Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, by Graham Allison. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 400 pages. $16.99. Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is in Jeopardy, by George Magnus. Yale ...

At that moment we somehow knew that it was the beach where the artist, with a perfect taste for drama, for a great story, for a piercing ray of light, had met his end. His signature might have been ...

The rules of Japan’s national sport are relatively straightforward: two rikishi—literally, “strong men”—face each other near the center of the ring, crouched on their haunches, like plus-size ...

Though they already live alone, Vigdis Hjorth’s narrators often feel that they need to be even more alone, to retreat from city life altogether, to a place where there is no risk of running into their ...

From The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy, out in February from Dutton. Leon Trotsky’s whitewashed study, which abutted his simply furnished bedroom, was ...

The speaker of “Danse Russe,” William Carlos Williams’s oft-anthologized poem, gyrates naked before his mirror, singing, “I am lonely, lonely. / I was born to be lonely, / I am best so!” Good for… ...

Becky Zhang: “The Precipice” is set at a private all-girls school in Los Angeles in the Nineties, but is written from the perspective of a woman in the present looking back on that time in her life.

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I ...

On a clear October day, I walked to the continent’s edge. I had arrived in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, encased in metal, first in a plane that brought me across the country, then in a rental car ...

EXT. 8TH STREET—LATE AFTERNOON (C. 1959). CAMERA IN NONSTOP MOTION is on the shoulder of a young man, late teens, intently walking west on a busy Greenwich Village thoroughfare. Under one arm, he’s ...

Let’s start with a wicked little paragraph. Guy Debord chose to kill himself the old-fashioned way; Jean-Luc Godard—“the dumbest Swiss Maoist of them all,” in the words of the amusing ...

In 1974, my mother was twenty years old, trying to make it as a theater actress in New York after dropping out of Bennington College. She was in a painting class led by the eccentric Ukrainian-Jewish ...