Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, by Alexander Nemerov. Penguin Press. 288 pages. $28. Imagine, if you will, that it’s the year 1990, and you are flipping through the magazine Art ...

The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf — that is, the boy who was believed the first few ...

From Liontaming in America, which was published last month by New Directions. I was reaching for a passage to the world they came from, the bodies slowly turning into the… ...

Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Richard Rorty accomplished something many writers aspire to but few ever pull off: he predicted the future. Toward the end of his 1998 book Achieving Our Country ...

After just a couple of days on bed rest, the material of your body begins to feel different: softer, heavier, a burden to the bone beneath. The thud of the heart in the chest feels deeper: each beat ...

My father always stressed the importance of blood — being worthy of it, showing loyalty to it, protecting what he called the purity of it. He was, as people sometimes say of well-educated racists, not ...

The Americanization of Narcissism, by Elizabeth Lunbeck. Harvard University Press. 384 pages. $35. The Narcissist Next Door: Understanding the Monster in Your Family, in Your Office, in Your Bed — in ...

At the 2003 World Figure Skating Championships, Tim Goebel stood by the ice just before his long program. At the time, people called him the Quad King. In figure skating, competitors gather speed ...

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages. $39.95. Our doomed thought ...

Straight Life isn’t widely known, but its fans are ardent. High-toned, too. Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky compared passages in it to Dickens, Joyce, and Dostoyevsky. The film director Mike ...

Then Rah-something turns the corner and four heads swing the other way in sync, like birds on a clothesline — KJ saying, Doug B, why your backpack look like My Little Ponies — Doug B’s lame comeback, ...

This untitled and undated piece may well be the last complete unpublished short story by Vladimir Nabokov. It was probably written and rough-sanded in the summer of 1926, when Nabokov read the prose ...