Ernest Jones had the urge to stand out. A small man, he learned early how to make himself visible through his bearing, his clothes, his mannerisms. And he learned how to distinguish himself—no ordinary Jones, he!—through the quality of his voice and intensity of his gaze. By the time he finished his medical studies and began a specialization in neurology, in 1902, he seemed poised for professional success and could boast of his "flair for rapid captivation of the opposite sex." But Jones could also be abrasive if not boorish, and he soon discovered that he was not very popular among his more

Most startling in the wealth of John Stubbs's new life of John Donne is that the subject of the biographer's attentions spent a very long time trying to escape his poetic fate. Even late in his life, according to Stubbs, Donne was fending off his literary inclinations like so many pesky acquaintances. He complained about having "this itch of writing" and told a friend that he wanted to follow "a graver course than of a Poet, into which (that I may also keep my dignity) I would not seem to relapse." When he did give in to his urges, his poems (which were often bawdy) were for friends only, and

Chance May Crown Thee

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Is there anything SHAKESPEARE didn't say? Settle your bets with the new Modern Library edition of the complete works. It comes out just two days after Abrams Books releases Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet, an illustrated guide to muscled melancholy, and Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, a tale of star-crossed lovers and their flowy, well-drawn hair. . . . If plays could write, perhaps SAMUEL BECKETTS's Endgame would tell of its journey to London for its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre fifty years past. The playwright had wanted to put it on in France but couldn't

While ferociously pious, Jonathan Edwards was also way into metaphysics. Thanks to Jeremiah Dummer's gift of five hundred volumes, which began making their way into the Yale library in 1714, the undergraduate Edwards enthusiastically discovered Descartes, Arnauld, Locke, and—most crucially for Joan Richardson's A Natural History of Pragmatism—an edition of Isaac Newton's Opticks (1704), which Edwards read time and time again. From the repetition of Samuel Clarke's Latin translation of Newton's English version of Opticks, Richardson finds etched into Edward's later sermonic rhetoric a prismatic

"You know, all my life, my favorite kind of story is one that starts early in the 20th century, and then works its way on down toward modern times." Kim Deitch, both the author of and a protagonist in Alias the Cat, explains exactly where he intends to take us in his latest book—and more than delivers. A revered underground cartoonist whose work is steeped in the lore and traditions of early animation, Deitch draws loopy, crowded, psychedelic stories that start where the Fleischer brothers' Betty Boop and Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat left off and add in sex, money, greed, paranoia, and other