Currie Jr. goes all Deep Impact in his new novel.

Perhaps owing to the ever-present jingoistic saber-rattling, economic upheaval or virulent plagues in the news today, novels about global, end-of-days smitings are, it seems, more popular than ever. People just love to look into the abyss and speculate on the form in which the destructor will come. (Freebird Books even hosts a monthly postapocalyptic book club, which, I have been assured by reputable sources, takes the subject quite seriously.) Author Ron Currie Jr., previously the author of the story collection God Is Dead, is the latest to prophesize our collective doom in his new novel Everything Matters!

Junior Thibodeau is a child prodigy who is given precise knowledge of the time and manner of the Earth’s destruction while still in the womb. This insight, clearly, makes him a more somber youth than most. Throughout his numbered days, Junior waxes and wanes between reckless hope and abject despair as he grapples with how this knowledge should affect his own life and what in it, if anything, really matters. It’s a heartbreaking, laugh-out-loud blend of philosophic gallows humor that could touch even the arid heart of Mad Max.

Currie Jr. reads tonight at Barnes & Noble.

Sure, Susan Sontag took herself pretty seriously—just look at the photo! This isn’t lost on Phillip Lopate, who frequently takes Sontag to task in his new book, detailing her pomposity and some of her ludicrous intellectual postures. But in the end, his praise draws strength from the fact that he’s willing to criticize. He’s also pretty good at criticizing himself and confronting his biases (namely his preference for prose more balanced than Sontag’s was). The result of his critical insight and self-awareness is a lively, layered book that’s inspirational in its quest for truth—a merging of personal reflection and big ideas. Anyone interested in the personal essay or in Susan Sontag should go see him in action tonight.

Ben Greenman’s debut novel, Please Step Back, is the heady saga of a funk-rock icon who soars in the ’60s before sliding into ’70s obscurity. Tonight at 7pm, at the Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo, Greenman will be reading from the book and throwing a party. Expect music.

Old folks rule. Straight up. After talking about how geriatric is the new tween in a review of Marc Fitten’s book, Valeria’s Last Stand, I got to thinking about a book by Sebastian Barry that came out last year, this one about a hundred-year-old Irish lady called Roseanne McNulty. This crazy old white-hair has seen some things in her day, and the Ireland of her youth is nothing like the one in which she finds herself in her dotage. Her story is set against that of her doctor at the asylum, who realizes that there is more to this old biddy’s story than meets the eye. It’s a terrific book, and Barry creates some real suspense when mining Roseanne’s memories for the dark truth of her troubled history. Barry reads tomorrow night at Glucksman Ireland House.

Hello? Neil? Are you out there? We’re sorry for thinking that you’re a paranoid militiaman wannabe. Fine, you want to hear us say it? You were right. Now please come and get us out of here!

Strauss’s recent book, Emergency, chronicles the former New York Times writer’s preparation for the cataclysmic breakdown in civil society, whether from famine, war, economic breakdown or pestilential bacon flu. Although it occasionally suffers from being a bit too self-indulgent, the book does offer many tips on how to go about ducking the apocalypse. We spoke to him a few months ago about how he would get out of certain fictional end-of-days scenarios. His answers can be found here.

Damion Searls—a writer who likes to pass the time by translating Rilke, Proust and Walser, among others (what fun!)—and travels in the Keith Gessen n+1 orbit, has an excellent short-story collection out next week titled What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going. In these five stories (thankfully a far quicker read than Remembrance of Things Past), Searls introduces us to a series of disaffected writerly types just trying to get by. He is quick to acknowledge his debt to the old guard (each story is connected somehow to an earlier work by Gide, Hawthorne, Inoue, Nabokov and Landolfi, respectively), but it’s his Hawthorne riff, “The Cubicles,” a play off the Scarlet Letter author’s short “The Custom-House,” that will work nicest in tandem with Personal Days author Ed Park, whom he reads with tonight at Book Culture. Who knew that office culture would be such a great setting for fiction? Friday Searls will appear with Benjamin Kunkel at BookCourt.

Denis Johnson has tackled a number of melancholic subjects—the Vietnam War, heroin addiction, the death of a spouse. But he’s also always had a deeply comic sensibility, one that seems to grow directly out of his disturbing content. In Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Leonard English, a drifter whose car breaks down in Provincetown, Massachusetts, falls for a lesbian and tries to woo her by describing himself like this: “I’m a nice person, but I have a lot of inside trouble.” Now, in Nobody Move, Johnson delivers his most ostensibly funny novel yet. It follows Jimmy Luntz, a gambler who owes too much money to the wrong people and winds up on a hit list. Johnson’s prose is more stripped down and purposeful than usual, but even if you miss his strange meandering, this is a sparkling neonoir with plot twists, laughs and a body count.

