Chris Messenger achieves a rare convergence of elite and popular cultural criticism by doing for The Godfather (and its spinoffs) what previous critics have done for Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Human waste takes center stage in Dominique Laporte's unusual microhistory, a book as valuable for the anecdotes as for its argument.

According to Amy Elias, Paul Maltby's negation of the mystical Other forecloses 'the most interesting conversation': between a critic who does not believe in visionary moments and those writers and critics who do believe in them.

On Amy Elias's view of fabulation in the moment of American corporate power, a postmodern novelistic aesthetic that is consistent with Sir Walter Scott's early nineteenth-century mix of romance and Enlightenment-inspired historiography.

Against the notion that music is the most abstract of art forms, Olivia Block thinks of music as a language with its own vocabulary of sounds, patterns, rhythms, notes. On the day of a performance in Kyoto, Japan, these reflections alter Block's sense of her own language, English, deconstructed by Japanese advertisements, tee-shirts, "American" candy-bar wrappers, and text-cell phones.

An argument against the collapse of categories by an author who has, yes, himself perpetrated a few codeworks.

Virginia Kuhn reviews an essay collection - Cybertext: Yearbook 2000 - ambivalent about its own printed status.

Ted Pelton reviews Ben Marcus's novel that's not one.

Thoughts on the debut novel by Alex Shakar.

Recent fiction by Curtis White, Alex Shakar, Michael Martone, and others read through the lens of Gertrude Stein and Wittgenstein.

Carsten Schinko on Niklas Luhmann's Analogue Loyalty.

graphics: Artists Rights Society; Performance for MIDI keyboard, pianola configurations, and click-track:G. Schirmer Rental; studio portrait of Hedy Lamarr: Roy George and Associates.