Uproot a city of artists and you will hear their cries, and New Orleans was nothing if not a gathering place for creatives. The musicians have been heard on such gut-scraping releases as Our New Orleans (Nonesuch). Now the city’s writers have begun to release their laments, notably novelist and critic Tom Piazza arguing from the heart Why New Orleans Matters and NPR commentator and poet Andrei Codrescu bookending a collection of essays and radio pieces, New Orleans, Mon Amour, with reflections on the Katrina disaster.

Both books are powerful, rich with anger, longing, and barely expressible loss. But whereas Codrescu, who first came to the city in 1982, primarily communicates through the indirect languor of a poet (or a long-time New Orleanian), Piazza, who moved to there in 1994, scores a direct hit. His book is an argument, laid out to build a case. That he is preaching to the converted — who else will read this book? — matters little. Attention must be paid. And what a case Piazza makes: first woo

Rick Moody, past master of tales of suburban alienation (Garden State, The Ice Storm), has made an ambitious leap into another genre — a sprawling, overstuffed satiric novel centered on the efforts of various incompetents to get made a television mini-series called The Diviners. It’s an epic concept that starts with the Mongol hordes and ends with the founding of Las Vegas, and it’s held together, dubiously, by the theme of divining, or dowsing, the old practice of finding water with a crooked stick. Moody — whose prose style is itself alienated, if not post-traumatic, in its insistence on atomizing his subjects while retaining a lofty distance — milks the grand stupidity of the idea for all it’s worth. Most of the characters in the book (and there are a couple dozen) are stupid, delusional, or foolish to the point of being dangerous to themselves, and this is both a pleasure and a problem, a source of humor but also tedium. Moody has a knack for the condescending insight into dumb behavior,

An interviewer once broke the ice with Rod Stewart by asking how he was doing, and Stewart said not so great — Sam Cooke was still dead. Since this exchange took place roughly two decades after Cooke had been shot to death in the front office of a seedy LA motel, it suggests just how hard Rod Stewart took his idol’s demise.

But then Sam Cooke was not ordinary as a singer or a person. Some achieve gold status and some have it thrust upon them. But Peter Guralnick (the author of a magnificent two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, among many other music-related books) in this new, dense, detailed, and utterly captivating biography, makes one think that Cooke probably shone in the womb. Certainly he was a golden child to everyone who knew him, and not just because of his incandescent smile and inherent sweetness; from his earliest days, Cooke not only seemed to know that he was destined for greatness but also planned for it. His brother L. C. recalls, "When we was very little boys, we were playing, and

Oftentimes a comic-book hero will appear fully formed in the first issue; only later is his or her back story revealed. Batman, for instance, first swooped in from Gotham’s shadows in Detective Comics #27, but it wasn’t until issue #33 that we learned what motivates his thirst for justice.

So it is with comic-book antihero Harvey Pekar. In American Splendor #1, published in 1976, we meet a schlubby VA-hospital file clerk. He’s a genial grouch. He lives in Cleveland. He loves jazz. He deals as best he can with the troubles and travails of everyday life. He ponders, he puzzles, he frets, he fumes. He just is.

Now, with The Quitter (DC Comics; $20) we get the full story of how Harvey Pekar became Harvey Pekar. A book-long narrative rather than the usual series of semi-epiphanic moments, it’s the most substantive and rewarding look yet at the strangely compelling life of the Lake Erie everyman.

We meet a kid named Herschel, born to Polish immigrants five weeks afte

The social novel has enjoyed a comeback among American readers in recent years. For their part, after generations of interior voyaging, novelists who want to capture the tone and the personal consequences of our troubling political and economic arrangements are suffering through a reawakening. The temptation to resort to Dickens-like caricature, bray one’s arcane knowledge of pop-culture and high-tech trivia, and display excruciatingly complex plot virtuosity is strong indeed, as is the lure of authorial sermonizing and breathless hyper-journalistic pacing.

