1 BRAIN ON FIRE by Susannah Cahalan. Simon & Schuster. A medical mystery in which doctors struggle to discover why a young reporter suddenly experiences seizures, hallucinations and eventually near ... Read more
When the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author David Mamet released his last book, “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture,” with the Sentinel publishing house in 2011, ... Read more
In 1984, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened its exhibition “ ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” the reception was generally ... Read more
James Herbert, a British novelist who wrote supernatural thrillers and horror stories and whose menagerie of marauding rats, serial killers, evil spirits, ghosts and ghost hunters filled books that sold ... Read more
“If you don’t like someone’s story,” Chinua Achebe told The Paris Review in 1994, “write your own.” In his first novel and masterpiece, “Things Fall ... Read more
Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer who was one of Africa’s most widely read novelists and one of the continent’s towering men of letters, has died after a brief illness, his publisher and agent said ... Read more
Richard D. Lyons, who covered science, Congress and the United Nations during almost 30 years as a reporter for The New York Times, died on Wednesday at his home in Charleston, S.C. He was 84. The ... Read more
LAHORE, Pakistan — Assailed by jihadist attacks and the moral cudgels of religious conservatives, Lahore’s celebrated cultural vitality has waned somewhat in recent years. A famous kite-flying ... Read more
Sylvia Smith — who dropped out of high school at 15, never married, lived most of her life in London rooming houses, never had a great adventure or suffered a great misfortune, and never read books by ... Read more
BEIJING — “I remember we heard a nightingale together, on the boulevard near the Sacred Heart convent. But there are no nightingales in North America.” So wrote Mary McCarthy in “Memories ... Read more