questions, Padget Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? Does it help that Powell's book is fiction and Kurlansky's isn't, that the latter is a sort of cultural history and interrogation of the act of questioning itself? Can you really sustain even a very short book on the single conceit that questions are more important than answers? Is Kurlansky's habit of taking time out to make weak jokes about people's names a sign that the answer to that question is "No"?
Do references to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Talmud, and Ernest Hemingway, a strangely unrealistic imagining of a conversation between two English people in the street, and some cute woodcuts come together to make a pleasing whole, or is it rather a disappointing amuse-gueule? In that case should we call it an ennuie-gueule? Are there even so a couple of nice questions here? "Shouldn't a lot of [Shakespeare's] titles have question marks after them? Much Ado About Nothing? Or All's Well that Ends Well? Or even Richard III? Isn't there a question of legitimacy here?" What do you reckon?
After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11, by Richard Gray (Wiley-Blackwell, £25)
In this survey of post-9/11 fiction (plus drama and poetry), the author has a fixed idea of "what the writer has to do". Novelists going about their business as they see fit are chastised if they do not perform the required political gestures, eg "de-territorialising America". Poor Don DeLillo evidently didn't know he was supposed to be doing that, so his Falling Man is lumped in with syrupy soaps such as Jay McInerney's The Good Life as an inferior effort; to boot, Gray sniffs that DeLillo's style is "excessively mannered". What would be mannered to just the right degree? Apparently, Cormac McCarthy's karaoke Faulkner/King James shtick. (The Road is surely the most overrated novel of the last decade.)
Gray does, though, have a sharp eye for the cheap (Safran Foer, Martin Amis, The Kite Runner), and makes intelligent points about bad art's misappropriation of politics. Satisfying, too, to see Denis Johnson's magnificent Tree of Smoke justly celebrated. A passing reference to the 9/11 Commission Report invites one to imagine a reading of that, too, as "post-9/11 literature".
The English Wordsmith: A Lexical Eclecsis, by David W Andrews (The Great Wordsmith LLP, £12.99)
Logomanes might enjoy this hefty alphabetical collection of words that one man found interesting. A fair few are rather straightforward ("lunge", "puma", "immigrate"), and some definitions debatable (I don't think a "gloss" is necessarily "a misleading explanation"). Pleasing obscurities abound, however: new to this reader were "aduncous" ("hooked, curved inward"), "eident" ("busy; diligent"), "nutant" ("nodding") and "zoilism" ("fierce criticism"), which might come in handy.
The book also works as a kind of aleatory encyclopedia, with advice on the ingredients of haggis, the names of Furies, useful French and German terms for strange feelings and people, and the fact that Old World monkeys are "more closely related to anthropoid apes than are New World monkeys". (The late author appeared to have had a fondness for animals, or at least the words for them.) A subtle humour occasionally makes itself felt, as when "cacoethes: an urge to do something unwise" is followed by "cacoethes scribendi: an urge to write". Tell me about it.
