At the climax of Mila 18—the late Baltimore-born novelist Leon Uris’s epic retelling of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—a fat and bumbling SS minion is dispatched to negotiate with the leaders of the Jewish resistance. “So you are a superman,” a Joint Jewish Forces commander sardonically inquires as the Nazi cowers, feeling “inept before the lean, black-eyed young Jew who could obviously rip him to shreds.”

Exhaustively researched and sweeping in scope, the beloved 1961 novel contributed immeasurably to awareness of this historic revolt, whose seventieth anniversary is this month. But more than

Since the Cold War, there have only been two reliable ways for a Russian intellectual to get noticed in the United States. One is being a dissident with charisma and sufficiently nonthreatening political views. The other is writing poetry or literature of such austere depth that it makes American literary culture seem shallow and comfortable. (Even better would be, like Brodsky or Solzhenitsyn, having a little bit of both.) The two are not, despite appearances, at odds. The arcane poets and political misfits both draw on and contribute to a deep-seated set of stereotypes about Russian literary

The term egghead has mostly been retired to the Hall of Lost Insults, hung up alongside Poindexter and gomer in the “Making Fun of Nerds” section. But as Aaron Lecklider's surprising history Inventing the Egghead shows, the figure of the unworldly and fragile genius showed up across postwar popular culture, in comic pop songs, science fiction, television, and the theater. Lecklider demonstrates how the suddenly omnipresent and mockable egghead was a creature of its time, born of postwar anxieties over Communism, gender roles, and race.

Has a novel ever been more aptly titled than J. M. Ledgard’s Submergence? From the opening pages, we’re reminded relentlessly that “submergence,” “submersion,” “sinking,” “diving,” and “descent” are very much what this painstakingly crafted book is about. It’s a thematic obsession that ties together philosophical synopses, historical anecdotes, essayistic meditations, two central characters, and three interwoven plots. Submergence is plainly a novel of grand ambitions—a brooding, atmospheric spy tale that wants to say something about science, religion, and destiny. Unfortunately, it too often

Of all the things one can portray in a movie, marriage is surely not the most titillating. It can’t possibly hold a candle to sex or violence—or some lurid combination of the two—and is an equally tough sell against horror, slapstick, sci-fi, romance, or the western. “Embrace happy marriage in real life,” director Frank Capra once remarked, “but keep away from it onscreen.” And yet there have been a great number of films, from the silent era until today, that have defied Capra’s warning and compellingly depicted one of the world’s most enduring institutions. (Capra himself offered a fiendish

Speak, memory: “Nan’s pussy got damp but not soaking wet,” the musician Richard Hell recalls late in his new autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp. “It was slick, like a squeaky rubber duck.” There are many shivery, illicit pleasures in this louche memoir of bygone bands and lost downtown haunts, including the author’s anatomically vivid, clinically surreal descriptions of past conquests. Hell writes of meeting—in a late-’60s poetry class taught by José Garcia Villa—a “sad, hysterical girl with red capillaries on her nose and cheekbones, and large breasts that looked like twin