Charles Jackson barely ever wrote a piece of fiction. The vast majority of his output—five novels or collections in the decade beginning 1944, and one final novel fourteen years later (“99 percent of this novel is lubricious trash,” read the Kirkus review)—was thinly disguised fact. His first, and by far his best-known, work was The Lost Weekend; it was essentially his homosexual alcoholic’s diary artfully made fiction. It made headlines for its depiction of alcoholism; the homosexual component got far less attention, likely because of the distorted Freudian fever gripping the nation, in which

On January 30, approximately 180 people overfilled an auditorium in the New York Public Library to witness an event titled (after Musil, in part) “Cabinet on Trial: A Magazine of No Qualities?” Forty-five issues into Cabinet’s run, which began thirteen years ago, a hefty compendium called Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine is being published. This large orange tome defines itself bluntly, and early: “THIS BOOK IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA.” Typical entries include “Mauve,” a short essay on the chemical and cultural components of the dye, and “Public Relations,” a history of the corporate

Of all the things one can portray in a movie, marriage is surely not the most titillating. It can’t possibly hold a candle to sex or violence—or some lurid combination of the two—and is an equally tough sell against horror, slapstick, sci-fi, romance, or the western. “Embrace happy marriage in real life,” director Frank Capra once remarked, “but keep away from it onscreen.” And yet there have been a great number of films, from the silent era until today, that have defied Capra’s warning and compellingly depicted one of the world’s most enduring institutions. (Capra himself offered a fiendish

When a Paris Review interviewer asked Vladimir Nabokov what he liked to do best besides writing novels, the author replied, “Oh, hunting butterflies, of course, and studying them. The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru.”

Nabokov was far from alone in this passion. The particular rapture of butterfly collection and study, the sensuous delight of this most painterly branch of entomology, was commonly voiced by its nineteenth-century adherents, as