The fat kid who plays the French horn. The mentally stunted drug dealer. The suck-up, runner-up for valedictorian. The boy who lights his fart into “a magnificent plume of flame…a cold and beautiful enchantment that for an instant bathes the locker room in unearthly light.” These are a few typical characters from Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies, a sprawling homage to adolescence, string theory, roofies, wet knickers, and unrequited love. Set in Ireland at the Seabrook Catholic School for Boys, the book features a cast of fourteen-year-olds who have populated classrooms for centuries.

“On the day I turned twenty-five,” Julia Wertz tells us at the beginning of “Drinking at the Movies,” her charming graphic memoir, “I came to consciousness at 3 a.m. in a twenty-four-hour Laundromat in Brooklyn, New York, eating Cracker Jacks in my pajamas. … To understand how I got there, we need to go back one year… “

In 1943, Hannah Arendt reviewed the memoirs of Stefan Zweig, one of the leading literary figures of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Like the vast majority of those figures—the playwrights and journalists, psychoanalysts and art collectors who made the Austro-Hungarian capital perhaps the most sophisticated city in the world—Zweig was Jewish. But this Jewish golden age was always haunted by the pervasive anti-Semitism of Austrian society, and it ended, of course, in catastrophe.

At the heart of Danielle Dutton’s Sprawl is a lavish, endless list of domestic objects: water pitchers, sweaters, cakes on cake stands, petunias in a terra-cotta pot. Borrowing techniques from both fiction, poetry, and visual art (particularly photography), the book not only infuses each object, be it a juice glass or a paper napkin, with a Vermeeresque glow but arranges it into part of a verbal still life. The result? A fresh take on suburbia, one of reverence and skepticism.

A decade ago Emily Fox Gordon made her debut with “Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy,’’ a memoir developed from an essay included in her fourth and latest book, “Book of Days: Personal Essays.’’This new collection of her work over the intervening years is stunning, not only in the precision and beauty of the language, but also in the author’s willingness to revisit events in her life — even ones she’s already written about — and to change her mind about them. Though each essay stands alone, the book as a whole traces the path of a

We may take Milan Kundera for granted, but in his new collection of essays, the author casts an undeniably powerful spell—even if you have no previous knowledge of the artists that he discusses.

The excruciating inter­regnum between the dying of print prosperity and the rise of minimally commensurate digital profits is a huge story, and the version playing out at The Washington Post has been singularly dramatic. So is it really a good idea to send in a sportswriter to report on it?

People frequently asked James Baldwin: “Was being born black, gay, and poor a ‘burden’?” “No,” he’s respond. “I thought I’d hit the jackpot.”

Great political movements start from the ground up. A group of citizens, faced with a government they find corrupt or unethical, take to the streets and march through their cities, sowing grassroots dissent through speech, writing, discussion and art. Great rabblerousers have shifted the direction of nations because of a firmly held conviction that the prescribed route is simply wrong.

Few threads have disappeared so completely into history’s loom than the story of Joseph Force Crater. A graduate of Columbia Law and a darling of Tammany Hall, Crater rose swiftly in the avaricious milieu of Jazz-Age New York politics; by the time then-governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Crater to the New York State Supreme Court in April 1930, the once-upstanding young jurist was awash in chorus girls and shady business deals. Vacationing in Maine that summer, Crater was called back to New York on a mysterious errand

One day in 1927, Buster Keaton spent forty-two thousand dollars to film a locomotive engine rush across a burning bridge and plunge into a river. The climax of his great Civil War adventure film, The General, it was the most expensive single shot in the medium’s history to date. Like the industrialists who produced the trains and steamships he loved, Buster Keaton knew how to spend money. His greatest achievements—Steamboat Bill, Jr. , The Navigator, Sherlock, Jr. —were almost always his most expensive ones as well.