John Horne Burns was the author of The Gallery, published in 1947. At the time, the book was considered a great war novel (less remarked was that it’s also a great gay novel). The book’s publication was widely viewed as the arrival of a huge literary talent and established tremendous expectations for the young writer. What followed, though, was failure on a tremendous scale. On the face of it, David Margolick’s biography of the author, Dreadful (which was Burns’s code word for “homosexual”), is a straightforward chronicle of the man’s rise and fall.

Margolick, a contributor to Vanity Fair and

Portrait photographs invite speculation, much as diplomatic treaties do when made public. In both cases, the product is the result of undisclosed, expected give-and-take between engaged parties. Their interests were adulterated in a process where agents jockeyed for an advantage, one side maybe losing, the other gaining some edge over the other. In portraiture, negotiations affect those who pose and those who make the picture, quite aside from those who compete by making similar pictures. Deliberate portraits are power outcomes, not always as involving when they appear harmonious as when they

At first, the "Hydrospatial City," Argentine artist Gyula Kosice’s expansive conceptual work begun in 1972 and continuing to this day, seems firmly planted in the long tradition of floating cities. Around the time Kosice began working on his project, plans for utopian cities were gaining prominence, especially within architecture—see Kenzo Tange's 1960 plan for Tokyo Bay, Mayor John Lindsay's 1967 “Linear City for New York,” and Amancio Williams's 1974 project “The City Which Humanity Needs” for Buenos Aires. The primary maquettes for Kosice’s project are hovering discs, each dotted with

In the general rare books college at Princeton University Library sits a stunning two-volume edition of John Milton that once belonged to Herman Melville. Melville's tremendous debt to Milton — and to Homer, Virgil, the Bible, and Shakespeare — might be evident to anyone who has wrestled with the moral and intellectual complexity that lends Moby Dick its immortal heft, but to see Melville's marginalia in his 1836 Poetical Works of John Milton is to understand just how intimately the author of the great American novel engaged with the author of the greatest poem in English. Checkmarks, underscores,

Tishomingo Blues is Elmore Leonard’s thirty-seventh novel. At that number you’d think he’d be flagging, but no, the maestro is in top form. If, like Graham Greene, he were in the habit of dividing his books into “novels” and “entertainments”—with, for instance, Pagan Babies and Cuba Libre in the former list, and Glitz, Get Shorty, and Be Cool in the latter—this one might fall on the “entertainment” side; but, as with Greene, those that might be consigned to the “entertainment” section are not necessarily of poorer quality.

Marisha Pessl’s first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was a maddening, twisty, eventual knockout of a book. It sparkled with showy erudition and the electricity of a true original. A prestigious, successful debut novel, it’s a tough act to follow. But here she is, in Night Film, thumbing her nose at sophomore slump.