THE VIVID DESCRIPTIONS of human suffering in Dante’s Inferno have long attracted visual artists. It’s no surprise that Sandro Botticelli, Gustave Doré, William Blake, Auguste Rodin, and Salvador Dalí all tried their hand at depicting the Italian poet’s demonic landscape. That dark world is rich in dramatic occasion (“an old man, his hair white with age, cried out: / ‘Woe unto you, you wicked souls’”) and irresistibly pictorial (“These wretches . . . / naked and beset / by stinging flies and wasps / that made their faces stream with blood, / which, mingled with their tears, / was gathered

Flushing, Queens, early 1960s, Saturday nights. The boy next door’s name was Eugene; he was overweight, attended the Bronx High School of Science, and was an amateur radio enthusiast. Home alone, a young Ellen Ullman would be watching TV when, “suddenly, Eugene’s ham radio hijacked our television signal—invaded the set with the loud white noise of electronic snow.” In a poignant piece in her new essay collection, Life in Code, Ullman describes how she could hear his voice, and in the sine wave that pierced the on-screen static she could see him, too. His message became as familiar as his

Andre Agassi’s Open was a groundbreaking memoir for a tennis player when it came out in 2009. The writing had verve and pop, as Agassi (and ghostwriter J. R. Moehringer) opted to tell his odyssey in the present tense, as if reliving every drama. And the confessionals along the way felt truly revealing. Agassi presented himself as a lost man: “I open my eyes and don’t know where I am or who I am,” reads the first line, bringing to mind a tennis-pro Gregor Samsa. We follow him from an intimate vantage point: crying in the shower, enduring militant training

We tend to think of The Odyssey as the adventure story of Odysseus’s troubled, decade-long journey home from the Trojan War, his path impeded by all manner of men and monsters and gods. And indeed it is full of action and adventure—Odysseus’s wily escape from the Cyclops, his seduction by (or of) the witch Circe, and his interviews with ghosts at the gates to the land of the dead are just a few examples. But as Daniel Mendelsohn, perhaps the most accessible contemporary ambassador of the classics, argues in his new book, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an

Hollywood has always been a place of invention and reinvention, a world where outsiders could fashion themselves as architects of American mythology, and where the outsize success stories of dogged scoundrels are celebrated with enthusiasm. Perhaps no studio, and no family, better represents this spirit than Warner Bros., established in the first decades of the twentieth century by the Polish-born Wonskolasor siblings Harry (né Moses), Albert (né Aaron), and Sam (né Szmul), along with their brash little brother Jack (né Jacob), who was born in Canada after the family fled to the New World. Their spectacular achievements in the motion-picture