Quarrel and Quandary
by Cynthia Ozick
Hardcover/247pp/Knopf
HBS Price: $12.99

In her new collection of essays, Cynthia Ozick examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature. She writes about "Crime and Punishment," Henry James, William Styron, and the Book of Job. She celebrates the ladle, wonders who "owns" Anne Frank, asks "What Poetry Is About." Wrote John Sutherland in the New York Times: "I urge all lovers of American prose to read it."

The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence
edited by David Remnick
Hardcover/432pp/Random House
HBS Price: $12.99

Culled from articles, essays, and profiles published in The New Yorker over the past decade, "The New Gilded Age" depicts the mega-, meta-, monster-wealth created in our recent "Gilded Age." From profiles of Martha Stewart and Bill Gates to articles which explore the twenty-something world of consulting and New York City's busiest real estate brokers, this anthology attempts to define an era that may already be over. Contributors include Joan Didion, Malcolm Gladwell, Calvin Trillin, and Adam Gopnik. Under The New Yorker's examination, our current day is exposed as a special time in history: affluent and aggressive, prosperous and peaceful, wired and wild, and, ultimately, finite.

Out of the Noosphere
by the editors of Outside Magazine
Paperback/480pp/Simon & Schuster
HBS Price: $5.99

This is the best of Outside magazine: literate outdoor writing to "give people back their dreams," as editor Tim Cahill puts it. An aging Californian abandons the good life to sail his 37-foot ketch alone to Antarctica, and tough Britons stuff furry carnivores into their pants in the nutty sport of "ferret-legging." You'll also read about killer bees, the Okefenokee swamp, railboating in Montana, scaling Mt. McKinley, and motion sickness. There's a lot of good stuff here by good writers: Edward Abbey, David Quammen, Peter Matthiessen, Bill Bryson, Rick Bass, and Jon Krakauer, to name a few.

Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952-1995
by Allen Ginsberg
Hardcover/536pp/Harper Collins
HBS Price: $14.99

Allen Ginsberg's essays, written over the course of a long, politically engaged life, are collected here for the first time. Arranged thematically, the pieces delve into politics and prophecies, the drug culture, spirituality, censorship, and the literary technique of his own Beat generation. Here, too, from the author of "Howl" are autobiographical fragments, profiles and discussions of writers from William Blake to Jack Kerouac, and thoughts on figures as diverse as Andy Warhol, Chogyam Trungpa, and Philip Glass.