The entry of Vivian Maier—a Chicago nanny who died in 2009, leaving an enormous trove of unpublished and often unprinted images—into the first rank of American postwar photographers has proved as revelatory as it was precipitous. During her lifetime, she refrained from bringing her photos to venues where they might have been judged, perhaps fearing that they would have been dismissed as the work of an amateur. But the several volumes of photographs that have been published since her death evidence a remarkable artistry and consciousness of craft. Vivian Maier: The Color Work (Harper Design, $

Like stereotypical versions of the people the book maligns, the title of Blythe Roberson’s How to Date Men When You Hate Men makes promises it can’t keep: This is not a how-to, she doesn’t hate men, and though she sleeps around and has maintained perplexing romantic friendships, she’s not totally sure if she’s ever been on a date. The book, she explains in the introduction, is more of a political meditation on what Roberson insists is not a personal problem but a structural one. It’s a “comedy philosophy book about what dating and loving are like now, in an era that we thought was the end of

As Denis Diderot’s lengthy and preposterously productive run approached its end in 1784, the question of his posterity loomed in an even more concrete way than usual. In the months before he expired, aged seventy, over a bowl of stewed cherries, he relocated from the conservative parish of Saint-Sulpice to the more renegade-hospitable precinct around Église Saint-Roch, on the other side of the Seine. The move offered a way for Diderot the atheist to avoid the fate of Voltaire the deist, whose corpse had had to be disguised as a still-living being and hustled out of Paris sitting upright in a

The shooting of The Wild Bunch was not a pretty picture. If a film were made today the way Sam Peckinpah shot The Wild Bunch in Mexico in 1968, and if people found out, members of the cast and crew would be facing time in jail. The history of the film’s production fascinates because it was all so wrong. What happened encompasses many vices and several crimes, including manslaughter and statutory rape. It is an often repellent tale, a stew of toxic masculinity feeding a movie designed to dismantle the very myths about heroic cowboys, gun violence, and la frontera that it succumbed to as a