ZZ Packer's masterful stories deal with the crisis of belonging that many African-Americans face because, as individuals, people of all races, including their own, have monolithic expectations of them, which their individuality defies. Packer's characters break out of any kind of preconceived molds and faced with Groupthink, pressures to conform, and the patronization and condescension of liberal whites, these characters become infuriated by the stupidity that surrounds them. The style of the stories is intensely realistic, often satirical, bitter, nihilistic. At the same time Packer brings a deep humanity, complexity, and sympathy to her cast of misfits, all who search for belonging and never find it.

In "Brownies" African-American girls stir a brouhaha with a dubious charge of having heard a racial epithet uttered by the white Brownies. The story in many ways is a funny and disturbing exploration of Groupthink whereby the black Brownies never really heard the epithet but get caught up in the self-righteousness and mission of their revenge. In "Every Tongue Shall Confess" a cross-eyed, homely lady, Clareese, plays by the rules, reads her Bible, and works hard as a nurse, only to be exploited by her church deacons who use her as a door mat. We cringe as we watch Clareese sink deeper and deeper into loneliness. In "Our Lady of Peace" a young woman takes on teaching in a public school in order to change nihilistic, lawless high school children, but in a reversal, the children make her a nihilistic misanthropist. The teacher Lynnea Davis not only begins to despise the children, but the teachers she works with. In the "Ant of the Self" a precocious teenage boy named Spurgeon must face the dilemmas of having an alcoholic bully of a father who drags his son to the Million-Man March where Spurgeon, the innocent party, is berated by rhetorically-inflamed black men to respect and love and appreciate his father for taking him to such a great event when in fact his hustler of a father simply took him to the march in order to sell a bunch of stolen exotic birds. In "Speaking in Tongues" a young girl runs away from home where her overly pious aunt subjects her to the abuses of a dysfunctional, abusive church. However, running away to Atlanta to find her mother, the young girl discovers that the secular world-full of pimps, hustlers, and libertines-offers no refuge.

For all the diversity of these stories, we can see Packer's general themes-her animosity against Groupthink, her loathing of convenient stereotypical thinking, her objection to the use of religion and false piety in order to bully others, her disdain for the manner in which clichés offer people false solutions and self-aggrandizement. Packer is a major writer tackling major themes and I am eagerly awaiting her next publication.

What made the 1999 film Election, based on Tom Perrotta's novel of the same name, was the way we saw suburban, middle-class characters suffering the disparity between their grand aspirations and their unfulfilled longings as they languished in their miserable marriages, their hellish sense of loneliness, and their personal frustration as they never lived up to whatever excitement, career success, and romance they believed they deserved in their lives. Now comes Perrotta's novel The Little Children, which in many ways is even more ambitious and relevant social commentary than his entertaining novel Election. Like the stories of John Cheever, Perrotta's novel shows that there is no suburban Eden. It is rather a place seething with infantile lusts, narcissism, arrested emotional development, and all kinds of tomfoolery that keep the novel from taking itself too seriously. For all the serious subject matter, this novel departs from Cheever in terms of tone. Whereas Cheever deals with suburban ennui with somberness and subtle irony, Perrotta prefers the comic romp. We see Todd, unhappily married to a wife who dotes on her child at the expense of giving her husband any attention, leaving him sexually starved. We see Sarah, from another marriage, who, failing as a professor of women's studies and working in a Starbuck's, marries for reasons of financial security and convenience and ends up having an affair with Todd whom she meets at the park playground where many adults take their kids to play. Perhaps the most grotesque character who comes close to being a cartoon figure is busy-body Larry, a macho retired cop who, bored with his early retirement, intrudes on the life of a released sex criminal, becoming in many ways more of a nuisance than the pariah who infests the neighborhood. The scenes where Larry pressures the namby-pamby Todd to play hardcore park football with Larry's Marine buddies is hilarious and gives the novel, which is so full of many sobering themes about dysfunctional suburbia, great comic relief. As many have said, The Little Children is about adults who wear a mask of bravado and assuredness to conceal that behind all their middle-class trappings and domestic comforts, they are little more than frightened children who, without a moral compass, have lost their way.

