You know the story. A young Jewish man preaching in Galilee and Judea accrues a small group of followers. He annoys the Jewish establishment and the Roman occupiers enough to be executed by crucifixion. It is a demeaning and, for the time at least, unremarkable end, but soon afterward, his acolytes claim that his body has vanished from its resting place, and that he has appeared to them in visions. This, they say, affirms his identity as the Son of God.

For a while after this, the disciples and hangers-on of Jesus Christ—who believe that the world as they know it will end in a few months or

On a recent episode of the web series Norm Macdonald Live, Jerry Seinfeld told a joke he promised only Jews would understand. This is a bold claim to make in 2017, after more than a century of shtick and oversharing from the borscht belt to Broadway to Broad City (and those are just the B’s!), small globs of Yiddish rising like schmaltz to the surface of the great melting pot. To suggest that there might be a cultural stone still unturned, some crumb of samizdat humor unknown to the goyim, seems like the kind of provocation that keeps conspiracy-minded anti-Semites up at night, clutching their

“Creating a narrative is a process,” announces Minna Zallman Proctor in “Folie à deux,” the first piece in Landslide: True Stories. This is the kind of silly, self-serious claim about autobiographical writing that would annoy me if it were not delivered with a heavy dose of irony, which, coming from Proctor, it most certainly is. Each of the stories in Landslide is a defiant and gleeful riposte to those who would dare treat narrative as a “process”: the humorless autobiographers and analysts who link sad memory to sad memory in what sometimes feels like a competitive bid for pathos without

The old questions about literature’s necessity in dark times received a new hearing in 2017, and the affirmative case seemed, some feared, a bit harder to make. Who could settle in with a book while the president was probably starting a war on Twitter? And yet it’s apparent that books have remained essential as conversation starters, escape vehicles, and signs pointing to new ways of thinking and living. We asked writers to name their favorite books of the year, a query that resulted in the list presented here—unscientific, informal, and blessedly free of the T-word.

BACK IN MAY, I said (i.e.,

I’d long had it in the back of my mind to write something about Clancy Sigal, which according to my notes I’d provisionally titled “The Man Who Fascinated Women (Writers).” Whatever it is in me that’s drawn to wounded men—and Clancy was a great one of the species—I suspect the fact that Doris Lessing got to this one first, branding him as her property, was no small part of the allure. Clancy and I spoke once on the phone, mostly about his thing with Lessing, but I never followed through. I guess he gave up waiting, since he went ahead and died in July, at age ninety. I don’t think he’d mind