For all his love of Dante, I don’t think Nick Tosches was much of a Boccaccio man. Still, he might have admired the saga that begins The Decameron. It is the story of one Ser Cepparello da Prato, un pessimo uomo, a dandy gentleman who wets his beak in every vice—blasphemy, forgery, booze, sex, crooked dice, marked cards, you name it. But nothing gives him a bigger kick than stirring up bad feelings, for, according to our storyteller, “the greater the evils he saw . . . the greater his happiness.” Dispatched to Burgundy to collect on the Boss’s loans,

A FEW NIGHTS AGO, I WAS VISITED BY AN EMAIL. Back before the world gasped, my brother, the doctor, hardly ever wrote me anything beyond a “dinner Friday y/n,” and yet here he was, in the breathless thick of it, attaching a file of 7,241 words. I’d thought that he was far out in the boroughs intubating the sick or putting them through dialysis—and he was—but somehow he’d also found the time and adrenalized energy to put more language down on the screen than I, the ostensible writer, had managed to eke out in weeks, even months. The instructions that

Reading at home can’t replace the sense of community and connection offered at your local bookstore, but virtual book clubs, talks, and classes may help fill the void. Independent booksellers and publishers across the US are moving their scheduled spring programming online and some are launching entirely new web series for your quarantine-viewing pleasure. Attending these won’t be the same as meeting in person, but it’ll come close.

Davide Sorrenti excelled at the part of photography that takes place long before a camera comes into play. He got people to relax, to be vulnerable and unselfconscious. (To be naked, too, sometimes.) Small and young and rapscallionish, he slid into complicated situations with ease, arrogance, and poise. He was the sort of photographer people in front of the lens wanted to please, because in his big-ego, small-package cocksureness, he seemed privy to some idea of beauty or freedom that maybe, if you let him snap the picture, you might access too.

SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE, written by Mike Davis in collaboration with historian Jon Wiener, is a kind of sequel to City of Quartz, the cultural analysis of Los Angeles Davis published in 1990. In the beginning of CoQ, Davis described the focus of that book as “the history of culture produced about Los Angeles.” And that is true for roughly two hundred pages of CoQ, as Davis reviews the work of California historians like Carey McWilliams (he approves) and “the European reconceptualization of the United States” carried out by Los Angeles transplants like Theodor Adorno (he’s torn). Davis also

WHENEVER I SEE A COPY OF A ROBERT STONE NOVEL in a used-book store, I buy it, pretty much to introduce him to others, to press his work upon others. I recently acquired a copy of A Flag for Sunrise, one of his masterworks—1981 first edition. Out of print. Nine dollars. Between its pages, a folded note. Black ink. Neat handwriting. Life is hard. We’re trying to prepare you for that. Make mistakes . . . fine . . . good. But make them because you don’t know. Learn from them. Do not make them b/c your friends are making

The last particule of the once-sprawling Chelsea Flea Market closed down on December 29, 2019. That remnant occupied a parking lot on 25th Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, but earlier the market, which opened in 1976, had in addition comprised three lots along Sixth Avenue, as well as a garage on 25th Street, the principal setting and primary subject of this beguiling memoir. Flea markets have been in serious decline for years; in many parts of the country a “flea market” is where you go to buy batteries, aftershave, and car parts. The recent, possibly terminal phase has everything