When Marie Antoinette was reputed (however erroneously) to have waived off the plight of France’s starving masses with the words “Let them eat cake” she was clearly unaware of the dire repercussions. The same might be said of the characters in Joanne Fluke’s best-selling Hannah Swensen mysteries. Dead bodies keep turning up in a small Minnesotan town, bearing evidence of having indulged in Swensen’s sweet delights prior to their demise.

For many of us, the world feels increasingly off balance. Life seems out of joint. Many of the apparent causes are in the human environment, whether it’s mindless movies, marketing campaigns to stimulate desire for useless things, political doublespeak or the endless supply of spam.

Similar to viewing scarce footage of John Coltrane or hearing an unknown concert recording by Woody Guthrie, this new collection of Truman Capote’s previously uncollected essays encourages a re-evaluation of his canon. Because each of these essays had been published separately during the author’s life, this compilation doesn’t possess the same scholarly fascination as 2005’s release of Summer Crossing, Capote’s lost first novel. Still, Portraits and Observations should spark renewed and deserved interest in this unique American voice.

Moe Prager is no stranger to cold cases. You might even say the former NYPD officer and protagonist of Reed Farrel Coleman’s award-winning P.I. series relishes the challenges they pose. He lives by Faulkner’s words, “The past is never dead,” the truth of which becomes unequivocally clear in Coleman’s fifth novel of the series, Empty Ever After.

By and large, historians have credited President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal for getting the United States out of the Great Depression. From time to time salvos are lobbed from conservative bunkers, such as Amity Shlaes’ anti-New Deal tome of last year, The Forgotten Man. But like so many other books of its kind, it failed to land a lethal hit, and meanwhile the ranks of New Deal defenders continue to be replenished.

Violence has been inseparable from the human condition, so why pick on Russia? The editors of this collection of scholarly essays fail to make their case, but that doesn’t mean that many of the book’s articles aren’t worth reading. Violence is a broad theme and the contributors to Times of Trouble explore the subject along many avenues. Among the most interesting topics are women writers who survived the Gulag, psychological violence in Dostoyevsky, the curmudgeonly and skeptical late-Soviet novelist Viktor Astaf’ev and an astute psychological examination of Stalinism whose conclusion is that Stalin and his henchmen feared the Russian people as much as the people feared them.

School shootings, date rape, kidnapping, modern-day witch hunts for alleged sexual predators: These are just a few of the thorny issues Jodi Picoult has dealt with in the numerous novels she’s written to date. And in each of them she offers readers a vantage point from which hasty moral judgments are impossible. In her new book, Change of Heart, she tackles capital punishment, using it as a vehicle to examine religious dogma and the crippling loss of a loved one, as well as the fallacy of sentencing a man to death without fully understanding his crime.

Herbert von Karajan was one of classical music’s towering figures in the 20th century. The Austrian conductor’s career began under the Nazis (even though Hitler considered him “un- German”) and continued after World War II, when he rapidly attained star status. The text to A Life in Pictures summarizes his life and career, but, as the title suggests, the photographs are the focus of this coffee-table book. The best are black-and-white, artful compositions in light and shadow. Their subjects cover Karajan at work and play—he loved zooming around in sports cars and speedboats when he wasn’t conducting meticulous and powerful interpretations of great symphonies.

In the summer of 2005, Nike SB, a division of the shoe giant in charge of producing footwear for skateboarders, created an advertisement for their upcoming skateboarding tour that attempted to connect the brand with the type of music that many skaters loved. Titled “Major Threat,” the ad reproduced the iconic album art of hardcore punk legends Minor Threat’s 1981 self-titled album. The response from many skaters—and from Dischord Records, the Washington, D.C., label run by former Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye—was swift and predictable.

Poetry or fiction that extols the virtues of art is certainly not a new phenomenon. Think of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In recent years authors like Tracy Chevalier and Jeanne Kalogridis have come to prominence for constructing fictional narratives around specific works of art, using them as a starting point from which to explore the social or historical context within which they were painted. Perhaps more importantly, they allow readers to peek beneath the shroud of mystery surrounding artists and their subjects. Susan Vreeland’s new novel, Luncheon of the Boating Party, belongs to this vein of fiction. Based on Renoir’s painting of the same name, it allows readers to enter the painting’s leisurely scene and capture a view of Parisian society in the late 19th century.