
In Cold Blood
In 1959 two ex-convicts murdered a Kansas farm family of four they had never met. Capote spent years with the killers and turned reporting into a novel, patient and entirely without comfort.

In 1959 two ex-convicts murdered a Kansas farm family of four they had never met. Capote spent years with the killers and turned reporting into a novel, patient and entirely without comfort.

Waiting outside a Leningrad prison with a parcel for her son, Akhmatova was asked whether she could describe this. Requiem was the answer. Her love lyrics have the same merciless exactness.

Sontag's charge against criticism: pulling meaning out of a work is a way of not experiencing it. She wants attention paid to surface and speed, and asks for an erotics of art instead.

Named executor of an ex-lover's estate, Oedipa Maas keeps finding a muted post horn on bathroom walls. Either a secret postal system has run under America for centuries or she is unraveling.

Two minor courtiers from Hamlet wait in the wings of a play they cannot follow, flipping a coin that lands heads ninety two times running. Stoppard wrings comedy and dread from their helplessness.

Mustafa Sa'eed sailed north to London and left ruined Englishwomen behind him, an African answer to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Arab writers voted it the century's most important novel in Arabic.