Boilerplate traveled the world at the turn of the twentieth century in attempt to dissuade humans from their many wars. Finally, his biography (can such things be?) is revealed, and Lianne Habinek reveals its astonishing contents

In her new story collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, Maile Meloy depicts men and women (but mostly men) who want to eat their cake and have it too. Lianne Habinek tells us how successful these characters, and Meloy, turn out to be.

Flotsam and jetsam clutter Javier Calvo’s novel Wonderful World, but do they choke its flow? Lianne Habinek, our steadfast guide, charts its course.

The Decemberists seem benign enough, but their songs are blood-dimmed with rape, drownings, and even cannibalism. The body count rises on their new release The Hazards of Love, but Lianne Habinek also discovers fresh wellsprings of feeling.

Celebrated young novelist Jesse Ball’s latest, The Way through Doors, twists and pulls at the nature of narrative itself. Lianne Habinek threads the labyrinth.

In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer tries to anatomize the choosing brain. Lianne Habinek – with an assist from some guy named Plato – anatomizes the anatomizer.

Poetry meets anatomy when Lianne Habinek reads Donne, who, in “The Flea” and other poems, aimed to discover the seat of the soul

Neuroscience? In Elsinore? Lianne Habinek has Hamlet on the brain and goes at the question in book and volume. You may never think about Hamlet, or think about thinking, in the same way again.

While confabulating postmodern fictions, Haruki Murakami has also been running – first to stay fit, then at grueling length. Contributing editor Lianne Habinek jogs us through his book on the subject, What I Talk about when I Talk about Running.

Lianne Habinek reviews Katie Hafner’s A Romance on Three Legs and gives up all the gossip on one of the most strange and successful relationships in music history, the ménage a trois among Glenn Gould, a blind piano tuner, and a one-of-a-kind Steinway concert grand.

Shannon Burke’s novel Black Flies returns to the scene of the crimes of his debut Safelight, the soul-scarring world of Harlem paramedics. Lianne Habinek rides along through these dark alleys and shows us how Burke achieves dramatic power without dipping into sentimentality.

In The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson assays the experiments he sees as most elegantly defining the wonder of the scientific method. But with their reliance on chemicals, voltages, and vivisections, are these experiments really “beautiful?” Lianne Habinek straps on her lab goggles and takes a look.

Lianne Habinek forges into the beguiling part-adult, part-childish, part-real, part-dreamlike films of Michel Gondry

Lianne Habinek maps the postmodern mazes of Jesse Ball’s maddening, memorable debut novel Samedi the Deafness.

Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist attempts to reconcile the ageless turf war between the arts and sciences, but, as Lianne Habinek reports, Lehrer’s propositions may leave both sides feelings shortchanged.