Presenting Sacha Guitry (Criterion Collection, four discs). Four films by the great French actor-playwright-director, none of which, so far as I know, has ever been available on home video in this country. In The Story of a Cheat, The Pearls of the Crown, Désiré, and Quadrille, Guitry transferred his stage-farce style to the screen with astonishing and near-unprecedented success. I can’t think of another playwright who took to film with such idiomatic gusto. If there’s any justice at all, this long-overdue box set will introduce Guitry to a new generation of film buffs who have no idea how much pure pleasure they’ve been missing (TT).

Richard Stark, Deadly Edge/Plunder Squad/Slayground (University of Chicago, $14 each). Three more titles in the University of Chicago Press’ ongoing uniform paperback edition of the complete novels of Richard Stark (a/k/a Donald E. Westlake). Parker, Stark’s diamond-hard anti-heroic heister-protagonist, has admitted a woman into his life but remains as tough and unrelenting as ever. The plots are more complex, the language richer, the canvas wider. Get them all (TT).

Erroll Garner, The Most Happy Piano: The 1956 Studio Sessions (American Jazz Classics, two CDs). If, like me, you adore Garner’s unselfconsciously joyous art, make haste to order this imported double album containing all twenty-nine of the long-unavailable trio sides that he cut for Columbia in 1956, including a show-stopping eight-minute-long version of “The Man I Love.” The title is on the nose: no jazz musician, not even Louis Armstrong or Fats Waller, has ever made more purely happy music (TT).

Charles Burchfield: Fifty Years as a Painter (DC Moore Gallery, 724 Fifth Ave., up through Sept. 25). If you’ve already paid a visit to the Whitney’s idiosyncratic large-scale retrospective of the work of the visionary modern American watercolorist whose studies of small-town life have won the admiration of everyone from Edward Hopper to Jerry Saltz, then check out this small, tightly focused museum-quality show. It’s more than a mere pendant (TT).

Pilobolus Dance Theatre (Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave., closes Aug. 7). These are hard times for the much-loved modern dance troupe, which is coming to grips with the recent death of Jonathan Wolken, one of its founding members. Yet there can be no better way to celebrate Wolken’s life than to pay a visit to Pilobolus’ annual summer season at the Joyce Theater. The company is performing three mixed bills, the first of which features the New York premiere of Hapless Hooligan in “Still Moving,” a collaboration with Art Spiegelman. No matter which one you see, you’ll be entranced (TT).

Brooke Berman, No Place Like Home: A Memoir in 39 Apartments (Harmony, $23). The author of Hunting and Gathering came to Manhattan at the age of eighteen in the hopes of someday becoming a full-time professional playwright. Talented, inexperienced, naïve, and broke, she spent the next twenty years sharing microscopically small apartments, sleeping on futons, bouncing from roommate to roommate and gradually finding herself along the way. Now she’s written a memoir of her formative years, and it’s a lovely piece of work, at once charming and deeply felt. No Place Like Home is one of the best books I’ve read about how young artists make their way–or not–in an unforgiving world (TT).

Selena Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (Random House, $35). Actually, not much of the dirt in this tell-all biography of the author of Of Human Bondage (and, needless to say, The Letter) will come as a surprise to those familiar with Ted Morgan’s Maugham, published in 1980. But Hastings is a much better writer who had unrestricted access to previously unknown primary source material, and the result is a smart book that portrays its subject with a welcome combination of candor and sympathy (TT).

Punch Brothers, Antifogmatic (Nonesuch). The second album from mandolinist Chris Thile’s post-Nickel Creek quintet is a collection of original songs about love and its discontents. Like its predecessor, Antifogmatic is tantalizingly hard to pigeonhole. To call it “progressive bluegrass” makes a fair amount of sense but fails to convey the group’s rich yet coherent stylistic eclecticism. Why not settle for “incredibly hip acoustic music”? I’ll stand on that (TT).