Living in Oblivion. Mrs. T and I recently treated ourselves to a viewing of Tom DiCillo’s prize-winning low-budget 1995 indie flick about the making of (what else?) a low-budget indie flick. Two decades later, it remains one of the funniest and most knowing screen comedies ever made, with wonderfully well-judged performances by Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener. Whit Stillman loves it, and so will you (TT).

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. I only just got around to reading this Pulitzer-winning 2010 study of the Great Migration, in which Wilkerson talked to and looked at the complicated lives of three of the countless southern blacks who moved north in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s to escape the nightmare of racism in the Deep South. It’s not so much a piece of formal scholarship as an exercise in historically informed storytelling, but on that level it’s a really remarkable piece of work, written with immense sensitivity and packed with a wealth of telling, near-novelistic detail. For once, the subtitle is no exaggeration: this really is an epic story (TT).

Big Bill Broonzy, These Blues Are Doggin’ Me (Living Era). An astutely chosen anthology of twenty-six recordings made between 1930 and 1951 by the influential Chicago blues singer-songwriter (he wrote “Key to the Highway”) who was embraced in later life by the nascent folk-music movement. If you don’t know Broonzy’s music, this is a good way to get started. Concise but informative liner notes by Digby Fairweather (TT).

Outsourced. I only just caught up with this sweet, smart clash-of-cultures romcom about an uptight novelty salesman (Josh Hamilton) who is sent from Seattle to India to ride herd on the employees of an underperforming call center. Naturally he falls in love with one of them (Ayesha Dharker), but nothing else about this indie flick, which makes its points with a lovely lightness of touch, is predictable. Directed and co-written by John Jeffcoat, Outsourced failed to make a splash on its original release in 2006, but it deserves to be as well known as Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, with which it has much in common. If you liked one, you’ll like the other (TT).

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Given the (understandable) fuss that’s being made over the new Lisa Kron-Jeanine Tesori musical version of Fun Home, it strikes me that those who haven’t read this powerfully poignant 2006 comic-book memoir about the suicide of the author’s closeted gay father should do so at once and see what they’ve been missing. The dry, detached candor and jagged emotional edges of Bechdel’s first-person narration are a big part of what made Fun Home so distinctive, and they’re largely missing from the softer, sentimentalized stage version. The real Fun Home is a much tougher and far more impressive piece of work (TT).

Leon Fleisher: The Compete Album Collection (Sony Classical, 23 CDs). A compelling case can be made for calling Fleisher the greatest American classical pianist of the postwar era, and you’ll find that case made with comprehensive eloquence in this brand-new boxed set of his complete commercial recordings for Columbia and Epic. It includes concerted works by Beethoven, Brahms, Britten, Franck, Grieg, Hindemith, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, and Schumann, plus solo pieces and chamber music by Brahms, Copland, Debussy, Liszt, Mozart, Ravel, Rorem, Schubert, and Weber, all played with Fleisher’s signature blend of virtuosity, and intelligence. The price is ridiculously right–$56.50 on Amazon (TT).

Jim Bishop, FDR’s Last Year: April 1944-April 1945. Most books about Franklin Roosevelt are overly nostalgic and insufficiently detached, often to the point of outright fawning. Not so this 1974 best seller, which is rightly remembered as the first book to have made known to the general public the fact that Roosevelt was desperately ill when he ran for a fourth term–and that his doctors lied about it. While it’s written in a lively but over-obvious journalistic style and devoid (alas) of source notes, Bishop interviewed as many of FDR’s surviving friends, family members, and colleagues as possible, and the results remain grippingly readable (TT).

Charles Mingus, The Quintessence: New York-Los Angeles 1947-1960 (Frémeaux, two CDs). This anthology of early and middle-period recordings by the great jazz bassist-composer-troublemaker, released earlier this year in France, is now available in the U.S. Like most of the many releases in Fremeaux’ “Quintessence” series, it’s uncommonly well chosen and quite decently (if concisely) annotated. You couldn’t ask for a better introduction to Mingus’ work (TT).