Did Patricia Highsmith and Susan Sontag ever meet? According to Joan Schenkar’s lively biography of the suspense writer, it seems the closest encounter the two ever had was in 1976, during Highsmith’s second visit to Berlin, where she heard Allen Ginsberg read his poetry and Sontag present a thirty-page paper about a recent trip to China: “Pat carried away with approval only Sontag’s firm declaration that she didn’t and wouldn’t belong to any writers’ group.” (Well, at least until Sontag became president of PEN American Center in 1989.) Had they actually met, these two women—whose (open) secret

How is it that a poet can do almost nothing new in a succession of books and yet still sound utterly awake to the fresh possibilities of language? This is the question that John Ashbery’s work has posed for at least the last fifteen years. The criticisms one can make of Planisphere, his twenty-fifth collection of new poems, are obvious and hardly original: Ashbery is writing more of the same kinds of poems he has been at for decades—short, disjunctive lyrics, fragmentary voice-collages, quirky lists, abortive philosophical tirades, oblique meditations on mortality. He is no longer thinking

Your Face Tomorrow, the enormously ambitious novel in three volumes by the Spanish writer Javier Marías, began seven years ago with a warning: “One should never tell anyone anything.” Not that Marías or his narrator, Jaime Deza, believes this advice—both go on to violate it for nearly 1,300 pages. But that opening remark haunts all that follows. Like so much fiction by Marías, Your Face Tomorrow returns again and again to the moral complications of storytelling: the hidden motives behind the stories we tell; the inevitable inaccuracies of language; the way that just listening to a story can

I cannot recall a book title that was less well-shaped to its subject. Far from being a “skeptic,” Arthur Koestler was a man not merely convinced but actively enthused by practically any intellectual or political or mental scheme that came his way. When he was in the throes of an allegiance, he positively abhorred doubt, which he sometimes called “bellyaching.” If he was ever dubious about anything, one could say in his defense, it was at least about himself. He was periodically paralyzed by self-reproach and insecurity, and once wrote a defensive third-person preface to one of his later novels

In February 1980, just out of his latest stint in California’s juvenile prison system, 19-year-old Kenneth Hartman, drunk and stoned, punched and stomped a homeless man into unconsciousness in a park outside Long Beach. Arrested the following day, Hartman overhears that his victim is dead and enters a new category of criminal: murderer.

About halfway into the process, the jailer told [another officer] I was being booked for beating someone to death. The blanching of the skin, the curious way fear dilates pupils, the slight drawing away: I saw all this for the first time. I felt a surge of

When strolling in an old church or museum, it’s often tempting to sneak into a roped-off section or peek behind a closed door. What, after all, could be hiding from us? Perhaps nothing more than an old broom. For the past twenty-five years, Canadian photographer Robert Polidori has been going behind the scenes at the Palace of Versailles to document periods of restoration and change. The result, nearly five hundred photographs collected in three volumes, is a far more intimate and revealing scene than the curated period set tourists flock to year-round. As a stage for the modern era, Versailles

Few things herald the end of a subculture like the book-length critical study. Yet it’s thrilling to see zines taken seriously in Alison Piepmeier’s Girl Zines, which explores the world of handmade magazines created by women as a kind of social activism. The idea of an academic treatise on “grrrl zines”—grrrl with its triple r referring to the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s—is probably what compels Andi Zeisler, a founder of feminist magazine Bitch, to warn humorously in the foreword that “it can be difficult to talk today about the impact of the medium without giving off a whiff of the . .