A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Judith Shulevitz reads the collected New Yorker stories of Ann Beattie, who famously helped to define the magazine’s fiction aesthetic in the 1970s: “Beattie was simultaneously reporting on and satirizing her generation. She understood its elaborate alienation and self-pity; she heard, beneath the jaded, post-1960s self-mockery, the hope that nontraditional lifestyle choices were still viable, and the fear that they weren’t.” . . . Second Pass contributor Jon Fasman reviews Salman Rushdie’s latest: “I found it nearly impossible to race past the cloyingly false childishness, the canned sense of expectation that the first chapter sets up. Reader, persist.” . . . Glenn Lester reviews Jim Hanas’ collection of short stories: “Why They Cried is, in fact, about something important: how much suffering arises in the gap between our constructed public identities and whatever kernel of self is left inside.” . . . John Self looks back at The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, in the news lately thanks to Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest project. . . . Rachel Cooke marvels at the car-wreck memoir of a Guinness heiress and the stepdaughter of poet Robert Lowell: “Sometimes, even truly bad books can be gripping, and Ivana Lowell’s Why Not Say What Happened? is one of them. Clunky, repetitive and disorganized . . . her prose is also fatally hamstrung by the weird incontinent blankness that is so typical of those who have spent too long in rehab. . . . she kills her funniest anecdotes at 100 paces; her metaphors are so bad, they make you cry out in pain. And yet I could not put her book down. Never before has so much bad behavior by people who should have known better been crammed into so few pages.”