Zadie Smith’s first two novels, White Teeth (2000) and particularly The Autograph Man (2002), were not immune to such criticism. And yet all agreed that here was a talent that one day might well match the genre’s monumental ambition. In On Beauty, the 30-year-old Jamaican-British writer achieves greater dimension and restraint, giving readers a social novel that is true both to the times and to the mysterious workings o

It’s hard to disagree with Arthur Miller. Right on the cover of Davy Rothbart’s debut collection of short stories, The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, we find one of the deans of American literature proclaiming, "Davy writes with his whole heart. These stories are crushing."

Maybe that’s not what you’d expect from a rapper and documentary filmmaker who’s made a name for himself by collecting scraps of other people’s lives in his Found magazine, which may be the most logical extension of postmodern literary thinking — why write a magazine when you can compile one from what’s already been written by other people? But with his stories, Rothbart seems to be saying that we write nowadays if only to feel, and we read if only to remember that other people feel the same things we do. The characters who populate his stories may or may not be representative of his readership, however. Two are prisoners. Three others risk jail with their actions. All of them reside in a gray moral reality — the sp

For those of us who devour every new book by Philip Roth — and he churns them out almost at the rate of one a year — the experience of trekking through the Library of America’s new two-volume collection of early Roth is both instructive and surprising, even if you’re revisiting material you’ve encountered before. I read Portnoy’s Complaint in college, when it was still new and shocking, and the Goodbye, Columbus stories and his first novel, Letting Go, in my 20s, but in the light of his later work, they give off different vibrations now. I don’t just mean that, for example, you can see the glimmers of The Plot Against America as early as his audacious short story "Eli, the Fanatic," and of I Married a Communist in the adolescent leftism of Alexander Portnoy, but that the arc of his early work wouldn’t have told you just what to expect of him.

Certainly the Goodbye, Columbus collection, brought out in 1959, was an auspicious debut — confident (one might say co

Dear Vinny,

I gotta tell you that the last volume of that surfer Dante thing has come out and it’s really somethin’. You remember that weird Inferno and Purgatorio we heard about last year? Now they’ve done Paradiso. Same two guys. One of ’em, Sandow Birk, is an artist and a surfer, and he did the illustrations, which look like Gustave Doré except when they don’t, if you know what I mean. And he translated the Italian with this other guy, Marcus Sanders, who edits Surfline, except it ain’t exactly a translation, since you know Dante never heard of Eminem.

But Dante’s big thing was writing his Commedia in the vernacular, and that’s what Birk and Sanders do, only they do it in our vernacular, not his. Some people are gonna freak when they see f-bombs bursting all over a Classic of Western Civilization, though I bet Dante’d have done the same if he’d thought he could get away with it. B&S update the list of souls, too; Foucault and Jung and Hemi

General Sherman told us war is hell; John Crawford fills us in on the specifics. No novice to Army service, Crawford spent three years with the 101st Airborne Division (XII) before joining the National Guard to pay for college tuition. Still, it wasn’t until near the end of his Guard time, when he was newly married and two credits away from graduating, that he got called up to active duty in Iraq. What happened there seems to have destroyed much of the life that came before. And in this intense volume, he spits it all back, half-digested and as disgusting as that sounds, full of bile, blood, and chunks of experience too awkward to pass.

As a National Guardsman, Crawford explains, he found himself a sort of semi-soldier, underappreciated and ill-equipped. The Air Force has "climate-controlled shelters"; the Guard does not. The Marines have tents; the Guard does not. Armed with equipment that can’t stand up to the desert, much less the weapons of the enemy, Crawford describes a helpless, desperate stat

Yes, there has been life after Listening to Prozac. Dr. Peter D. Kramer, Providence psychiatrist and author of the 1993 best seller, has written four more books since that time, including a novel and Against Depression, which came out earlier this year.

And starting this month, local listeners have been able to hear his accumulated insights on the hour-long radio magazine The Infinite Mind, Saturdays at 7 pm on WRNI (1290 AM) in Providence and WXNI (1230 AM) in Westerly.

In April Kramer took over hosting the program from Dr. Fred Goodwin, who had done so for eight seasons, after having guest-hosted a half-dozen times. Last year, Kramer’s shows on domestic violence and mental health care for immigrants were award-winners. He has recently covered topics ranging from multi-tasking and dyslexia to animal companions and "foods and moods."

"We’re thinking about doing shows focused on one individual’s work," Kramer said, "where we think there are some great minds