Literary culture can be as guilty as the rest of American society when it comes to favoring the young, both as characters and as authors — when’s the last time anybody released a list of fashionable old writers, an annual tally of (say) “Five Over 65”?

That’s our loss. Age, after all, often brings exactly the ingredients most crucial to literary success, including experience, wisdom and perspective. The proof is in a handful of books we recommend this week, among them “A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety,” by the former poet laureate Donald Hall (who died in June); “Clock Dance,” Anne Tyler’s latest novel, about a retiree who shakes up her placid existence in service of others; and “The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela,” by the legendary civil rights activist who earned his law degree at the tender age of 70, while still incarcerated, and became president of South Africa after his release. Let the young try to keep up.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

A CARNIVAL OF LOSSES: Notes Nearing Ninety, by Donald Hall. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25.) Hall, who died in June at 89, was poet laureate from 2006 to 2007. Our critic Dwight Garner says that this new memoir and a previous one, “Essays After Eighty” (2014), are “up there with the best things he did.” About a third of “A Carnival of Losses” is “threadbare and meandering, memories of dead relatives and journeys abroad and anthologies past,” Garner writes. “But the other two-thirds are good enough to make clear that Hall did not live past his sell-by date as a writer. He brings news from that moment in life when the canoe is already halfway over the waterfall.”

INFINITE RESIGNATION, by Eugene Thacker. (Repeater, $17.95.) This fragmentary book about pessimism and its discontents takes its title from Kierkegaard. It’s a survey of the thoughts and dark quips of the Danish philosopher and his ilk, like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and others, combined with Thacker’s own aphoristic thoughts on the subject. “In order to get the most from Thacker’s book, it’s probably best if you already agree with this sentiment of his: ‘There are writers who are so depressing it’s inspiring,’” our reviewer, John Williams, writes. “This book provides a metric ton of misery and a lot of company. Even if you already have a long shelf of these writers at home, your reading list will grow exponentially after finishing this compendium.