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 ...

In the fall of 2014, I attended a public dialogue on “Revolution and Religion” between Bob Avakian, chairman and cofounder of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and Cornel West, professor of ...

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… ...

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 ...

This untitled and undated piece may well be the last complete unpublished short story by Vladimir Nabokov.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 ...

I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 book that gave my generation a ...

Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 592 pages. $30. The first half of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, centers on an improbable church youth group in the near western ...

About a year into the global coronavirus pandemic, hunkered down in West Philadelphia and searching—this will be familiar—for a lifeline, I corralled five of my best beloveds worldwide into an ...

The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Harper Perennial. 400 pages. $16.99. The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 704 pages. $35. I first heard of ...

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 ...

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, edited by Ralph Rugoff. Hatje Cantz. 208 pages. $48. The Artist’s Studio: A Century of the Artist’s Studio 1920–2020, edited by Iwona Blazwick. Whitechapel Gallery.

I first read the Book of Revelation in a green pocket-size King James New Testament published by the motel missionaries Gideons International. I was in seventh grade. I remember reading the tiny Bible ...