Some works of art are so engrained in our popular consciousness that it's almost impossible to judge them without the interference of all our collective baggage we bring as we approach them. Gatsby is a classic example. Having read the novel ten times over the last twenty years, I have enjoyed a certain distance and just as importantly the opportunity to compare different impressions at different stages of my life. The result is that I am even more impressed with the novel than all the annoying hype and commotion that continues to follow the novel would allow me to have. Without boring you about all the themes that have been hashed over and over, I would like to point out that there is a great question the novel asks us: Why does the narrator Nick have sympathy for Gatsby while loathing all the other chasers of the American Dream? It seems that Gatsby is a contradictory fellow, part ruthless dreamer zealously selling his soul to afford himself the trappings of fame, popularity, and glory. However, Gatsby, unlike the other ambitious characters in this novel, has a certain innocence and vulnerbility. Also, he is a true believer in his own delusion that if he can live a life a wealth and afford parties, he will overcome his childhood limitations and win the love of others. It's his craving of others' love that makes him sympathetic. In a way, he's a spiritual cousin of Citizen Kane who, for all his gaudy possessions, simply wanted the unconditional love represented by "Rosebud" on his sled, the embodiment of childhood belonging. Nick the narrator has the sensitivity to see this wounded child in Gatsby and reserves judgment against him.

Gatsby's pathological hunger for attention and popularity reminds me of all the people who go on Reality TV shows, hoping to promote themselves and be seen by all, grabbing their fifteen minutes of fame even as they debase themselves in various types of tomfoolery that showcase America's blind ambition and back-stabbing competition. Many years earlier, Fitzgerald saw how dangerous it was to blindly embrace American images of success without self-knowledge and without a moral code to keep us sane and he wrote about this theme so elegantly in Gatsby, a masterpiece that transcends all our limiting preconceptions we bring to it.

Several years before the tipping point occurred and Americans were alerted in significant numbers to the dangers of trans fats (also known as hydrogenated oils), Weil, in 8 Weeks to Optimum Health, sensibly and clearly laid out the dangers of these kinds of processed fats and warned us of their dangers so emphatically that he made the elimination of them from our diet the first step in his 8-step plan. Weil uses credible science to backup his assertions, never offers fads or extremes, and best of all, he writes in an intelligent, personal voice, using phrases like "I'd like you to . . ." which give the book an intimate feel, as if you were consulting with a personal nutritionist. Further, he has the wisdom to see that improving our health is not based on micromanagement, tweaking one thing or another, but rather is a holistic approach requiring daily walks, bringing beauty into our lives with something as simple as having fresh flowers on the table, and meditating or doing yoga. While I don't embrace everything Weil suggests, I have embraced the gist of his message and, more specifically, have radically changed my diet. No longer eating refined sugar and hydrogenated oils, I have lost 40 pounds in the last five months. A great companion book that is compatible with Weil's philosophy on many levels and which has also helped me is The Philosopher's Diet by Richard Watson.

I've been listening to Stereolab off and on for thirteen years and have a few earlier discs which I rarely listen to because there are too many redundant, grating songs between the lovely ones. That's not the case here. Their most unified, accessible album to date, Margerine Eclipse is naval-gazing dream pop with hipster attitude (some songs are sung in French to give the album the slightly supercilious avant-garde arch feel Stereolab is famous for). If you're new to Stereolab, this is the best album to start. Their mellifluous hipster tracks remind me of a hybrid of Cardigans and Cocteau Twins (think Blue Bell Knoll). This is great background lounge dream pop with no jarring surprises like on some past albums.

Yes, there is a rogue great white shark featured in this nonfiction account of an adolsescent great white that apparently went crazy and attacked bathers and swimmers off the East Coast during the summer of 1916, but you have to read a lot of padding in this book, long expository segments on man vs. nature, the industrial revolution, the drum beats of World War I, back stories of people who were directly and indirectly in contact with the shark. The writing is excellent, but the book seems at least twice as long as at it would have been had the author focused on the shark attacks. It seems so many books are in reality essays that literary agents and publishers inflate into books. If you don't want all the peripheral information, what I'm calling padding, you may be disappointed. In the end, though, I have to give the book four stars because the prose style is sharp and the author recreates the harrowing shark attack scenes with lucid clarity and suspense.