Many well-informed readers know how globalism has changed world economies, but few understand how much it affects women’s rights. Michelle Goldberg sets out to change that in her compelling and well-reported new study.

David Maisel’s 2008 photo book, Library of Dust, is beautiful to look at and haunting to ponder. A little backstory: The Oregon State Insane Asylum opened in 1883, and for years mentally unstable patients were sent there (and often forgotten). When patients died and were unclaimed by their families, they were cremated; the ashes were put in a can, stored in a warehouse. Over the years, these canisters corroded, their surfaces taking on patinas of brilliant color. In 2005, Maisel photographed a series of the canisters, and collected the pictures in this book. Tonight, an amazing roundtable discusses Maisel’s work: photography expert Luc Sante, specialist on many things Jonathan Lethem, war photographer Gilles Peress, art critic (and seeker of eccentricities) Lawrence Weschler and Maisel himself. Appropriately, the discussion will be held at the beautifully dilapidated former synagogue Angel Orensanz, at 172 Norfolk Street between East Houston and Stanton Streets.

It’s hard to put your finger on what makes Geoff Dyer’s writing so effective. It’s smart, elegant without being fussy, all that. But there’s an even subtler charm, a complex tone that’s at once restless and comfortable, melancholy and joyous, intense and relaxed. The combination of deep feeling and easiness helped make his book on jazz, But Beautiful, one of the truly great books you’ll find on that subject.

Dyer’s latest book, a novel called Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, should be really confusing, but we were hooked from the start. The first half is a satire on the 2002 Venice Biennale. The second part follows a London journalist to India, where he might or might not be having a nervous breakdown. It’s never clear how, exactly, these two parts fit together. Yet in Dyer’s hands, they weave together in quiet—then louder—ways. As the author told TONY, he wasn’t going for old-fashioned suspense, but for an “effect.” He delivers. This book grips you with its motifs and mysteries, even as—or rather, because—its two plotlines refuse to match up.

French journalist Jean Hatzfeld has been covering the Rwanda genocide and its aftermath for more than a decade now. His first two books on the topic were oral histories that collected statements from the survivors (Life Laid Bare) and the killers (Machete Season). Those books are astonishing, but The Antelope’s Strategy, his latest book on the conflict, is the most stunning of the trilogy because it combines the accounts of killers and survivors, who are now trying to coexist. The result is a lucid examination of national reconciliation, and an attempt to show how people record the horrors of genocide. This book is essential for anyone wondering what Rwanda looks like ten years after Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families.

Henry David Thoreau has always been the guy all of us wanted to be (that is, if we couldn’t be Han Solo, Captain Ahab or Mega Man): ecologically sound, morally upright and one who didn’t suffer fools lightly (if at all). The guy was so cool and detached that he didn’t even need human friends, because his drinking buddies were John Oak and Pete Sycamore. And Josh D. Squirrel. Mike “Blotto” Mulch. Okay, I’ll stop now. But according to Brooklyn author Robert Sullivan—author of The Thoreau You Don’t Know: What the Prophet of Enivironmentalism Really Meant—this image of antisocial, pro-hermit Myrmidon of the forest is a skewed one that misrepresents the things HDT actually stood for. The false legacy, Sullivan argues, is largely the fault of a condescending Emerson (who wrote the famous eulogy for his “friend”), and also the vitriol of James Russell Lowell, his old editor at The Atlantic, who apparently accused Thoreau of having a “morbid self-consciousness that pronounces the world of men empty and worthless before trying it.” Ouch. Whatever the truth of the matter, Sullivan’s book is important because it offers a new look at a misunderstood American figure, and might incline you to dust off your high-school books on transcendentalism for a fresh read.

Dave Hickey is a self-described “relic of an old-school, all-volunteer, heavily medicated art world.” As a critic, he has a renegade, crusty charm. To wit, the epigraph of his classic essay collection Air Guitar comes from Keith Richards: “Let me be clear about this.… I don’t have a drug problem. I have a police problem.” But there’s more to him than catchy irreverence. He’s smart, provocative and a great writer, to boot. Just see his latest book, The Invisible Dragon, which is a collection of essays old and new. Here, he goes to bat for a quality rarely discussed these days: beauty. His subjects are as far-flung as Shakespeare, Raphael and Robert Mapplethorpe. Even if you don’t agree with him, he’s such a lively thinker that you’ll relish the argument.

