In 2006, musician Michael Zapruder boarded the Wave Books Poetry Bus in North Carolina and spent a week riding through the South. Among the poets with whom he traveled were his brother, Matthew, an editor at Wave (a leading poetry publisher, based in Seattle), as well as D.A. Powell, Bob Hicok, Dorothea Lasky and Mary Ruefle.

The idea behind the bus tour was to bring poetry to its readers by making it accessible in the most public way. Poetry, after all, remains on a fundamental level aural, a form in which meaning is as much a matter of sound, of music and rhythm, as it is of the content of...

Spilt Milk
A Novel

Chico Buarque
Translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin
Grove Press: 178 pp., $23

Eulálio d'Assumpção is on his deathbed. A century old, born into the Brazilian aristocracy, he has watched his world change, or crumble, and still he lingers. "As the future narrows," he tells us early in Chico Buarque's deft and moving "Spilt Milk," "younger people have to pile up any which way in some corner of my mind. For the past, however, I have an increasingly spacious drawing room."

This is the tension that drives Buarque's novel, the divide between past and present, between...

The Holy or the Broken
Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah"

Alan Light
Atria: 272 pp., $25

There's a great scene in Penelope Spheeris' 1992 film "Wayne's World" — find it on YouTube under the title "May i help you riff" — in which an impatient guitar-store employee prevents Wayne from plucking out the opening arpeggios of "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin. Pointing with great urgency, the guy directs Wayne's attention to a sign hung on the store's wall: "NO STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN," it reads.

In Alan Light's new book about the music of Leonard Cohen, the...

Author Lee Child created a killer character with Jack Reacher. A brutal ex-military officer with a thirst for justice, he's a force — a massive force. Six-foot-five, 220-250 lbs., with a 50-inch chest is specified on Child's website.

For months, fans of the books — 17 so far — have been anticipating the film "Jack Reacher," which opens this weekend, with comments such as: "hope it flops." They are not looking forward to seeing Tom Cruise, not known for his bulk, portray the hero of Child's novels.

The commentson an earlier Jacket Copy post reveal just how furious Reacher...

A Possible Life
A Novel in Five Parts

Sebastian Faulks
Henry Holt: 304 pp. $25

In the wake of bestselling, highly praised historical tales such as "Birdsong" and "Charlotte Gray," Sebastian Faulks has been hailed as one of those authors who straddles art and commerce — which may be another way of saying he belongs to neither camp entirely. We should not be surprised, then, that his latest book, "A Possible Life," gravitates between poles of its own.

At first blush, it is a collection of five longish short stories, self-containable, not obviously related, ranging in era from early19th...

Few people read more literature that’s written outside their own borders than the French. And if you want to get a really good sense about what’s out there in the vast multilingual world of books, there’s no better place to look than a French newspaper.

This week, the respected Paris daily newspaper Libération asked 20 non-French writers to recommend 20 recently published books to their readers. (Among them there is a certain American novelist and blogger for Jacket Copy — moi.)

If you read French, you can check out our essays at this link. Even if you don’t, the...

On a recent visit to Italy, I found myself at a dinner table with an economist, astrophysicist, specialist in medieval Central-Asian history and art, professor of Russian, several graduate students and a couple of poets, along with a few publishing people. At one point, the conversation around the table was simultaneously conducted in five languages: Italian, French, English, Russian, Bosnian. Not all the languages were spoken fluently, so I would, for example, respond in Bosnian to a question in Russian, or ask a question in English that would be responded to in Italian.

Everyone partaking in...

Antifragile
Things That Gain from Disorder

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Random House: 544 pp., $30

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 2007 book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable," detailed the impossibility of predicting the future, which jerks forward by way of massive changes such as the Internet or 9/11. But thanks to "Swan's" timing — published a year before the financial crisis — it appeared to do just that, preemptively offering a handbook to our institutions' inability to handle the unexpected.

The book catapulted Taleb, a trader and quantitative analyst turned independent...

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
A novel

Ayana Mathis
Knopf: 256 pp., $24.95

In "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie," first-time author Ayana Mathis walks upon some of the richest thematic terrain our country's history can offer a novelist.

Her protagonist, Hattie Shepherd, arrives in Philadelphia from Georgia in the mid-1920s, one of a legion of travelers in the great migration, that movement of African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the promise and relative freedom of the North.

The great migration gave us the Harlem Renaissance and too many great American writers to list here. It ended in the...

The world is ending on Friday — according to a bunch of people who’ve misread the Maya calendar. (Take it from me, they’re wrong. I should know: I’m part Maya and I’m pretty sure my ancestors didn’t intend for the whole world to freak out just because we’ve reached the end of another Maya long count cycle).

Should the mushroom clouds or exploding sun catch you...