While the history of WWII is common knowledge, fewer people are aware of what happened in Europe right after the armistice was signed. In his new book, Keith Lowe, the author of two novels and a well-received account of the bombing of Hamburg in 1945, delves into the four years immediately following the war, and what he finds isn’t pretty. Much of Savage Continent reads like a non-fiction version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Chapters are devoted to, among other subjects, physical destruction, famine, moral dissolution, and revenge against collaborationists. Only one chapter, on hope, interrupts

“It is rather inspiring,” writes Peter Schjeldahl in the New York Times, “that in an hour of political crisis this art (despite its makers’ eschewal of revolutionary postures) has arisen to make possible a project like 112 Greene Street.” The year is 1970. The place is Soho, until recently known as the South Houston Industrial District. Here an unemployed artist can buy a six-story cast-iron ex-rag-picking warehouse, and huge chunks of sheet-zinc cornice can lie abandoned on the sidewalk at a demolition site until another artist bribes the garbage men to drive them to his studio. Sculptor

The opening scene of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way is one of the most famously difficult to get through in literature. That’s not because of its style, which is sublime, but because it describes the experience of falling asleep. Many susceptible readers nod off the first few times they attempt it. All writing about sleep has this problem; of the fundamental human appetites, it’s the least exciting. The better you invoke it, the more likely you are to incite it, and because it can’t be remembered, sleep can’t be described.

The first rule is that there are no rules. Anything I might say about or against the derivation of movies from great works of literature is gainsaid by what’s at the top of my all-time-top-ten list, the adaptation of King Lear, by Jean-Luc Godard (and, high on the list that follows it, of younger filmmakers’ greats, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz). And, of course, some of the very best filmmakers, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, have made a lifetime’s work of literary adaptation. That said, the practice—which has burst into the headlines again with the news that Baz

The Internet, originally known as ARPAnet, was first constructed for specialized use by educational and government professionals, but when the idea took off, the small infrastructure could not handle the sudden explosion of users. So in the 1990s, private companies built huge amounts of their own Internet infrastructure, mostly across a few locations in the United States and Europe. Wired journalist Andrew Blum’s first book, Tubes, is an entertaining travelogue that takes him through these sites—from Silicon Valley conference rooms to Oregon datacenter warehouses to ships laying underseas

The writer Emma Straub has 9,192 Twitter followers. That might seem like a lot for an author whose first novel, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, hasn’t even come out yet. But Emma Straub is really good at Twitter. She’s funny and charming and evinces great enthusiasm for the books and stories of the fellow authors and critics in her social sphere. Outside of Twitter, Straub writes for many bookish publications, she's the daughter of the novelist Peter Straub, and she runs a small design outfit with her husband that's made posters for everyone from Passion Pit to Jonathan Lethem.