When mass demonstrations began erupting throughout the towns and cities of Egypt three years ago, there seemed to be no author more inappropriate to the moment than the late Albert Cossery. A legendary advocate of idleness and enervation, his writing felt totally at odds with the energy and euphoria of the protests on Tahrir Square. “Reading his novels amid the exhilaration of the uprising, Cossery seemed irrelevant or, happily, wrong,” reflects Anna Della Subin, who found herself in Cairo that winter with a pile of old, dusty copies of his books. And yet, that was more or less the exact moment

What is it about writing with no chapters and no paragraph breaks that is so intimidating? Why do we miss those gaps of white space on a page when they aren't there: those little tabs at the beginning of a paragraph, the textless paper at the end of a chapter? No matter how big a Faulkner or Thomas Bernhard fan you are, it's somehow never a welcoming sight to open a new book to find (gulp) an unbroken wall of text waiting for you.

The novelist Thomas Rayfiel has been working just below the radar on some strange and wonderful projects over the years. He has an uncanny talent for convincingly

In All That Jazz, director Bob Fosse’s sort-of-autobiography, Fosse cast Roy Scheider as sort-of-himself: a philandering, bearded, black-clad, hairy-chested satyr of the ’70s, a Penthouse personal ad come to life. Relating his life story to Death (Jessica Lange), he finds she’s the one woman he can’t bamboozle. That’s a bamboozle, too, because as we learn in Sam Wasson’s new biography, Fosse, even when this moment of truth arrives, it’s just more show business.

Fosse’s remarkable body of work onstage and on-screen as choreographer and director includes Sweet Charity, Cabaret, Pippin, Chicago

In the spring of 1947, when German-émigré film scholar Siegfried Kracauer published his groundbreaking history of Weimar cinema, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, theater critic Eric Bentley accused him, in the pages of the New York Times, of being “led into exaggeration” by hindsight and pursuing a “refugee’s revenge.” It’s true that Kracauer, who barely managed to flee Nazi-engulfed Europe on one of the last ships to leave the port of Lisbon, had some difficulty retracing the course of German cinema in the period between the wars without recalling the horrors

The Communist experience, Vivian Gornick wrote in her classic oral history The Romance of American Communism, is “a metaphor for fear and desire on the grand scale, always telling us more—never less—of what it is to be human.”

Now more or less confined to the historical imaginary, that romance lives on, travestied with appropriate fear and desire (and shock and awe) in Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens, and writ strategically small in Eleanor Antin’s comic girlhood memoir Conversations with Stalin, slyly named after the 1961 book that landed Communist dissident Milovan Djilas back in a