Pity the poor bachelor who can’t find a decent suit to wear courting before autumn comes, because if he doesn’t find a wife by then he’ll be forced to work at the candy mint factory, or worse. Pity everyone else, too—the garbage-pickers, the soldiers, even the police—living in this world where doubt must be avoided and individuality is stamped flatter than a snake at a square dance.

"On the day I turned twenty-five," Julia Wertz tells us at the beginning of "Drinking at the Movies," her charming graphic memoir, "I came to consciousness at 3 a.m. in a twenty-four-hour Laundromat in Brooklyn, New York, eating Cracker Jacks in my pajamas. … To understand how I got there, we need to go back one year… "

In 1943, Hannah Arendt reviewed the memoirs of Stefan Zweig, one of the leading literary figures of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Like the vast majority of those figures—the playwrights and journalists, psychoanalysts and art collectors who made the Austro-Hungarian capital perhaps the most sophisticated city in the world—Zweig was Jewish. But this Jewish golden age was always haunted by the pervasive anti-Semitism of Austrian society, and it ended, of course, in catastrophe.

At the heart of Danielle Dutton's Sprawl is a lavish, endless list of domestic objects: water pitchers, sweaters, cakes on cake stands, petunias in a terra-cotta pot. Borrowing techniques from both fiction, poetry, and visual art (particularly photography), the book not only infuses each object, be it a juice glass or a paper napkin, with a Vermeeresque glow but arranges it into part of a verbal still life. The result? A fresh take on suburbia, one of reverence and skepticism.

In terms of plot, the book follows the crumbling marriage of the nameless narrator. At night, her husband “makes

We may take Milan Kundera for granted, but in his new collection of essays, the author casts an undeniably powerful spell—even if you have no previous knowledge of the artists that he discusses.

The excruciating inter­regnum between the dying of print prosperity and the rise of minimally commensurate digital profits is a huge story, and the version playing out at The Washington Post has been singularly dramatic. So is it really a good idea to send in a sportswriter to report on it?

People frequently asked James Baldwin: "Was being born black, gay, and poor a 'burden'?" "No," he's respond. "I thought I'd hit the jackpot."