It’s a sad time to be heterosexual. Men are angry at women, women are angry at men, and nobody’s getting the type of action they want. But here comes a book to solve all that, to clear away confusion, restore male dynamism, and rekindle the spark of chemistry in straight mating. The jacket copy of cultural historian Betsy Prioleau’s Swoon promises to reveal “surprising seductive secrets” of the old masters in the interest of giving the beleaguered modern man a leg up on the nigh impossible task of wooing a modern woman. Subtitled “Great Seducers and Why Women Love” them, the book purports to

Oscar Wilde is famous for having found the Atlantic Ocean a bit of a letdown. "The roaring ocean does not roar," he observed in 1882. But he would face tumult soon enough. Wilde was just twenty-seven, and about to embark on a year-long lecture tour of the United States that would throw him together with miners and socialites, undergraduates and poets, and set the ocean of the world roaring around him. He was young, dandiacal, theatrical, publicity-seeking—ridiculed and lionized on both sides of the Atlantic. In years to come he would glitter with fame and accomplishment, yet he would also be

Poetry has always been the handmaiden of ­mythology, and vice versa. Sometimes poets are in the business of collecting and tweaking existing myths, as with Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and the Poetic Edda. Other times poetry applies a mythological glamour to stories and characters from history, legend or even other myths (the hero of the “Aeneid” is a minor character from the “Iliad”). Then there are poets who equate the idea of myth with the supposedly irrational essence of poetry itself. Here is Robert Graves in 1948: “No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision

Kevin Killian is one of America’s great eccentrics, a stylist with so much pizazz that perhaps it's inevitable he has been punished with under-recognition. His sentences are suffused with a folksiness that reminds one of the great southern writers, though his books are usually set in the California he has called home for the past several decades. In his latest novel, Spreadeagle, one of his characters relays the following: “‘Dogs and cats got two things in common,’ my mother used to say, ‘and one of them ain’t fit to mention.’ That always made me feel uncomfortable. I didn’t even know what the