Five years ago, I flew to England to see the grand opening of something improbable: an attraction called Dickens World. It promised to be an “authentic” re-creation of the London of Charles Dickens’s novels, complete with soot, pickpockets, cobblestones, gas lamps, animatronic Dickens characters and strategically placed chemical “smell pots” that would, when heated, emit odors of offal and rotting cabbage. Its centerpiece was the Great Expectations boat ride, which started in a rat-infested creek, flew over the Thames, snaked through a graveyard and splashed into a sewer. Its staff had all been

I first came to know William Gaddis at a writers' conference in the Soviet Union in 1985. I had heard that he was shy and averse to publicity, but I found that this reputation was based only on his belief that a writer's life and personality should be as little as possible associated with his work. As a conferee, he was both eloquent and precise.

Perhaps the most amusing contrast in our group was between him and Allen Ginsberg. Allen, shaggy and bearded, chanted his verse in loud, emotional tones as he pounded a species of accordion that he always carried with him. Will, on the other hand,

Brazil’s capital city, Brasilia, conceived by modernist architect Lucio Costa, was built in the late 1950s on what had been an unpopulated desert. Costa envisioned a city in which urban design enabled the existence of an ideal society, a utopian notion that deflated when confronted with reality. Brasilia’s once futuristic archways now slouch toward violent suburbs riddled with decay and corruption.

Novelist and former diplomat Joao Almino may be the poet laureate of Costa’s failed vision. Disappointment flickers in the background of his novels, all of which deal with attempts by a shifting

In Los Angeles comedian Moshe Kasher’s first book, the clever vitriol of the performer’s fast-paced stand-up routines meets the vulnerable sincerity of a man who “gave a fuck very much.” His biography, distilled in the book’s lengthy subtitle, The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16, reads like a dayyenu refrain: Any one of these details “would have been enough” for readers to deem the writer’s adolescence both thorny and enthralling. And yet God granted more.

When it came to family life, Kasher was given quite a

Isaiah Berlin split intellectuals into two groups: foxes, who know a great deal about many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing. But I wonder if there isn’t a third type, too, mysterious and misunderstood: the individual who knows a great deal about one thing—and that thing is herself. Narcissism has nothing to do with it. This is a specialty that usually signals deprivation: In the absence of other people, the self was all there was to study.

Such is the lot and genius of Jeanette Winterson. Her novels—mongrels of autobiography, myth, fantasy, and formal experimentation—evince

When the center cannot hold, public attention turns to the passionate intensity of those who are destroying it or amusing themselves with its destruction. But what becomes of the public itself in this process—and of citizens’ dignity and prospects?

Aristotle considered humans beastly without the sphere of “the political,” through which we envision and bind ourselves to common undertakings. Political “speech acts” are imaginative, almost fictive, projections into an unknowable future, but our choices of some fictions over others have consequences. If politics falters, words and deeds

In her introduction to this volume, curator and author Elizabeth Easton argues that the invention and early use of amateur cameras is relevant to the twenty-first century because the technological changes experienced by people using the Kodak around 1900 parallel those that are upending modes of communication in the digital age. Instantaneous, portable, cheap, and easy to use, the Kodak camera allowed everyone to become an image maker, in the process blurring the distinctions between artists and their public—a distinction that is being further eroded today. Easton’s book accompanies a