Few now remember boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, except perhaps as Jake LaMotta’s shadowy nemesis in Raging Bull. But through the middle of the twentieth century, Robinson was an American icon of dangerous power expressed with deft artistry and a gentleman’s demeanor outside the ring as well as in it. Millions of people hung on the broadcasts of his bouts. When he fought in Europe, he was hailed as royalty. In 1951, his smiling face filled the cover of Time magazine. Women swooned before him. Men dressed like him. Cassius Clay studied him. In his long, bright day, Sugar Ray was

In the summer of 1967, subscribers to the obscure far-left theoretical journal Socialisme ou Barbarie received notice that it was suspending publication and that its sponsoring organization, familiarly called SOUB, had dissolved. This cannot have come as too great a shock. Two years had passed since the last issue. But the shuttering of SOUB marked the end of an important collective project within the anti-Stalinist left, one whose influence was felt well beyond France.

A teamster in Pennsylvania awakes to find his wagon atop a barn. A sign reading CAKES AND BEER FOR SALE HERE appears over a minister’s door in Virginia. Men are led from one New York saloon to another by the promise of letters from friends in California, though no such letters exist.

However you feel after finishing Amy Bloom’s new collection of stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, you certainly won’t be at a loss to answer the question implied in its title. The action takes place, by and large, in living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens. Conversations prickling with decades of regret happen at the sink, as one speaker washes and the other dries. Reluctant lovers on long, slow collisions finally accept the inevitable in front of the television, with Greta Van Susteren supplying background music. Even when Bloom does send her characters off-property—to bars, to hospitals, to

Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas should be required reading for anybody considering a PhD in the humanities, especially now that the recession is driving more and more people into the supposedly safe haven of graduate school. In less than 200 pages, Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, examines the history and evolution of American higher education, and makes the case that the American university is suffering from a deep-seated institutional crisis that has grown rapidly more dire since the 1970s.

In March 1974, Warren Beatty and director Hal Ashby filmed Shampoo. Set on Election Day 1968, it’s a sex farce about a Beverly Hills hairdresser, George (Beatty), bedding his client list while trying to get investment money to open his own salon from a husband he’s cuckolding, Lester (Jack Warden). While Shampoo was in postproduction, Watergate undid Richard Nixon, and Ashby made sure to feature him prominently on televisions and radios—though no character even thinks of voting—to comment on the newly chastened era in which the film’s audience was living. Sending up not only Nixon, the easy target, but how

Early in Jonathan Dee’s fifth novel, The Privileges, wealthy stay-at-home mom Cynthia Morey plays poker with her two young children, equipping them with sunglasses and bandanas to shield their faces from giving away their hands. When she notices one of her Manhattan neighbors—apparently confused by the sight of two children dressed like unabombers—staring into their window, Cynthia chastises the woman for her nosiness. She punctuates the outburst by saying, “Our family rules!”

Mark Gluth’s The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis is a short novel with a fractured narrative structure, but it is also a complete and awe-inspiring text, offering an acute and moving portrayal of grief’s powers. Opening with a disquieting scene about the reclusive writer of the title, as she is working on her final story, the book sets the stage for what it then becomes: an enchanted network of artists, tragedies, reveries, and mise-en-abymes built from a raging desire to rewrite mortality. Each page evokes the traumatic nature of loss and the stunning fact that life goes on when others