After landing in Paris, from New York, I went straight to the Gare Saint-Lazare to board a train to the town of Valognes in Normandy, a three-hour ride. On the train, I fell into a rushing sleep, then woke with a jolt, worried that I had missed my station. The carriage was empty except for an elderly couple tipsily playing cards, smiling at me in what seemed an invitation to join them. They got off at the station before mine, he with a thick carved cane in each hand, hobbling forward with a determined thrust of his hips, throwing his canes onto the platform and then climbing down, like a man

After spending some weeks luxuriating in the gorgeous presence of Penguin’s Great Food series—a collection of reprints that includes the genre’s classic titles from the past four hundred years—I have many questions. Would I ever actually make lambs’ ears with sorrel or fricassee of calves’ tongues, as suggested in Recipes from the White Hart Inn (1759)? Could I possibly live up to “the inward virtues of every housewife,” as detailed by Gervase Markham in The Well-Kept Kitchen (1615)? But perhaps most pressing is this inquiry, fortunately directed at someone living now: Designer Coralie

Why does everyone love him so? Well, not everyone, of course. Here’s what I mean: “Today Chesterton is not among the best known of authors,” wrote the right-wing anarcho-capitalist Joseph Sobran. “But among those who do know him, he is one of the best loved.” And those who do love him are as likely to be on the left as on the right, among vegans and carnivores, bohos and ultramontanes, theocrats, agnostics, and Bible burners alike. Almost everyone.

Sobran, a gifted and prolific crank, is a case in point. From the first rank of Chestertonians we might pluck any number of prominent writers who

“I was under the tragic spell of the South, which either you’ve felt or you haven’t,” John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in “Mr. Lytle: An Essay,” from his new collection, Pulphead. “In my case,” he continues, “it was acute because, having grown up in Indiana with a Yankee father, a child exile from Kentucky roots of which I was overly proud, I’d long been aware of a faint nowhereness to my life.”

Sullivan’s previous book, Blood Horses, was an extended meditation on the horse, adapted from a gripping cover story he wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 2002, “Horseman, Pass By.” I remember thinking it

In her newly translated 2002 autobiography, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama describes her dense all-over paintings as “white nets enveloping the black dots of silent death against a pitch-dark background of nothingness.” Such a mystic, existential idea of art places Kusama on the long roster of modernist artists, from Wassily Kandinsky to Barnett Newman, convinced that abstraction is a gateway to the unknown, the eternal, the universal—that simplified compositions can plumb the psyche’s deepest secrets, or even reach the holy. For Kusama, her signature dots are a “spell,” “mysterious,” “magical,”