In Memoriam: I don’t recommend it, but sometimes death is a good career move. Consider Jim Harrison, who was 78 when he died of a heart attack last month, with a poem unfinished on his desk and a pen in his hand. Extravagantly talented, critically adored, more famous than most literary novelists thanks partly to the movie version of his “Legends of the Fall,” Harrison in his lifetime never once hit the print edition of the Times best-seller list. (The closest he came was three years ago, when his novella collection “The River Swimmer” landed at No. 32 on the extended list.) But his death brought new attention to his raucous, earthy writing, and now Harrison’s latest book — another novella collection, “The Ancient Minstrel,” which David Gates reviewed on the cover of our March 13 issue — debuts at No. 14 on the hardcover fiction list.

Harrison’s work isn’t without problems. He embraced a kind of rowdy mysticism that could make you scratch your head when it didn’t soar. But it soared a lot, and Harrison’s best writing was anchored in an instinctive humility and generosity and largeness of spirit. “Often we are utterly inert before the mysteries of our lives, why we are where we are and the precise nature of the journey that brought us to the present,” he wrote in an explicitly autobiographical epilogue to the title novella of “The Ancient Minstrel.” It ends with an artist’s statement of sorts, which also makes a fitting elegy: “In a lifetime of walking in the woods, plains, gullies, mountains, I have found that the body has no more vulnerable sense than being lost. . . . It’s happened often enough that I don’t feel panic. I feel absolutely vulnerable and recognize it’s the best state of mind for a writer whether in the woods or the studio. Your mind feels a rush of images and ideas. You have acquired humility by accident. Feeling bright-eyed, confident and arrogant doesn’t do this job unless you’re writing the memoir of a narcissist. You are far better off being lost in your work and writing over your head. You don’t know where you are as a point of view unless you go beyond yourself. It has been said that there is an intense similarity in people’s biographies. It’s our dreams and visions that separate us. You don’t want to be writing unless you’re giving your life to it.” Jim Harrison gave his life to it, and American literature is richer as a result.

Physical Education: “Girls and Sex,” Peggy Orenstein’s comprehensive look at the subject of its title, enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 4. In her introduction, Orenstein explains why she wrote the book: “A few years ago I realized that my daughter wouldn’t be a little girl much longer. She was headed toward adolescence, and honestly, it put me in a bit of a panic.” As the father of preteen daughters myself, I empathize — though Orenstein may be alone in facing her panic by asking girls across the country to discuss their sex lives with her. Not that they minded. “They were not just eager,” Orenstein writes, “they were hungry to talk.”