A more rounded picture of James Baldwin
Nicholas Boggs has written the first major biography of the writer in more than 30 years
Books and Arts
Tuesday
Why Jane Austen is still the queen of romance
The writer remains supreme in part because women don’t merely want dazzling men, we want to be dazzling ourselves.
Vermeer’s Love Letters is something of a riddle
The paintings become mysteries, enticing and deserving of attention precisely because there are so few
How Esther inspired the imagination of Rembrandt
The enchanting and historically haunting show consists of more than 120 objects
The problem with Heathers: The Musical
The musical flirts with nonconformity and then, scared, retreats into its own shadow
The Phoenician Scheme is Wes Anderson at his most transparent
Everything is a dolly shot of dolled-up people in a doll’s house
Tuesday
Mark Twain’s finest invention was himself
Over more than a thousand pages, Ron Chernow identifies the emotional root system that fed the writer’s art
Glennon Doyle’s latest offering marks a change in direction
We Can Do Hard Things allows a chorus of voices into the Glennosphere
The mechanics of cancel culture
I was struck by the way the Blake Bailey combines the poignancy of decay with his gift for dryly comic observation
How to make America read again
Christopher J. Scalia knows his audience and his light, avuncular style proves engaging throughout
The enduring brilliance of C.S. Lewis
More than 60 years after his death, the Oxford literature professor and writer is everywhere
A walk through Geoff Dyer’s childhood
Homework is openly billed as an antidote to memoirs full of derring-do but it does exactly what the essayist’s fans will want
The enduring appeal of Jaws, 50 years on
It’s easy to forget that there was nothing inevitable about the film’s long-lasting success
‘Being a mom sometimes sucks’: an interview with Sarah Hoover
The art historian’s memoir is no feminist treatise
How museums can promote diversity without demonizing tradition
We need art that keeps our collective imagination and sense of tradition alive
Tuesday
Has Trump’s return defanged Ezra Klein?
Abundance is the old juicebox mafia’s definitive statement to the world in the second Trump era
Unpacking John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s complex relationship
You end John & Paul in understanding of their essential humanity
Joan Didion’s unedited record of therapy is morbidly fascinating
It is the great failure of Notes to John that it lacks the writer’s distinctive voice altogether
Erik Satie was an inadvertent innovator
Ian Penman’s brief book takes us around the French composer’s life three times
Seventy-five years of Strangers on a Train
At its dark, complex heart, the novel represents Patricia Highsmith at her most contradictory – and greatest