True believers want to reclaim Parker from a now deeply degraded image, emphasising instead the dare and complexity of his music. This is a gamble when many fair-weather fans tend to shut down at the first mention of flattened fifths and roving thirteenths. Biographers first have to explain the tradition Parker emerged from—solo improvisation within a many-handed ensemble music—but also show Parker’s own itchy, wasp-sting style as the fruit of one vulnerable life, no other.

Chang-rae Lee’s new novel On Such a Full Sea takes its title from a line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which the traitor, Brutus, refuses to believe that fate trumps free will: “On such a full sea are we now afloat / And we must take the current when it serves / Or lose our ventures.” Lee’s protagonist, named Fan, draws on a similar sense of purpose in the face of an outcome she seems all but destined to meet.

In Promise Land, Jessica Lamb-Shapiro recounts her efforts to conquer one of her multiple phobias by attending a support group called Freedom to Fly. The group’s course, led by a psychologist, met at the Westchester airport and culminated in a round-trip flight to Boston. Lamb-Shapiro secretly had no intention of boarding the flight, but she ultimately mustered the nerve, thanks in part to peer pressure and the charismatic leader. The decisive influence, however, was chemical rather than social. “I had often wondered if taking a pill would prevent me from thinking I was about to die on a plane or

When the writer and painter John Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972—for his novel G., about sex, loneliness, a failed revolution, and the imminent devastation of the First World War—he rather famously donated half of his award money to the Black Panthers. On the political spectrum of his day, Berger’s action outraged the right and the left alike, the former for giving any cash at all to a band of militants, the latter for holding back the other half. A few months ago, the novelist and critic Geoff Dyer retold this story, off the cuff, at the start of

A totemic novella of Modernism and alienation, Franz Kafka’s “bug piece” has been in publication for nearly a century, baffling and delighting readers in equal measure with its fundamental strangeness and rigorous avoidance of explanation. In our present era, marked by a ferment of genetic engineering and hybridization (not to mention isolation and economic hardship), revisiting this text seems not only appropriate but necessary. This welcome new edition of The Metamorphosis was translated by Susan Bernofsky in a smoother, less Germanic, more contemporary voice than the Muir version most Anglophone readers remember from school, and is introduced by the master

Flannery O’Connor’s readers either revere her fiction because it’s immersed in the mystery of Christianity or admire the work in spite of this. A Prayer Journal will naturally be embraced by the first group. But the book should also appeal to those who find this writer’s concern with “the action of grace” a puzzling aesthetic curiosity—because the prayer journal is also the journal of a writer scouting her own cosmology and beginning to discern its grand and peculiar design in her art.

The cover of Michael Deibert’s examination of Congo bears a striking image of a young woman in flip-flops playing the cello in a bleak, grubby yard surrounded by a bleak, grubby city. She focuses on the notes on a sheet music stand, seemingly oblivious to the potholes and grime and rain-bellied clouds overhead.

A child from the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem community in Dimona, Israel, 2005. A few years after she graduated from college, Emily Raboteau received a phone call from Tamar Cohen, a close friend from childhood. Cohen had relocated to Israel, and she longed for a visit from one of her oldest friends. Over the […]