These days, comic-book enthusiasts are often portrayed as somber scholars, and feminists get caricatured as obsessive eccentrics—so it’s natural to wonder when, exactly, the world went topsy-turvy. A mere glance at photos of suffragettes marching proudly in the streets in 1917 can incite a feeling of liberation vertigo: Where did the last century go? Women’s rights entered a swirling comics-style time tunnel and emerged looking more like a fanatical hobby. Meanwhile, creating superheroes was transformed from a down-market, and definitely obsessive, side project into a handsomely rewarded higher

MOYRA DAVEY, best known as a photographer, is also a writer. Since the early ’90s, the self-described homebody has taken the precariousness of the everyday, often outmoded objects in her life—dusty records, books, hi-fi gear—as a primary subject of her art. In this volume, she extends that inquiry, examining just how elastic the category of “autobiography” can be. Pairing excerpts from writings by (and about) Jean Genet with her own thoughts on keeping a journal, Davey also integrates several recent color prints, all of which document her belongings, travel, and diurnal activities. As in her

Some sixty-five years after Dada first shook the stage, David Byrne debuted his own dadaistic twist on the limits of cognition: “Facts are simple and facts are straight . . . facts don’t do what I want them to.” One place where facts often don’t do what one wants them to is in a biography, where the simple narration of events is not enough to bring a subject to life—where, as Byrne says, “facts are living turned inside out,” from palpitating existence to dry recital. To a large extent, that is the problem with TaTa DaDa, Marius Hentea’s biography of Tristan Tzara, Dada’s front man and master

John Cage’s avant-garde compositional procedures, which value chance and avoid deliberate meaning-making, have had nearly universal application in the arts—in painting, poetry, and, especially, dance. In Story/Time, a collection of performance texts and lectures that reckon with the composer’s influence, the renowned choreographer Bill T. Jones describes a 1972 encounter in tones of awe. More than the music itself—“the sounds were of nature in constant interactive flux with electronic drones, whirring, whines, tweets, and scraping metallic noise”—what impressed the young drama student was Cage’s