Jay Mcinerney

Ostensibly, "Beautiful Losers" is a documentary about the eponymous band of graphic artists and filmmakers whose work was showcased in a mega-exhibition of the same name that traveled the world from 2004 to 2007, drawing crowds from Baltimore to Tokyo. Mostly self-taught, the artists coalesced in New York in the mid-'90s, brought together by their love of skateboarding, graffiti, and punk rock, and united in their adherence to an ethos of unembarrassed self-expression. Or, as one artist in the film puts it with characteristic inelegance, "the joy of creation and stuff.

Jay McInerney, preeminent chronicler of high life and low in New York City, onetime party fixture in the heyday of the literary bratpack, knows as well as anyone that every good artist deserves a career retrospective. "How It Ended" is his. The collection reunites 26 stories written over 26 years, though you may not notice much of a progression; without the ever-abundant cultural markers and brand names, you would be hard pressed to identify a story as, say, "late McInerney. " You do, however, get to know his pet obsessions - sexual infidelity, wealth and fame, cocaine - and for the most part, it...

Jay McInerney, preeminent chronicler of high life and low in New York City, onetime party fixture in the heyday of the literary bratpack, knows as well as anyone that every good artist deserves a career retrospective. "How It Ended" is his. The collection reunites 26 stories written over 26 years, though you may not notice much of a progression; without the ever-abundant cultural markers and brand names, you would be hard pressed to identify a story as, say, "late McInerney. " You do, however, get to know his pet obsessions - sexual infidelity, wealth and fame, cocaine - and for the most part, it...

Ostensibly, "Beautiful Losers" is a documentary about the eponymous band of graphic artists and filmmakers whose work was showcased in a mega-exhibition of the same name that traveled the world from 2004 to 2007, drawing crowds from Baltimore to Tokyo. Mostly self-taught, the artists coalesced in New York in the mid-'90s, brought together by their love of skateboarding, graffiti, and punk rock, and united in their adherence to an ethos of unembarrassed self-expression. Or, as one artist in the film puts it with characteristic inelegance, "the joy of creation and stuff.

1001 Books for Every Mood By Hallie Ephron Adams Media, 400 pp., $14.95 "There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away," wrote the reclusive Amherst poet Emily Dickinson, a bookworm on intimate terms with moodiness. Books, if they are any good, can take us places, can change our lives, and can certainly alter our moods with fewer side effects than mind-altering drugs. Boston Globe book columnist Hallie Ephron's new book, a terrific reference guide for the mood-altering substances known as stories, offers a literary prescription for whatever ails you. Ephron's...

Rielle Hunter's life had a lurid, supermarket-tabloid quality to it — full of deception, betrayal, reckless behavior and broken dreams — well before she became a party to one of the biggest lies in recent American political history. Her father had her beloved show horse killed for insurance money. An ex-boyfriend used her as his muse for the "cocaine-addled, sexually voracious" narrator of one of his novels. She went to Hollywood to become a star and left about a decade later with only a few bit parts.

You know how "Clueless" was a reboot of Jane Austen's "Emma," and how "Ten Things I Hate About You" brought Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" to the halls of Padua High School? Well, the CW's "Gossip Girl" really has no specific canonical underpinnings, no classic blueprint that will give its fans an acceptable excuse. We have no literary defense. I could say that the CW soap opera has shadings of "The Great Gatsby" in its material excess and moral hollowness, particularly tonight at 8 on Channel 56, when "Gossip Girl" returns amid the...

According to this newspaper's website, there are at least 39 places in the Boston area to eat sushi. This does not include Shaw's, Market Basket, Whole Foods, or Haru, the new expensive-looking place that just opened at the base of the Prudential Center. A reasonable sampling of most of the old places declares the new spot a big winner. The fish doesn't taste frozen. Served as a slab of sashimi or wrapped in rice and avocado, then covered with a sliver of mango and crowned with shimmering gold leaf (the Dice-K roll)

"The Tourists" is an intriguingly apt title for Jeff Hobbs's debut novel about four Yale-graduate Manhattanites as they near 30 and finally begin to take stock. They are, in fact, tourists in their own lives, never fully engaged with much beyond their insular social circles and mired in a kind of pervasive malaise and voyeuristic disconnect. Though they are often a little tedious and not particularly lik able, it's easy to get caught up in their comings and goings. And while Hobbs's account bogs down in spots, it is an impressive debut in which keen insights...

Mergers and Acquisitions , By Dana Vachon, Riverhead, 290 pp., $23.95 A preppy young wag with the world ahead of him, Tommy Quinn is no one's hard-luck poster boy. But things aren't entirely what they seem for the hero of "Mergers and Acquisitions," a funny, garrulous romp through moneyed Manhattan. The opening chapter of Dana Vachon's first novel so dazzles and confuses the reader with unconnected bits of narrative, salty sexual innuendo, and references to Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and other faux-celebs that it almost derails all interest.

1001 Books for Every Mood By Hallie Ephron Adams Media, 400 pp., $14.95 "There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away," wrote the reclusive Amherst poet Emily Dickinson, a bookworm on intimate terms with moodiness. Books, if they are any good, can take us places, can change our lives, and can certainly alter our moods with fewer side effects than mind-altering drugs. Boston Globe book columnist Hallie Ephron's new book, a terrific reference guide for the mood-altering substances known as stories, offers a literary prescription for whatever ails you. Ephron's...

THOUGHTS WITHOUT CIGARETTES: A Memoir By Oscar Hijuelos Gotham, 367 pp., $27.50 Like God in the proverb, Oscar Hijuelos writes straight with crooked lines. His memoir of confused identity between his Cuban heritage and the tough world of the streets outside his family’s New York tenement is awkwardly worded and organized, and at times plain ungrammatical. Even the occasional Spanish phrase makes a mistake or two. Yet what comes through is complex and moving. Its very roughness is that of a real voice and troubled presence.

PRIZES: THE SELECTED SHORT STORIES OF JANET FRAME By Janet Frame Counterpoint, 396 pp., $26 Collected here are stories from the start of Frame’s brilliant writing career in 1952 through her most productive years, which ended in the 1980s. The earliest stories from “The Lagoon and Other Stories’’ were written while Frame was confined to a mental hospital in her native New Zealand. Many of them present the world through the limited boundaries and false securities of childhood.