Please be clear: these are fun stories to read, not simply good literary stories that people consume as if they were eating their vegetables. Reminding me of Flannery O'Conner and Lorrie Moore, these stories are tied together by the theme of belonging. In the opening story, for example, Brownies, the African American girls, members of the Brownies, want to avenge the white girl Brownie members at a campsite not so much because they feel they have been genuinely offended or because they feel the need to avenge anyone but because they need a rite of passage that will test their loyalty to each other. In the second story, Every Tongue Shall Confess, a skinny, somewhat homely nurse does everything she can to be a good Christian: she sings in the choir, she witnesses, she submits to the church deacons' patriarchal rules, she lives a life of chastity . . . yet for all her good works, she remains a misfit, a lonely outsider who wonders if there is any power in her life of piety and she begins to wonder, watching the hypocrites in her church, if she will ever find a sense of belonging. In the third story, both tragic and funny, Our Lady of Peace, a young woman who is in desperate in need of job resorts to teaching high school English at a tough inner city school in Baltimore and she suffers incredible isolation and burnout as she sinks further and further in her failure to reach her students to the point that she surrenders, however temporarily, to the powers of nihilism. All these stories point to the outsider looking for a place to belong is a common theme in these stories, which are told with complexity, humanity, irony, and deep humor. These wonderful stories have that quality that demands that they be reread, a sign of the highest literary art.

Lowry does a good job of writing a fast-paced dystopia novel where society, making a sort of deal with the devil, trades in their humanity--their choices, their capacity to error, their inclination for diversity and adventure--for a safe cozy womb-like existence where a false perfection kills the human spirit. Jonas, the main character, is a twelve-year-old boy who, like Jim Carey in the Truman Show, must re-evaluate what freedom is and act on his courage to change his destiny. A society that seeks to remain ignorant in the name of a utopia is a great theme that is explored effectively in this novel. For some companion pieces, I recommend H.G. Wells' short story In the Country of the Blind and two films: the aforementioned Truman Show and Pleasantville.

Some highlights of this collection are:

Higher Education, the profile of Reese Perry, an African American high school basketball coach who shows up in an all-white midwest small town and, through his altruistic love, transforms them from prejudiced tribalists to open-minded cosmopolitans, a heart-breaking essay.

Bomb Scare, a graphic or comic book style story of a high school where all the kids and their parents lack a moral compass and surrender to nihilism, the inability to transcend their self-centeredness.

Why McDonald's French Fries Taste So Good, an excerpt from Fast Food Nation, which explains how the food industry uses sinister science to secretly make us addicted to the chemicals the food companies put in our food.

Stop That Girl, a short story about a ten-year-old girl whose mother marries a rich man and ends up in a False Eden where playing house leaves her feeling abandoned and unloved.

My Fake Job, an essay in which Rodney Rothman simply walks into a tech office and feigns being an employee, an act of charlatinism that isn't questioned by anyone at the office, casting light on how these fly-by-night business operations are so disjointed and full of isolated employees who suffer so much transience and alienation as the employers don't commit to them in the slightest.

Toil and Temptation, an essay about a Mexican immigrant who slowly gets caught up in consumerism and becomes more of a slave in America than he ever was in Mexico.

Jones' best stories here, the ones that deal with the aftermath of Vietnam, are about the conflict between the soldier's need to develop a predatory, demonic spirit to survive in wartime and how that spirit, so hypermasculine and effective in war, is tragically in conflict with civilian life as the soldiers seem to enter a demonic world of no return. Jones' title story, reading like an autobiographical essay, is about a man who tries to make that return and salvage his life and save it from nihilism. Unlike Krebs in Hemingway's "Soldier's Home," the narrator finds at least some kind of love (he loves his dogs) as he courageously lives on with his deep psychic war scars. About a half dozen stories in the collection develop this same theme, all with power and unflinching brutality.