Researchers have discovered that swearing when in pain or making a titanic effort to lift something, relieves discomfort and increases strength. It’s great for anxiety and tension, too. Read more
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Sinclair Lewis captured the narrow-mindedness and conformity of middle-class America in the first half of the 20th century. On the 100th anniversary of his best-selling novel “Babbitt,” Robert Gottlieb revisits Lewis’s life and career. Read more
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A historic London home once occupied by the Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad—whose novella “Heart of Darkness” inspired the 1979 epic film “Apocalypse Now”—is on the market for £1.7 million (US$2.3 million). Located in the city’s upscale Pimlico neighborhood, and a short walk from Victoria Station, the property spans 1,206 square feet over four stories, with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Read more
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The poignant and searching debut from Gorman, the youngest presidential inaugural poet in U.S. history, goes beyond the inauguration poem to consider the larger role of history, struggle, and hope in American lives. Read more
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At last, in “Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell,” journalist, biographer and Kansas City resident Steve Paul has constructed a meticulous, intriguing, and long-overdue appraisal of a talent deserving of wider attention. Read more
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The Book Review’s art director picks his favorite covers from a year that reminded him of the joys of picking up a book and holding it in his hands. Read more
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If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own. Read more
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For party guests in 19th-century London, Charles Dickens appearing with his punch bowl was the Victorian equivalent of a modern host breaking out his acoustic guitar. Whether his guests were ready or not, it was showtime. Read more
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Joan Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the New Journalism, and whose novels “Play It as It Lays” and “The Book of Common Prayer” proclaimed the arrival of a tough, terse, distinctive voice in American fiction, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87. Read more
Dallas, Schutze argues in The Accommodation, has always been “much more Southern, with stronger roots in slave culture,” than most residents know or care to admit. His book traces how the city’s white “business oligarchy” was able to achieve a relatively smooth transition into legal desegregation during the Civil Rights era — it’s an oft-cited source of civic pride that Dallas in the 1960s avoided the racial unrest of cities such as Little Rock and Los Angeles — while finding “informal ways to maintain actual and total separation” of the races into the present day. Read more
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