What secret was trying to pierce through this hallucinatory and hermetic language?” asks poet Ghérasim Luca in his long-lost classic The Passive Vampire. The book, first published in French in 1945 by Les Éditions de l’Oubli in Bucharest, is chimerical and delirious yet remarkably concrete in its lewdness. Blending personal confession, prose poetry, meditation, verbal games, catalogues, and hymns to desire, this hybrid book is a Surrealist carnival that taps satanic and psychic rituals. Bawdy and bizarre, it also evokes the era’s dark history, including anti-Semitic pogroms. Writing of the earthquake that devastated Bucharest on November 10, 1940, Luca internalizes

My sister is in our parents’ bedroom, at Mother’s vanity dresser. She tries on earrings and necklaces; she hazards a provocative smile; she puts her right elbow on the glass-covered dresser top and places her chin on her hand. (Her ballet-class hand, soft but alert and slightly rounded.) Before dinner, she will ask: “Who do I look more like, Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge?”

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will seem curiously lonely when it arrives in theaters this July. For the first time since the film series premiered in 2001 with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, no one is anticipating a new Potter novel by J. K. Rowling, the books having run their course two years ago. The films still have a ways to go; after Half-Blood Prince, Warner Bros. plans to split the final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, into two films and release them in 2010 and 2011. The stated reason is that the company wants to

Aleksandar Hemon does not write for, in his words, “therapeutic reasons.” But as the virtuosic author told me over a southern-fried lunch in Chicago one cold, damp March afternoon, writing has unexpectedly helped him fuse his two lives: At twenty-eight, in the spring of 1992, he became stranded in Chicago during a month-long journalism program, when his home, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, fell under siege and was ravaged by civil war. In just a few years, Hemon was publishing stories written in English, which he perfected by reading Nabokov and canvassing door-to-door for Greenpeace. Hemon, a MacArthur “genius,” has since

What was so great about I. F. Stone? For many journalists—most but not all of them on the left—“Izzy” remains the ultimate scribbler of truth to power. Like-minded bloggers claim him as a patron saint; last year, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard began awarding an annual I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. D. D. Guttenplan concludes his new biography, American Radical, “I. F. Stone wrote not to create a sensation, or to promote himself (or his ‘brand’), but to change the world.”

Books claiming to decipher evangelical Christianity for the secular reader are nothing new, but the Bush years ushered in the genre’s golden age. Following the 2000 election, scores of pundits sought to explain the rise of the Christian right, and some of their efforts were worthwhile. For The Great Derangement, Matt Taibbi went undercover at a fundamentalist retreat that culminated with a mass exorcism where he was encouraged to vomit up demons, and he walked away understanding how easy it could be to “bury your ‘sinful’ self far under the skin of your outer Christian.” D. Michael Lindsay conducted interviews

Quick: When you think of inner-city poverty, urban blight, gang violence, and steep high school dropout rates among chronically unemployed minorities, what American cities come to mind? Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Chicago, maybe Saint Louis? Yet recent studies show that smaller cities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, are plagued by the same problems—indeed, to a worse degree. Small-to-midsize older industrial cities didn’t experience the “comeback” secured via globalization and high-tech development that helped lift bigger metropolises out of the doldrums over the past two decades. Instead, these “forgotten cities” slid further into postindustrial malaise, with a massive influx

It is part of Robert Ryman’s legend that he is a self-taught artist. He moved to New York in 1952, at age twenty-two, to pursue a career in jazz. A year later, he took a job at the Museum of Modern Art as a security guard. Paintings had begun to interest him “not so much because of what was painted but how they were done. I thought maybe it would be an interesting thing for me to look into—how the paint worked and what I could do with it.” So he bought some art supplies and began to experiment. At