Benoit Denizet-Lewis | America Anonymous: 8 Addicts in Search of a Life | Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline | January 7th @7PM | 617-566-6660

In the 8 or so years Jamaica Plain's Benoit Denizet-Lewis has been writing for the NY Times Magazine, his cover stories have included "The War on Frat Culture, And why maybe that's not so totally great, dude," "Whatever Happened to Teen Romance (And What is a Friend with Benefits Anyway?)," and "Living (and Dying) on the Down Low."

In 8: A Memoir, Amy Fusselman’s followup to her excellent first memoir The Pharmacist’s Mate, time, rather than moving in a linear fashion, takes the form of the figure eights the author used to skate when she was a kid. Events, for her, don’t just come and go. Instead, everything from Fusselman's experience in the backseat of a cab to the sexual abuse she suffered in her youth at the hands of her babysitter’s husband stays around, affects her in the present.

A one-time budding academic who for existential reasons drops out of Colombia University to work as a hot dog vendor, Mortimer Taylor Coleridge doesn’t even like pop music. Nor is he familiar with VH1, the channel on which he first comes across Gwen. But it isn’t long after the encounter that he’s carefully considering No Doubt’s lyrics and patroling message boards for clues about his ain true love's character.

A long time ago, when we were temping in an office that reduced us to a trained data-entry monkey, the only way we could halt the onset of a mental breakdown was to stream archived episodes of NPR’s This American Life off the internerd. It was in this way that we discovered the delightfully snarky DAVID RAKOFF, who not only dresses better than like-minded contemporary David Sedaris but often delivers the acidic wit with 10 times the panache.