Books, Arts, and Culture

These four books describe a remarkable society that once stood like a colossus between the Danube and the Euphrates, and was governed from its newly built...

Let sadness tell you what to read. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Joan Didion begins her essay “The White Album” by recalling a...

The great Rosa Luxemburg, radical extraordinaire, possessed a rich appreciation of life in all its glorious variety. While the potential for socialist revolution was her passion,...

Jon McGregor published his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), at the age of twenty-six. Set on an urban street in northern England,...

Late in the afternoon of March 27, 1964, members of the community theater group in Anchorage, Alaska, were preparing for that evening’s performance of Our Town,...

In the 1920s and 1930s several groups and individuals sought Pablo Picasso’s loyalty. Among them, John Richardson writes in A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years,...