L.E. Sissman, Night Music. All but forgotten today, Sissman died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1976 at the age of forty-eight, leaving behind a slender but indelible legacy of poems and essays, many of which were about the illness that was to rob America of one of its finest and most promising writers. Twenty-three years later, Peter Davison edited this well-chosen collection of Sissman’s verse, whose cool, crisp iambs sit well with the highly individual sensibility of a poet-businessman who looked his fate in the eye without blinking: “Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap,/A booted man in black with a peaked cap/Will call for me and troll me down the hall/And slot me into his black car. That’s all.” Read him if you dare (TT).

Giovanni De Chiaro, Scott Joplin on Guitar. “The Entertainer,” “Maple Leaf Rag,” “Elite Syncopations,” and eight other rags and character pieces, recorded in 1989 by the first classical guitarist to take a serious and sustained interest in Joplin’s music. De Chiaro’s lucid arrangements pare the non-stop oom-pah bass of the original piano versions down to the bare essentials, allowing the gentle lyricism of such pieces as “Solace: A Mexican Serenade” to come through with spring-like clarity. Don’t give away your Joshua Rifkin albums, but once you listen to this CD, I bet you’ll feel like playing it again right away (TT).

Noël Coward at Las Vegas (DRG). In 1955 Noël Coward, who was past his playwriting prime, retrofitted himself as a cabaret singer, hired Peter Matz to arrange an evening’s worth of his best show tunes, took himself to the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, and promptly became the hottest act in town. This live album, which documents his stage show, is a priceless document of Coward the singer-songwriter at the peak of his performing powers. The highlights include a high-speed version of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” tossed off with dizzying nonchalance and a gleefully naughty rewrite of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It” whose updated lyrics are even more outrageous than the original: “Tennessee Williams, self-taught, does it/Kinsey with a deafening report does it/Let’s do it, let’s fall in love.” That such arch japes went over big a half-century ago says a great deal about America then and now (TT).

Kate Christensen, Jeremy Thrane (Anchor, $13 paper). Sexual ventriloquism is the trickiest of literary stunts, and Kate Christensen didn’t pull it off with complete success in her second novel, narrated by a 35-year-old kept man who gets dumped by his rich lover, a deeply closeted movie star. But even if you don’t quite buy the eponymous Thrane as a believably gay man, you’ll still find yourself disarmed and enthralled by the sharply observant wit of this smart yet heartfelt chronicle of life in Manhattan’s fast lane. Christensen’s fourth novel, The Great Man, will be published in August. I’m soooo there (TT).

Of Mice and Men. Like so many middlebrow “classics” of the Thirties and Forties, John Steinbeck’s best-known novel plays better than it reads. Lewis Milestone’s handsomely photographed 1939 film version, adapted by Steinbeck himself from the stage version he wrote two years earlier (with the unacknowledged assistance of George S. Kaufman), is an unexpectedly impressive piece of work. Burgess Meredith is perfect as George–he never gave a better performance–and though you’ll have to brush aside countless half-remembered parodies to see how good Lon Chaney, Jr., is as George, it’s worth the effort. The music is by Aaron Copland, and it’s every bit as powerful as his better-known scores for Our Town and The Heiress (TT).

Hollywood String Quartet, Beethoven Late Quartets (Testament, three CDs). Felix Slatkin, Leonard’s father, was a superbly gifted Heifetz-style violinist who served as concertmaster of the Twentieth-Century Fox orchestra and, after hours, led an ensemble of Hollywood studio players good enough to stand up to direct comparison with the Budapest Quartet. Their 1957 Capitol recordings of the late quartets of Beethoven, now available once again after a long hiatus, rank among the finest chamber-music recordings ever made. Rarely have Beethoven’s most sublime inward utterances been played with such awesome technical finish–or interpreted with such self-effacing seriousness (TT).

H.L. Mencken, A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources. Published in 1942 and still in print, this million-word behemoth, organized by topic instead of author, is wrongly remembered for its eccentricities, including a suspiciously extensive selection of nasty remarks about Jews and an assortment of anonymous “proverbs” that sound as though they came straight from the mouth of the editor himself. In fact, Mencken’s New Dictionary contains a vast number of well-chosen, precisely attributed quotations on every imaginable subject, ranging widely among both familiar and obscure sources. It’s that rarity of rarities, a reference book with a personality, and the passage of time has done little to diminish its usefulness–or charm (TT).

Béla Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra/Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (BMG). Virtuosic, incisive, commandingly shaped performances by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony of Bartók’s two orchestral masterpieces, digitally remastered so immaculately that no apologies of any kind need be made for the superlative early-stereo sound. If you find the great Hungarian modernist intimidating, this desert-island CD is likely to change your mind (TT).