In Los Angeles comedian Moshe Kasher’s first book, the clever vitriol of the performer’s fast-paced stand-up routines meets the vulnerable sincerity of a man who “gave a fuck very much.” His biography, distilled in the book’s lengthy subtitle, The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16, reads like a dayyenu refrain: Any one of these details “would have been enough” for readers to deem the writer’s adolescence both thorny and enthralling. And yet God granted more.

Andrei Rublev, Apostle Paul, ca. 1410. When the center cannot hold, public attention turns to the passionate intensity of those who are destroying it or amusing themselves with its destruction. But what becomes of the public itself in this process—and of citizens’ dignity and prospects? Aristotle considered humans beastly without the sphere of “the political,” […]

Back in 1980, I persuaded the Washington Post Book World, where I was then working as an assistant editor, to launch a monthly column devoted to science fiction and fantasy. For once my timing was just right. During the 1980s, Gene Wolfe produced the four original novels of The Book of the New Sun. John Crowley brought out Little, Big and the first volume of the Ægypt series. Writers with roots in science fiction—J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Ursula K. Le Guin—broke into mainstream consciousness, while mainstream literary figures such as Margaret Atwood and Russell Hoban produced dystopian visions of

The NYPL Picture Collection In the opening pages of Pity the Billionaire, Thomas Frank sounds like he’s reporting on the protests against Wall Street during the fall of 2011. He describes the uproar that spread through the country in the years after a stock-market bubble burst in America’s face, a moment in which unemployment is […]

Hans Keilson’s story is one worth telling and retelling. The German-born doctor and writer’s years hiding from the Nazis in the Netherlands, his membership with the Dutch resistance during the Second World War, and his groundbreaking work as a psychotherapist dealing with the treatment of trauma in Jewish children after the war are all fascinating topics—all the more so when you realize that he did these things in the first half of his 101-year life (he died in 2011). And somehow, during all of this, he found time to write books. In 2010, FSG released two of Keilson’s novels, 1959’s

In 1948, his first year of teaching at Black Mountain College, John Cage gave a lecture on Erik Satie, at the time a little-known French composer. To make his point about Satie’s significance, Cage weighed him against a composer who needed no introduction. “Beethoven was in error,” he said, “and his influence, which has been as extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music.” All that could be said of the German composer is that his legacy was to “practically shipwreck the art on an island of decadence.” In Indeterminacy, Cage recounted Satie’s remark that

When Anis Rushdie read his son’s novel Midnight’s Children for the first time in 1980, he became convinced that Ahmed Sinai, the drunken father in the book, was a satirical portrait of himself. A family row ensued. Rushdie fils did not deny that Sinai was based on his father—“In my young, pissed-off way,” he would later tell The Paris Review, “I responded that I’d left all the nasty stuff out”—but he objected to his father’s wounded reaction and thought it revealed a crude understanding of how novels worked. “My father had studied literature at Cambridge so I expected him to

IN A RECENT TIME magazine profile, the renowned German artist Gerhard Richter confessed his admiration for John Cage, particularly the composer’s famous dictum on poetry, “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.” Cage substituted silence for actual notes, and Richter, in recent works of epic reproduction, substitutes multiplication for brushstrokes. Nowhere is this more in evidence than the artist’s book Patterns, a dizzyingly intense exploration of one of his works, 1990’s Abstract Painting (724-4). Richter digitally divided an image of that artwork a dozen times (then split those divisions in 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128,

In 1999, on the eve of the massively hyped release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, J. Hoberman, at the time the lead film critic at the Village Voice, used the occasion to ponder George Lucas’s enormous influence on the movies. Hoberman’s reflections were fraught with unease: Rather than carrying on cinema’s function—perhaps even its duty—of preserving a photographic relationship to real events and performances, Lucas had initiated cinema’s move into the digital realm, where any image could be endlessly manipulated or even invented from whole cloth. “Infinitely malleable, digital imaging does not share photography’s indexical relationship to

Whenever I take a bath, I am faced with a question: To read or not to read? Of course, bringing printed matter near water is always a risk. But the reward—a transcendent moment of absorption in both liquid and text—is usually too large to forgo. And so, I have ruined numerous books and magazines, from issue after issue of the Economist to my grandfather’s first edition of Architecture without Architects.

Let us say that you are a Mexican reporter working for peanuts at a local television station somewhere in the provinces—the state of Durango, for example—and that one day you get a friendly invitation from a powerful drug-trafficking group. Imagine that it is the Zetas, and that thanks to their efforts in your city several dozen people have recently perished in various unspeakable ways, while justice turned a blind eye. Among the dead is one of your colleagues. Now consider the invitation, which is to a press conference to be held punctually on the following Friday, at a not particularly