Tereska Torrès will be probably be remembered as the world's first lesbian pulp novelist, though as Torrès was always the first to point out, she had no intention of earning that reputation. Born in Paris in 1920, Torrès served with the Free French forces in London during the Second World War and fictionalized her experience in the 1950 novel Women's Barracks. Though she went on to write fourteen more books before her death last week, Women's Barracks became a cult classic for its campy homoeroticism and since its publication has sold over 4 million copies in the US alone. ("If you look at

Ever since The Iliad and The Odyssey were ascribed to Homer, the blind poet has served as a metaphor for the ability to catch sight of things beyond mere appearance. Robert Duncan, born in 1919, belonged to this tribe of seers. At the age of 3, he slipped in the snow in Yosemite while wearing sunglasses against the glare; they shattered, and the injury resulted in strabismus—a condition in which the eyes cannot focus on the same object.

‘There is a visibility so tenuous, so different, or so discomfited that it is easy to miss,’ Lisa Cohen observes in All We Know, and, contrariwise, ‘a visibility so simple, so precise, or so extreme that it, too, is obscure.’ Why do we see what we see? Why do we fail to see what others see? Can we see things before they are ready to be seen? Can we see things before we are ready to see them? Such questions lie at the heart of Cohen’s strikingly elegant and assured biographical study of three now almost forgotten lesbian women: the American heiress and intellectual polymath Esther Murphy (

On the plane, something odd but also vaguely magical-seeming happened: namely, nobody knew what time it was. Right before we landed, the flight attendant made an announcement, in English and Spanish, that although daylight saving time recently went into effect in the States, the island didn’t observe that custom. As a result, we had caught up — our time had passed into sync with Cuban time. You will not need to change your watches. Then, moments later, she came on again and apologized. She had been wrong, she said.

During the height of the Belle Epoque, while comfortably ensconced in his palace in Brussels, King Leopold II of Belgium perpetrated a series of shadowy maneuvers that succeeded in making him the sole owner and master of an area almost 10,000 miles away: the Congo river, the land surrounding, and the people who lived there. Through Leopold never personally set foot in Africa, his merchants and gendarmes stripped the land of ivory, mahogany, and rubber; kidnapped, mutilated, and lynched local populations; and left about ten million dead over the span of twenty years.

This is the landscape of

Michael Chabon split his career in two with 2000's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Before then he was a Respected Young Novelist whose widely praised, commercially robust The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys mined the academic-bohemian nexus in the city where Chabon attended college. He also published two volumes of short stories, many of which initially appeared in The New Yorker. "Naturalistic," Chabon came to call this mode, especially in short-story form; stories of "disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace. Divorce;

According to the website of Found magazine, which was started by Davy Rothbart in 2001, the publication accepts “anything that gives a glimpse into someone else’s life.” The only condition is that the material has been, well, found—in the street, in an old book, on the windshield of a car, wherever. The result is a hodge-podge of to-do lists, old photographs, love letters, notes of apology, and children’s homework assignments. Ordinary as they may be, the finds tend to be unintentionally hilarious or poignant, and often both.

In his new collection of essays, Rothbart, who is best known as a