Five years ago, I flew to England to see the grand opening of something improbable: an attraction called Dickens World. It promised to be an “authentic” re-creation of the London of Charles Dickens’s novels, complete with soot, pickpockets, cobblestones, gas lamps, animatronic Dickens characters and strategically placed chemical “smell pots” that would, when heated, emit odors of offal and rotting cabbage. Its centerpiece was the Great Expectations boat ride, which started in a rat-infested creek, flew over the Thames, snaked through a graveyard and splashed into a sewer. Its staff had all been

I first came to know William Gaddis at a writers' conference in the Soviet Union in 1985. I had heard that he was shy and averse to publicity, but I found that this reputation was based only on his belief that a writer's life and personality should be as little as possible associated with his work. As a conferee, he was both eloquent and precise.

Perhaps the most amusing contrast in our group was between him and Allen Ginsberg. Allen, shaggy and bearded, chanted his verse in loud, emotional tones as he pounded a species of accordion that he always carried with him. Will, on the other hand,

Leela, the young exotic dancer at the center of “Beautiful Thing,” is a genius of vulgarity. In this intimate and valuable book of literary reportage by Sonia Faleiro nearly every word out of Leela’s mouth is spit like a cartoon hornet. Few of these sentences, alas, are publishable here.

In a letter to his lover, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller wrote that he was possibly the only writer in our time who has had the chance to write only as he pleased. This kind of hyperbole marked his audacious, pornographic monologue of a first novel, Tropic of Cancer, which was published in the US fifty years ago (after the Supreme Court overturned a quarter-century ban). Now, in Renegade, scholar Frederick Turner reassesses the work, making the case that the book and its author are as quintessentially American as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Turner’s volume is part of Yale University Press’s

“Isaiah prophesied, ‘And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of man shall be made low.’ That prediction bore truth in my lifetime and on my watch.”

So writes David Scheffer, who was instrumental in creating the four separate UN war crimes tribunals, as well as the International Criminal Court, and who yet remains haunted by what was left undone, done too late, or accomplished incompletely.

From 1993 to 1997, Scheffer was senior adviser and counsel to UN ambassador Madeleine Albright; from 1997 to 2001, he was the first ambassador-at-large for war crimes

When the center cannot hold, public attention turns to the passionate intensity of those who are destroying it or amusing themselves with its destruction. But what becomes of the public itself in this process—and of citizens’ dignity and prospects?

Aristotle considered humans beastly without the sphere of “the political,” through which we envision and bind ourselves to common undertakings. Political “speech acts” are imaginative, almost fictive, projections into an unknowable future, but our choices of some fictions over others have consequences. If politics falters, words and deeds