Fats Waller, Handful of Keys. Every self-respecting record collection needs a generous slice of the collected works of Fats Waller, the stride pianist and comic singer whose 78s can put a smile on the sourest of faces. Proper Records’ imported four-CD box set, originally released in 2004 and readily available in this country, contains ninety-five tracks that come about as close as is possible to covering all the Waller-related bases. A few classics are absent, but if you don’t know what they are, you won’t miss them. Meanwhile, put on “Serenade for a Wealthy Widow” or “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” and see if you don’t become happier within seconds. No jazz musician–not even Satchmo himself–has ever succeeded in squeezing more joy into a three-minute package (TT).

Stewart O’Nan, Last Night at the Lobster. I don’t know how this tough, no-nonsense 2007 novella about the closing of a suburban chain restaurant got past me, but now that I’ve finally caught up with it, Stewart O’Nan is going straight to the top of my catch-up list of contemporary novelists. At first glance there doesn’t seem to be much to it, but before long you realize that you’re reading a deeply serious moral tale whose protagonist, a Red Lobster manager whose marriage is in trouble, is one of the most memorable fictional characters to come to my attention in recent years. Short and wholly to the point, Last Night at the Lobster is a minor masterpiece (TT).

The Devil and Daniel Webster. William Dieterle’s bracingly dark 1941 screen version of Stephen Vincent Benét’s once-popular short story about a New England farmer who makes a Faustian bargain isn’t exactly forgotten–the Criterion Collection released a deluxe version in 2003–but it’s not nearly as well known as it ought to be. The cast, especially Walter Huston and Edward Arnold, is superb, and the atmospheric black-and-white cinematography borders on the miraculous. As for Bernard Herrmann’s score, which won him his only Oscar, it’s identical in quality to the music he wrote for Citizen Kane in the same year. If you missed this one on TCM the other day, pick up a copy of the DVD and revel in a first-class piece of work (TT).

Robert Casadesus, George Szell, and the Cleveland Orchestra, Mozart Piano Concertos, K. 467 and 491. French pianism can be superficial, but it can also be irresistibly cool, clear, and limpid. Casadesus filled all three bills, never more fully than on this budget-priced CD. Yes, there are other ways to play Mozart, just as there are those who think that George Szell was a cold fish, but these performances of the C Major and C Minor Piano Concertos seem to me to be as close to definitive as a classical recording can get (TT).

Wolf Kahn’s America: An Artist’s Travels. I love Kahn’s paintings and pastels, in which the utterly distinctive palettes of Bonnard and Mark Rothko are miraculously blended into a no less individual style that wanders fruiltfully from abstraction to representation and back again. I’m embarrassed to admit, though, that I knew nothing of this 2003 volume, which consists of miniature essays by Kahn in which he talks about the real-life settings for a hundred of his canvases and works on paper, until I interviewed the artist last week at his Manhattan studio. It turns out that Kahn is also a marvelously blunt and funny writer with a knack for pungent anecdotage. Rarely has a modern artist written so unpretentiously yet vividly about his art (TT).

The King and I. Now that TV screens are growing bigger and brighter, it’s becoming possible–just–to appreciate the glories of wide-screen musicals without seeing them in a theater. Even if you don’t much care for Rodgers and Hammerstein, the 1956 CinemaScope film of their musical version of Anna and the King of Siam is of the first importance because of Jerome Robbins’ dances–especially since Robbins personally supervised their filming. “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” his Asian-flavored retelling of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, looks cramped and illegible on a conventional TV, but to watch it on a HDTV-friendly screen is to be astonished anew by the endless ingenuity and unaffected freshness of Robbins’ choreographic storytelling (TT).

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. Percy’s first novel, published in 1961, is a startlingly rich and unsettling portrait of anomie under the aspect of modernity, seen through the eyes of a young man from New Orleans who flees from his fear of the meaninglessness of life by going to the movies and chasing his secretaries. Alienation is to American literature what love is to Italian opera, but The Moviegoer makes something enduringly new and relevant out of the old, old story (TT).

The Man Who Came to Dinner. With one exception, Hollywood did poorly by the plays of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. This screen version of their most enduringly popular comedy, released in 1942, is the only Kaufman-Hart film that clearly suggests the theatrical quality of the play on which it’s based, in large part because Monty Woolley, who created the role of Sheridan Whiteside on Broadway, repeated his justly celebrated performance for the cameras. Yes, it’s stagy, but so was the irascible Whiteside, a (barely) fictional portrait of Alexander Woollcott, and Woolley played him with enormous relish and malice aforethought. Don’t ask me why Bette Davis was cast as the good-egg heroine–she’s soooo not the type–but everyone else is competent or better, while the script, by Julius and Philip Epstein, sticks surprisingly close to the play. Jimmy Durante, of all people, plays Banjo, a character based on Harpo Marx, and does it well (TT).