Began as one of the boldest and most audacious experiments and inventions in the history of entertainment, MTV has been a dominant force in popular culture since its launch in 1981.    

It takes an intellectual scholar with the knowledge, depth and curiosity of Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt to take a tale ancient and unknown and turn it into a compelling saga.  

With her tough, tense and taut tale of one rural family’s bitter and bloody fight for survival in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, 2011 National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward has secured herself a place among such other great Southern writers.  

It’s always a treat when a book comes along that lives up to the hype. That is the case with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, a collection of 14 brilliant experiential essays in which the writer places himself at the center of the story. The 37-year-old Southern-born Sullivan is now being compared with first-person journalists like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and David Foster Wallace.  

Most histories of World War II are successful because they focus on specific battles or campaigns. The global conflict that seemed to define the last century was so complex and multifaceted, it would seem foolhardy to attempt to cover it in one book.
  

It’s hard to believe it has been 50 years since President John F. Kennedy and the days of Camelot in the White House. Fortunately, this anniversary already has produced two revealing new portraits of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, one a written appreciation of his life by television commentator Chris Matthews, the other a recently unsealed conversation between historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Jacqueline Kennedy, conducted just four months after President Kennedy was assassinated.  

Earlier this year, the Internet was abuzz with a series of videos entitled Art Thoughtz. In them, artist Jayson Musson performs as his fitted-cap-wearing, flashy-chain-dangling alter-ego Hennessy Youngman, while offering sharp, LOL-worthy commentary on the contemporary art world. He tackles concepts like relational aesthetics and post-structuralism.   

Dennis Lehane’s distinctive, often disturbing visions have made their way into 10 novels, including his ongoing series of crime thrillers featuring the working-class detective duo Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, the widely acclaimed Mystic River and The Given Day, a dense, well-researched historical novel set, like nearly all of his narratives, in the author’s hometown of Boston.   

What a long strange trip from Miami University and back it’s been for 1958 graduate Ken Babbs. He returns to Miami, where he graduated in 1958, at 7:30 p.m. Monday and Tuesday for two Sixties Extravaganza free public events at the school’s Leonard Theatre in Peabody Hall. On Monday, there’s a screening of the new documentary featuring him — director Alex Gibney’s Magic Trip.  

Gamers are typically no sufferers of hardship. They are neither starving nor homeless nor prevented from participating in civic activities. To game, you need a couple hundred bucks and copious free time. Yet to be a gamer among art lovers is to be the blackest sheep in a platinum pack, one that finds themselves defending that which feels indefensible.   

By the summer of 2007, Columbus-based AP reporter Andrew Welsh-Huggins recognized that an ongoing story he’d been covering put Ohio at the center of events making important national news. “All this information was swirling around: Christopher Paul was indicted, the coffee-shop meetings were coming out,” Welsh-Huggins says in a recent phone interview.   

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is a pop-culture geek’s paradise, a futuristic thriller that looks back to the 1980s and its various touchstones — everything from the Atari 2600 and obscure Japanese anime to the Vision Quest soundtrack and the films of John Hughes — with addictive, often inspired glee.  

“How the private lives of presidents, first ladies and their lovers changed the course of American history,” promises the cover of One Nation Under Sex, which also bears the byline of Hustler publisher and onetime Cincinnatian Larry Flynt, towering over the decidedly smaller one of historian David Eisenbach.  

Make no mistake that Cowboys is a book very far removed from whiskey, spurs, horses and any other accoutrements of the Old West. It’s a 188-page graphic novel weaving the exploits of family-man FBI agent Tim Brady and detective Deke Kotto, whose sexual appetite and devil-may-care ingenuity leads him to deadly places.  

In Meg Wolitzer’s The Uncoupling, a suburban New Jersey town falls under a strange spell as the local high school prepares its stage adaptation of Lysistrata. The play is a centuries-old Aristophanes comedy in which women are called upon to withhold sex from their men in an effort to end the Peloponnesian War.