In his 1929 essay “Will Talkies Abolish the Theater?” Luigi Pirandello offered a provocative reading of cinema (and defense of the stage) when the younger medium was at a pivotal moment. “The greatest success to which film can aspire, one moving it even farther along the road toward theater, will be to become theater’s photographic and mechanical copy, and a bad one at that. Like all copies, it must arouse a desire for the original.” What stoked Pirandello’s criticism of film was the introduction of sound—he wrote the essay after seeing The Jazz Singer, the first talkie, and not long after

A fan of Alan Hollinghurst’s masterpiece The Line of Beauty has created a Twitter account, @lollinghurst, to document the many epigrams and sly jokes and thrillingly acute descriptions found throughout that novel. These “lines of beauty” don’t just serve to decorate the book; they are the book. “His lips quivered and pinched with the sarcastic alertness that was his own brand of happiness.” “He felt victimized, and flattered, pretty important and utterly insignificant, since they clearly had no idea who he was.” In The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst evokes inner states and interior decor with

There’s a food truck that roams Manhattan, offering a Belgian waffle piled with bananas, strawberries, chocolate fudge, and whipped cream called the WMD—the “Wafel of Massive Deliciousness.” That WMDs can now be casually vended around the city signals the end of one era and the beginning of another. We’re still in the midst of indefinite war, but September 11 is no longer the center of our civic life, and the memory of it, like a kidney stone in the national consciousness, is being pulverized and passed, in cultural remnants, here and there. The activist books are still being written, but the

Since the turn of the century, the New Yorker has mentioned the German writer W. G. Sebald on seventy-seven occasions and devoted six longform articles to his ouevre. During the same period, Sebald’s contemporary Alexander Kluge has been named in that magazine only twice: once in reference to his films, not his novels, and another time to mention one of his works of theory—and only in the online edition. Why have two writers of such similar gifts, similar tastes, and—in Germany—equal stature, found such different receptions in the English-speaking world?

It may simply be that Sebald, unlike

The narrator and (barely) protagonist of Lynne Tillman’s smart and sleightful novel—her first since American Genius, A Comedy (2006)—is one Ezekiel H. Stark, a cultural anthropologist who specializes in vernacular photography. He’s a playful invention, given to citing highbrow or avant-garde culture—“We worked in silence. John Cage scored with it.”— and then undercutting himself with passé slang: “Kidding. Not.” In his earnest, academic, sometimes awkwardly demotic fashion, Zeke outlines his personal-professional interests in self and image, the inward oddness of family life, and wider cultural

Some things can exist only on the verge of nonexistence. Like the novel, moribund since its inception—and like God, abidingly vulnerable to heresy and debunking—Berlin has always teetered toward death. It had died and died again by the time I moved there in 2012, when everyone said it was over.

But news of its demise hadn’t reached me, and my first weeks in the city were raw with stupid excitement. I seemed to live on trains: shuffling from one to the next, squinting at maps threaded with lines and knotted with stations, confused when the Strassenbahn, or street train, slouched under the