With George Jonesian morbidity, I’ve been devouring the Wimbledon coverage—in Grantland!—by our sometime special tennis correspondent Louisa Thomas. (Come back, Louisa! We’ll quit our honky-tonking and running around, if you’ll just come back and keep writing the way you do.) —Lorin Stein

I don’t usually laugh out loud when I read, but Iris Owens’s alternately hilarious and appalling After Claude was getting me strange looks on the A train. Incidentally, it’s one of the great NYC summer books, too. —Sadie Stein

I picked up the charming Weeds by Richard Mabey, who suggests that our definition of the word is far more subjective and cultural than we would like to think. The book is sprinkled with entertaining anecdotes, like this one about the eminent rosarian Humphrey Brook, who became slightly belligerent after a few pints of beer at a local pub: “On the way back we passed a suburban garden where the owner was picking modern shrub roses whose shades were a farrago of Day-Glo reds and oranges. Humphrey stopped unsteadily, stared at the scene much as one might at a junk dealer gluing Formica onto a Chippendale table, and screamed ‘Vegetable rats!’ at the hapless grower.” —Thessaly La Force

Chris Weitz’s new movie, A Better Life, opens this weekend in New York at Lincoln Center and the Sunshine. I’ve heard a lot about the film, and it’s not clear how long it will run—I’m not taking any chances. —L. S.

I love you, Victor Shklovsky. —Nicole Rudick

Why shouldn’t The Onion win a Pulitzer? —Cody Wiewandt

I feel hypnotized, and also slightly agitated, when I watch these one-minute films of “beautiful young people … standing around looking beautiful” by Dennis Swiatkowski. —Natalie Jacoby

I’d been waiting for Ben Loory’s first collection of stories, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, ever since I read “The T.V.” Just one question: which stories were meant for nighttime and which for daytime? —Ali Pechman

A wonderful visit to Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium last week got me hankering for Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium. I like this 2008 poetry collection and abecedary because reading it is sort of like watching blue blubber jellies bounce around inside a light-up tank. —Clare Fentress

If you don’t know who Kreayshawn is, now you know. —C. W.