When Der Brand, Jörg Friedrich's best-selling history of the Allied bombings of German cities during World War II, was published in Germany, in 2002, it unleashed a firestorm. For some, the notion that the British and American air campaigns against cities like Dresden, Hamburg and Essen constituted a new and atrocious war, utilizing weapons of mass destruction and targeting civilians rather than industrial centers, is problematic in itself. But Friedrich's harrowing descriptions of the incineration of men, women, and children—a story that aligned his book with other taboo-confronting efforts

Here’s how I read Mallarmé’s prose, in Barbara Johnson’s lustrous new English translation: painfully, dutifully, passionately, a sentence at a time, while holding the French original in my other hand, so I can compare her sentence with his sentence, and so I can measure as accurately as possible each crevice where an adjective meets a noun, a comma meets a dependent clause.

Mallarmé published Divagations (a collection of essays and other highly compact prose implosions) in 1897 and died the following year. English-speaking aficio­nados of Symbolist rarities have relied on Mary Ann Caws’s

In the small Pennsylvania town where I grew up, the windows of the Gap, the national purveyor of affordable and non-threatening attire, are papered over and a to lease sign has been posted. But across from this empty storefront, Hot Topic is booming. Discordant music pours from an arched entrance meant to resemble a dungeon, and the red-and-purple-striped tights and silver-studded jewelry here sell for double the price of khakis and blue button-downs. That goth attire flourishes while more mainstream options languish is a cultural phenomenon on which academics have finally set their sights—with