Aug. 26-Sept. 1: Fashion, Family And David Foster Wallace

Low-priced clothing is what Elizabeth Cline calls "fast fashion": clothes made on the cheap for big chains like H&M or Zara. Customers wear them and discard them, buying new clothes to match new trends and dropping the old like they're disposable products. In Overdressed, Cline reports on how the globalization of the garment industry has led to cheap products in the U.S. but human rights violations and environmental damage elsewhere in the world. She also documents her transformation into a conscientious consumer — one who resoles shoes and shops for local, sustainable clothing.

David Foster Wallace had an extraordinary impact on American writing; when he committed suicide in 2008, U.S. literature lost one of its most influential living writers. D.T. Max takes a deeply researched look at the writer's life and work, drawing on conversations with family and friends, as well as hundreds of unpublished letters, manuscripts and audio recordings.

Marco Roth grew up on New York's Upper West Side in a lost post-war world of high European culture. His liberal Jewish family put an intense emphasis on the life of the mind in a way that sometimes felt more like the 1890s than the 1980s. In his memoir, Roth struggles to understand how his upbringing both liberated and, as he puts it, "thwarted" him. He also reflects on his father's death from AIDS and the probability that his father was secretly gay.