Giddy Discomfort
/How ought we to read the reactions of viewers to a piece of provocative art? What if that piece, like Kara Walker's "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby" is entirely to do with race?
Read MoreTitle Menu: 12 Hot Summer Reads
/It's summer at last, and you won't find any relief from the heat in our editors' round-up of the hottest books they know.
Read MoreIt Wasn't Palimpsestuous
/The collectors of rare 78 rpm records are nearly as singular and remarkable as the vinyl they seek out. A new book travels to flea markets and music fairs to discover the secrets of these American obsessives.
Read MoreHanging On: Modernity and the Crisis of Suicide
/With suicides on the rise throughout the Western world, a recent study by Jennifer Hecht attempts to both diagnose the frightening trend and evangelize against it. Ivan Kenneally discusses how effective her arguments are likely to be.
Read MoreDervishes and Gypsies
/Legendary Indian author Saadat Hasan Manto's choicest short stories - depicting a teeming Bombay that's both long-vanished and eternal - receive an attractive new paperback edition from Vintage International
Read MoreSkilled in the Ways of the Desert
/A fascinating new book tells the remarkable stories of five ‘improbable’ women who defied convention to explore the much mythologised landscape of the Middle East.
Read MoreLeft Wanting
/Elia Kazan's unwavering confidence in his own brilliance was the spur to his successes as a director and the source of his infamy as a Cold War canary. A new collection of his letters makes his outsized personality seem even larger.
Read MorePaper Mausoleums
/Rock music is all about inflaming the senses. Rock biographies, on the other hand, are built from facts and reasoned explanations. Matthew Stevens looks at a study of the life of Big Star frontman Alex Chilton, and wonders what fans can get out of it.
Read MoreStrange Troubador
/Joseph Roth spent his life fighting the kind of lazy dangers that arise from the rot of empire, even as his life and his letters embodied so many of them.
Read MoreEcho Chamber Blues
/Marvel Comics is mopping up at the box office, but what of its rival DC? Our resident expert fisks the also-rans and reminds us about an epic story still waiting to be adapted.
Read MoreAriel: Shelley in Italy
/Like so many before him, the celebrated Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had a tangled and complicated history with Italy, equal parts inspiration and frustration. Luciano Mangiafico tells the story
Read MoreLove in a Cold Climate
/Isabel Greenberg's graphic novel is set in the frozen land of Nord, but its lush storytelling influences come from such legendary places as Mount Olympus and Mount Sinai
Read MoreThe Art of the Con
/Years ago, while on the hunt for writing material, Walter Kirn befriended an eccentric, dog-loving raconteur named Clark Rockefeller. Then Rockefeller was charged with murder, kidnapping and identity fraud, and Kirn had his book. G. Robert Ogilvy reviews Blood Will Out.
Read MorePistols and Pearls
/It’s Melbourne in the late 1920s and violence keeps intruding into the elegant world of jazz clubs, cocktails, and fabulous fashion. No matter: Phryne Fisher is on the case.
Read MoreTitle Menu: 7 Books on Art Crime
/Art crimes aren't really sexy: they are an offense against humanity. Leah Triplett offers up a catalog of recent studies that explain the criminal attraction to art.
Read MorePedestaled in Triumph: Robert Browning in Italy
/The great and problematic poet Robert Browning drew some of his most powerful poetic inspirations from the lore and lure of Italy; Luciano Mangiafico traces the complicated relationship of the man to his "adopted homeland."
Read MoreLost in Eliot
/The books we reread say a lot about who we are or who we hope to be. They also shape us, as Rebecca Mead discovers in exploring her own long relationship with George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
Read MoreWar, in Panorama
/How could they do it, those young men who, with every reason to live, walked deliberately into machine-gun fire? Joe Sacco gives us a panoramic view of the horror, the labor, and the losses of WWI.
Read More‘I Would Like to Write a Beautiful Prayer’
/When in her twenties, Flannery O'Connor recorded her prayers in a private journal. Newly published, they shed light on her youthful theology, her literary ambitions, and the role of faith in the fiction she was soon to write.
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