James Tate has been writing great poetry for four decades now, delivering lines of mild hallucinatory beauty (”the terror of the earrings”) and poems that invite you in, make you comfortable and then pull the rug out. In his most recent work, he has been honing his gift for dialogue-driven poems, small stories that seem to have a small-town familiarity and then say something totally unexpected. His latest, The Ghost Soldiers, finds friends, neighbors and random strangers bickering about God, struck by paranoia and wondering why their houses have been torn down. The odd discussions start simply but weave their way to moments of surprising power, as Tate squeezes a droll essence and secular mysticism out of his characters’ crankiness. Don’t miss him reading these comic gems on Friday 20 at The Writer’s Voice, the excellent reading series hosted by the West Side Y.

So compelling is Flannery O’Connor that one almost forgets there’s another writer at work in Brad Gooch’s fascinating biography of the Southern short-story master. But this fact is a testament to just how well written and thoroughly researched (there are 48 pages of source notes!) Flannery is. Gooch draws a complex portrait of O’Connor—beginning with her as an un-belle-like five-year-old and ending with her premature death from lupus—by combing through her work and correspondence, and quoting friends and family. Slowly, Gooch intimates parallels between her life and her work, revealing that although she was a very sharp, dry (occasionally caustic) wit in person, in private she struggled with her illness, loneliness and craft.

But don’t get the wrong impression—although there is much about writing and academia, there is serious color in this book. O’Connor could be quite droll, and her quotes (as well as those of her scandalized relatives and neighbors) are often laugh-out-loud funny. O’Connor never tired, it seems, of being a pain in the ass. For instance, at a party thrown in her honor after the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood, members of the Milledgeville Book Club were asked to cite the childhood book that had impressed them most. Everyone who spoke cited an improbable, highfalutin title. Flannery, obviously,  picked the Sears, Roebuck catalog.

On Thursday 12, John Wray will read from his new novel, Lowboy, on the L train platform. This makes sense: Wray’s thriller tracks a teen schizophrenic making his way through New York City’s subway system. Wray’s story is fast paced, but its carefully drawn teen hero is what lingers: He’s at once intensely familiar, completely foreign and unforgettable.

See straphangers read Wray’s book here.

Gary Lutz’s debut story collection, originally put out by Knopf in the mid ’90s, has just been revived by the venerable independent publisher Calamari Press. The book has already become a true cult item, and no wonder: It comes charged with humor, humiliation, odd sexual currents, koanlike thought patterns and an artfully gnarled syntax. Experience it for yourself tonight at Word, where Lutz will read from—and celebrate the new printing of—this lost classic.

Edward Hoagland, a writer who John Updike once called “the best essayist of my generation,” is someone who fears neither the grizzled men nor the ornery critters that reside in the wild regions of British Columbia (nor does he much fear death, it seems). While exploring these remote areas in the late ’60s, looking for material for his next novel, Hoagland instead found the stuff of iconic travel literature, and the scribblings from his journey would become Notes from the Century Before. Eventually, Hoagland made his way back to the Great White North, and the resulting book, Early in the Season: A British Columbia Journal, is a slim, engrossing read that will tell you all you need to know about legendary trader Skookum Davidson. It was released in quality bookstores everywhere this past Sunday.

The Greenwich Village family members at the center of Zoe Heller’s fiercely intelligent new novel, The Believers, are unapologetically leftist—or are they? When civil-rights attorney Joel Litvinoff, who can boast that he represented Martin Luther King back in 1962, suffers a stroke, his wife, Audrey, suddenly finds herself rethinking her stance against life support. Meanwhile, one of their daughters starts dabbling in Orthodox Judaism, deeply offending Audrey’s staunch atheism. The book’s internal and external conflicts are subtly rendered and make for excellent drama, but Heller, whose previous novels include Notes on a Scandal, also employs them to develop a thought-provoking question about belief—namely, what function does it serve, and how stable is it? The flawed Litvinoffs might not be the kind of people you want to sip espresso with, but they’re fascinating to watch.

Read an excerpt.

The versatile Parisian Emmanuel Carrere is a film director, novelist and biographer of Philip K. Dick. He’s also the author of The Adversary, one of the most cool-headed and novelistic true-crime books we’ve ever read. The meditative tome recounts the strange case of Jean-Claude Romand, a French father of two who convinced his family and friends that he was a doctor (he wasn’t) and that he worked at the World Health Organization (he didn’t). Romand spent his work days sitting in his car or walking in the woods, and conning friends and in-laws into giving him vast amounts of money. Threatened with exposure, he killed his wife, his kids and his own parents. The Adversary appeared in English in 2000. We revisited it today because Carrere is in town to discuss his work with Francine Prose at NYU’s Festival of New French Writing (Sat 28 at 2pm). Chilling.