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Books Radar

Spy: The Funny Years
Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter and George Kalogerakis (Miramax)
Nothing evokes the halcyon days of the early ’90s more entertainingly than Spy, esoteric repository of Manhattan media gossip, pre-Photoshop pastiches, and small type. Blogs may do the same things faster now, but they’ll never match the sardonic panache of a faux-naive Spy riff. The greatest-hits collection is eagerly anticipated, at least on the Upper West Side.

On Truth
Harry Frankfurt (Knopf)
The Princeton professor had a surprise hit last year with On Bullshit, a pseudometaphysical treatise on prevarication and cultural speciousness that became a staple gift for brothers-in-law in academia. Truth, subject of the sequel, has received a great deal more philosophical attention over the past few millennia; Frankfurt promises to bring humor and famously clear prose to the pursuit, but it’s hard to believe that, at 112 pages, it’s the whole truth.

The Aeneid
Virgil; translation by Robert Fagles (Penguin)
Fagles established himself as the most prominent classical translator alive with his brilliant Iliad and Odyssey. He finishes the epic trilogy with Virgil’s tale of the founding of Rome, high school Latin’s bread and butter. If not as striking as his previous renditions, it will at least give prep-school students another source to cheat from.