Had the filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino been born a few decades earlier, he’d have enjoyed widespread Stateside buzz. His 2008 Cannes prizewinner, Il Divo, would’ve been an art-house smash, and this year he would’ve done still better, with the Sean Penn vehicle This Must Be the Place. Nowadays, however, European film must glean the leftovers outside the multiplex, as even a figure like Almodovar struggles for US distribution. Small wonder, then, that a creative spirit like Sorrentino has turned his back on success as defined by the Industry—even in his first novel, Everybody’s Right. The narrative’s experimental, its plot helter-skelter, its

Desire is a question to which there is no answer, yet much of the time it’s the only question that matters. “Love . . . makes one little room, an everywhere,” wrote John Donne. Death, in its not-so-different way, does the same. The place of one’s final heartbeat is immense, or so it seemed to me at age eight when I inadvertently became sole witness to a murder.

A haunting is a doorway into the private history of place. Such is the idea of Corinne May Botz’s compelling collection of photographs (and accompanying oral narratives) from eighty allegedly haunted houses, which includes mostly private residences, like the one above from Orange County, Virginia, as well as a few legendary sites like Edgar Allan Poe’s home in Baltimore and Alice’s Grave on Pawleys Island, South Carolina, where people (including Botz) have seen Alice’s ghost, said to be searching for her engagement ring. Nineteenth-century spiritualists employed photography as a medium to the afterlife, and in her fine and literary introduction

Modernist America is by no means the last word on its subject, though not for lack of trying. Richard Pells’s book leaps, lunges, gallops, and, once in a while, pirouettes its way toward something very close to a unified field theory of twentieth-century American culture by charting its intersections, polarities, eccentricities, and, most conspicuously, impact on the world at large. This epic of ideas encompasses a cavalcade of mercurial personalities—dreamers, cranks, tinkerers, promoters, troublemakers, deep thinkers, and obsessive-compulsives—moving across Pells’s grand stage as if they were making guest appearances on a very special pre-millennial edition of The Ed Sullivan Show,

Jealousy may be the closest a sane person can get to the experience of psychosis. I’m referring to the kind of florid, full-blown jealousy that strikes poor, enraged Leontes in The Winter’s Tale—a jealousy that leads to complete ruin. It is sometimes confused with envy, but the difference is fundamental: With envy you want to possess what the other person has—money, power, beauty, fame—whereas with jealousy you want to possess the actual person. Its true cousin is paranoia; both are anchored in a kind of warped, iron-clad logic. The thrill of jealousy, like that of paranoia, is that every sign

In the late Renaissance, many northern Europeans came to Italy in search of a world of natural wonders. The Swiss Hebraist Caspar Waser reported in 1593 to a friend in Basel that he had visited everything from Jewish printing houses in Venice to Roman sites outside Naples. But he dwelled on the natural philosophers whose thrilling museums he had seen: Ulisse Aldrovandi in Bologna and Giambattista della Porta and Francesco Imperato in Naples. Waser gaped at their magnificent collections, the shelves stocked with shells, fossils, monstrous fish, and Siamese-twin animals, the ceilings hung with everything from starfish to crocodiles. He

While Steve Pyke’s early photographs of philosophers featured white backgrounds, this latest collection favors a black backdrop, a decision that sets Arthur C. Danto, in an otherwise fine introduction, astir: “I prefer the black. The faces and figures are shown against the white but emerge from the black. . . . It heightens the sense that the philosophers here make an appearance from another space and luminously hover in the viewer’s space.” What fun would Richard Rorty have had with that gaseous bombast, which hails the philosopher as if from some supernatural realm. In Rorty’s absence, however, Pyke’s fine volume

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker stakes out a boldly optimistic view of the world, at a time when his readers are no doubt processing all kinds of bad news. Straining at the bigger picture of the trends afoot in human history, Pinker argues that violence is at an all-time low today—and human rights, social equality, and gender egalitarianism are at all-time highs.

In 1961, Wesleyan University Press published a set of “Lectures and Writings” by John Cage called, simply, Silence. “It’s the book I’ve reread most often in my life,” writes the composer-critic Kyle Gann in his illuminating foreword to the 50th anniversary edition. I know exactly what Gann means: With each rereading, Silence seems as charming and challenging as ever, but also somehow different — not quite what we thought it was. In the sixties, it was Cage’s “scandalous” ideas that were most influential: his rejection of melody and harmony (indeed, all traditional elements of music) and his declaration that “there