It's hard, perhaps, to recall that once sex was radical politics conducted by other means. When Wilhelm Reich coined the phrase "the sexual revolution," he meant transformation in every sphere: health, marriage, economics, morality, and government. It was in sex, he believed, that we found the integrated self, liberated from the alienating culture and the authoritarian state. Christopher Turner's new book is in part a report from that past, when sex held the promise of social reform.

The Curfew, Jesse Ball’s third and slimmest novel for Vintage, contains within its pages the best sentence the young novelist and poet has yet written: “Is it not on the ground over that very grave that my life proceeds?” It’s a rhetorical question, and the contrast it presents (life and grave) is no accident. Ball is a strange paradox of a writer—his prose is as simple as stage directions but at the same time impenetrable, often because he whittles his sentences to nonsense. At his best, Ball is a virtuoso minimalist, situating only a handful of words poignantly on a page, letting the silence

In her new study, Wendy Lesser calls composer Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich's quartets his "pure" music, by way of contrast to the "impurity" of his symphonies and other work, as demanded by his navigation of a precarious route between creative honesty and survival in Stalin's Soviet Union.

Hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam’s view of human nature was not so different from that of Willie Stark, in All the King’s Men: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.”

In the long-ago time of the mid-1990s, an earnest pair of radical British intellectuals named Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron surveyed the emerging, and deeply reactionary, dogmas of the Internet age. Barbrook and Cameron explained that this worldview, which they dubbed the “Californian ideology,” hinged on a curious blend of New Left and New Right orthodoxies: culturally tolerant, anti-hierarchical and experimental, it was also punitively neoliberal and profoundly antigovernment in expounding a rigidly libertarian vision of the global economy.

The legendary playwright and self-declared "reformed Liberal" explains his turn to Fox News-style politics, writing: "The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable, Sisyphean burden."

Arthur Rimbaud wrote the poems that were eventually published under the title Illuminations between the ages of seventeen and twenty. John Ashbery, who has just translated the forty-two poems (plus one fragment) traditionally grouped under that title, is eighty-three. Rimbaud, when he wrote the poems, was at a peak of creativity, moving from formal poetic composition to his long prose confession A Season in Hell (1873), and into the form—the prose poem—with which he is most often associated.