As Salman Rushdie intones his own elegant prose in a rich, musical British accent, a soundtrack plays softly but distinctly in the background. If the music seems particularly well-selected -- if its rhythms subtly match the story's turning points -- that’s because it was commissioned expressly for the purpose.

Though the story is short, Rushdie stops several times to ask the audience if he should continue. At each juncture, rapt listeners beg him to go on. After the performance is over, guests murmur words like “mesmerizing” and “transporting” as they turn back to their tablemates -- and I’m one of them.

The event is a glitzy dinner organized by Booktrack, a company that publishes e-books with "synchronized soundtracks"; the occasion is the launch of the e-publisher's first short story -- Rushdie’s “In the South" -- with accompanying music composed by John Psathas. ("In the South" is available for download now from Booktrack's website.)

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"The Lifespan of a Fact" by John D'Agata and Jim Fingal documents the epic fact checking of "What Happens There," an essay D'Agata wrote about a teenager who committed suicide by jumping from the observation deck of a Las Vegas hotel. Their exchanges merit publication in part because D'Agata is the leading light of a literary movement (largely confined to MFA programs in creative nonfiction) advancing the "lyric essay," a form that combines elements of poetry with the prose essay. D'Agata has been militant in asserting his liberty as an artist to alter, invent or ignore facts in writing his essays, as well as critical of the eruptions of outrage that greet the increasingly commonplace discovery that some celebrated memoirist has embellished or fabricated parts of his or her work.

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In their new book, "Much Ado About Loving," authors Maura Kelly and Jack Murnighan do just that. Next week, in honor of Valentine's Day, we're bringing their expertise -- and the innumerable literary examples at their fingertips -- to you.

Tell us about your romantic problems, and we'll send Jack and Maura to the stacks. Heartbroken after a nasty breakup? Languishing in a long-term relationship that's lost its spark? They'll tackle anything -- from good old-fashioned forbidden love to ultra-modern online dating disasters -- and let you know which Great Works offer words of wisdom suitable to your situation.

Email your entries to bythebook@salon.com, and check back on Valentine's Day to see which classics they prescribe. Submissions will be accepted until 5 p.m. EST on Friday, Feb. 10.

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Dickens was born at No. 13 Mile End Terrace, Landport. His mother, of course, had no anesthetic. He was named, in part, for Christopher Huffam, an oar-maker in London — now perhaps the most famous oar-maker of all time.

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I love Dickens. Few writers have equaled his assessment of the human condition — somewhere between tragedy and comedy, with a poetic attention to beauty, and an investigation of man-made ugliness.

His characters have entered the popular imagination of even 21stcentury America — Scrooge becoming synonymous with miserliness, Miss Havisham with disappointed love, Wilkins Micawber with hopeful (if improvident) expectation. When Holden Caulfield refuses to set down his life story in the first sentence of "The Catcher in the Rye"...

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"Behind the Beautiful Forevers" is the result of intensive, immersive observation over the course of four years in the life of a Mumbai shantytown called Annawadi. Boo's technique is as exhaustive as it is self-effacing. She conducts countless hours of interviews with her key "characters," interviews that, to judge by the results, can be as searching as therapy sessions. She backs these up with documentary research and shoe leather reporting. To establish what actually happened during a crucial event -- the self-immolation of a one-legged woman following a dispute with one of the book's central families -- she interviewed 168 people, many of them more than once. She never mentions herself.

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I certainly had no time to brush up while actually reading the novel. "The Fear Index" is a perfect exemplar of the species "taut thriller." It's a book whose pages cannot be turned fast enough; a mystery with just a dash of science fiction and plot twists ripped from the business news headlines of the past year. Beware taking this book to bed with you, because you will stay up too late. (And your dreams will be queasy.)

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Gaby Rodriguez, the author of the memoir "The Pregnancy Project," soon to be a Lifetime movie of the same name, lives in Toppenish, Wash., population 9,000, 75 percent Latino, with a casino and a discount movie theater where second-run movies cost $3; where 98 percent of the students at her high school qualify for free lunch and teens compete with their parents for jobs at Dairy Queen and Taco Bell, and in migrant labor.

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Commanding the balloon was S. A. Andrée, a 33-year-old Swede. Andrée was an engineer by training and a firm believer in lighter-than-air travel. He had run the numbers. Leaving from the Spitsbergen archipelago, he and his two compatriots would float the 600 miles to the pole in 43 hours. A week later they would make landfall in Asia or Alaska, or maybe even San Francisco. Andrée packed a tuxedo just in case. You've got to admire his moxie – even as you wince at the fate-tempting presumption. The year was 1897.

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Open "The Art of Medicine: Over 2,000 Years of Images and Imagination" (University of Chicago Press, out now), which spotlights works from London's Wellcome Collection, and you'll find illuminations from late medieval medical manuals; 18th-century anatomical waxworks with removable organs; leaves from hand-colored plant and herb guides; early-20th-century lithographs advertising gout remedies; astonishing close-ups of implanting human embryos; and much, much more. The collection is so wide-ranging and diverse as to defy a pithy explanation -- but taken as a whole, it's transfixing.

Emma Shackleton, one of the book's co-authors, answered a few of my questions over email; the accompanying slide show offers a whirlwind tour of the past few hundred years of medical imagery.

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I sat down with my iPad to read "The Yellow Submarine" with a friend's 7-year-old twins, and within 10 minutes, we were embroiled in a conflict that captured the central, nagging problem with the enhanced e-book concept. Desmond liked playing with the interactive features -- the digital equivalent of the tabs and flaps in a paper pop-up book -- although few of these could steal his ongoing fascination away from the iPad's system-wide "pinch to expand" feature. Nini was aggravated by her brother's pinching, tapping and swiping, and shouted, "I'm trying to read the story!" (Neither one cared much about either the music or the videos, incidentally.) Instead of a cozy interlude of reading, we had a fight.

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Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students "a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question." The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a "banal" story like this tiger-cub number admits "multiple interpretations," and the prod to "reduce the work to a single idea" does a disservice to both reader and text.

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Builders, be warned: This is not an instruction manual. Instead, Diedricksen's book is bursting with abstract creative concepts, all outlined in eye-popping, full-page black-and-white comic-book-style drawings (you can see some examples -- along with a number of photographs -- in the slide show that accompanies this piece).

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This will come as bad news to the small but persistent fan cult who harbor hopes of a Soul Coughing reunion. (And I might as well admit right now that I’m one of them.)

For a few years there back in the '90s, Soul Coughing was making the most interesting music on the planet, a sonic collage of Doughty’s downtown beat poetry and guitar riffs, the monstrous syncopation of bassist Sebastian Steinberg and drummer Yuval Gabay, and the zany sampling of Mark De Gli Antoni. Doughty called it “deep slacker jazz.” The critics, by and large, raved. But the band minted only a few minor hits before imploding.

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“We wanted it to be a place where you could meet Salman Rushdie, not just read him. Before Jaipur, you might only have been able to see him at some British Council event,” said William Dalrymple, the festival’s genial host. That was just about a month ago.

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