Alexandra Jacobs

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By Isabel Fonseca

Alfred A. Knopf, 306 pages, $23.95

Oh, to be Isabel Fonseca! A stunning brunette with high cheekbones and that glam international surname that suggests a yummy pairing of fontina and prosecco. Second wife of Martin Amis, easily among the top five writers working in the English language (never mind those scathing reviews of his recent Sept. 11 essay collection; part of genius is just being brave and prolific)—surely they’re not snarling at each other over whose turn it is to clean the cat’s litter box. Author of Bury Me Standing, a Serious Nonfiction Work about gypsies that took her four years of intense, virtuous immersion research ... and now, with consummate versatility, of a novel as fruity and delicious as the cocktails served on the fictional tropical island of St. Jacques, where it’s primarily set.  read more »

ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN
By Keith Gessen
Viking, 242 pages, $24.95

The hazy golden specter of F. Scott Fitzgerald looms over all first novels by young white male Ivy League graduates, but it looms especially large over this one, by Keith Gessen, a limpid-eyed, sensual-mouthed founding editor of the intellectual journal n+1.

It’s there in the title, of course, and in Mr. Gessen’s brittle romanticizing of New York City, though the chic neighborhoods have shifted since the Jazz Age (“Oh god—what would it take to live in such a place?” one character thinks, perambulating among the gleaming muscleds of Chelsea. “What reserves of strength? What reserves of cash?”) It’s there in the titular young men’s melancholy enthusiasm for booze (“I was still drinking too much and giving up on people too quickly” confides one sozzled sophomore), and in their ambivalent pursuit of tempestuous, flighty women who “italicized things” and wear navel rings.  read more »

AGAINST THE MACHINE: BEING HUMAN IN THE AGE OF THE ELECTRONIC MOB
By Lee Siegel
Spiegel & Grau, 182 pages, $22.95

To read the social critic Lee Siegel’s latest treatise on the deleterious effects of Internet culture is to find oneself exultantly blurting things like “Mmm-hmm!”, “That’s right!” and “Sing it!” Overhearing me ejaculate thusly, my friend Mike said he imagined a bunch of geeky white journalists sitting in a Baptist church, huzzahing a sermon whose highlights included, for example, the declaration that the Internet “has forced traditional news outlets to seek out more and more trivial news,” and that it has “engorged the ‘old’ media with streams of useless information.” Ain’t it the truth, brother!

“But I feel like I read posts about that stuff every day on Romenesko,” said skeptical Mike, referring to the oft-clicked “media news” Web site. (Mike is a sometimes television writer who doesn’t share Mr. Siegel’s tastes in that particular medium.)  read more »

HER LAST DEATH: A MEMOIR
By Susanna Sonnenberg
Scribner, 273 pages, $24

Some families bond over photographs or touch football; the writer Susanna Sonnenberg’s precious memories are of puking.

Now in her late 30’s, Ms. Sonnenberg longs for her estranged mother most when “sick with flu or after too much wine with a rich dinner.” During childhood, “when I needed to throw up,” Ms. Sonnenberg recalls in Her Last Death, a mesmerizing new memoir, “Mummy came and sat at the edge of the tub.” This is one of the few times the familial term is used rather than the flamboyant and somehow faintly contemptuous pseudonym “Daphne.”

“I was afraid, but she made it safe,” the author continues. “She kept my nightgown out of the way. … She soothed me and said ‘Almost done.’ … That’s when I had her.”  read more »

Shalom Auslander has written a memoir centering on his pangs over getting his newborn boy’s member snipped.  read more »

A new doc about the Chanel designer reveals a cold, aging man clinging to youth (a ponytail! 100 iPods!).  read more »

Within a certain social circle—O.K., mine—mention of the name Katie Roiphe inspires exasperated eye rolls, forehead slaps, even hisses.  read more »

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Tina Brown’s new biography of her apparent longtime girl crush, the doomed Princess of Wales, is that one doesn’t feel totally embarrassed reading it.  read more »