Writing guru Ben Marcus has finally learned an important lesson. His own.

Lamenting the hard lives of young girls, Caitlin Flanagan ends up in a dream world all her own.

Michael Ondaatje has made a career out of stiff-arming readers. So why is he finally inviting them in?

A photographic collection of averted eyes.

Steven Pinker’s new history is vivid on the brutality of premodern life. And blind to the depravity of our own.

Alan Hollinghurst unlocks Brit lit.

Amy Waldman takes a trip into the uncanny valley of ground zero.

Simon Reynolds’s Retromania looks back at a pop culture that has, for years now, done nothing but look back.

A new collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s early work shows him to be the world’s sweetest man of war.

A musician conjures a mesmerizing alternate history of his own lame life in the novel Stone Arabia.