Edgar Degas, a master at capturing ephemeral moments, found his perfect medium in monotypes, the subject of EDGAR DEGAS: A STRANGE NEW BEAUTY (Museum of Modern Art, $50). The process—applying ink or oil paint to a printing plate then transferring the image to paper using an etching press—makes the prints malleable until the last moment, granting the artist great freedom to spontaneously experiment. They are well suited to creating a sense of motion, atmospheric effects, and stark contrasts between darkness and light. Degas, who was not formally trained in printmaking, took advantage of these capabilities in figurative work between 1875

Why do we turn on art in general or pick a particular art to denounce? In the case of the distinguished French author Pascal Quignard, hatred grew from the ashes of love. In The Hatred of Music, this former devotee decries music as a once-glorious art now degenerated into a torturous surround sound that deserves only contempt (and La Haine de la musique, originally published in 1996, appeared five years before the advent of iTunes). The ten theses that make up his erudite diatribe proceed by way of clipped readings of Biblical passages, classical texts, feudal fables, and obscure etymologies.

One of the inevitable advantages that Liz Garbus’s recent documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, has over the book of the same name by Alan Light is its mesmerizing footage of Nina Simone in performance. The most arresting scene shows Simone playing at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. Framed in an intimate close-up, Simone has just begun a hushed rendition of the Janis Ian song “Stars” when she suddenly lifts her right arm from the piano and extends it accusatorially toward the balcony. “Hey girl,” she chides an unseen audience member. “Sit down. Sit. Down.” She waits. And then, once the

To the historian Henry Adams, his grandmother Louisa was an exotic creature of delicacy and charm decidedly out of place among the founding family of American Adamses. Her dour husband, John Quincy Adams, was the sixth president of the United States; her peevish father-in-law, the second. Unlike them, Louisa Adams had been born in London, and rather than grim or frizzled, she looked as though she’d stepped out of a pretty painting by George Romney. Presiding over the breakfast table, among the teacups and the silver pot, Louisa Adams revealed nothing of her inner life, and for a very long

Photos of Netley Lucas in Prince of Tricksters show a slender, pleasant-looking young man, sort of halfway between Eddie Redmayne and a young Hugh Grant. The images of Lucas linger—one at his desk, seemingly hard at work, one from a wanted poster, another from the Police Gazette, still another seated in a chair, hands folded in his lap, looking for all the world like a respectable British man of letters. They are all haunting and more than a bit disturbing.

Since we live in an era of compulsory self-disclosure, there’s no way I can avoid confessing that I read Kristin Dombek’s short book, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, in a frenzy of narcissistic injury. The reason is that for the past several years I myself have been working fitfully on a short book about contemporary narcissism (maybe I should say had been working on), except that I kept writing myself into corners and putting it aside. Still, in my own mind I owned the subject, or at least I owned the book-length essay on

The title of disco scholar Tim Lawrence’s new book has taken on a more ominous overtone following the massacre at the nightclub Pulse in Orlando. Of course, the grim reaper alluded to in Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983 is not a homophobic terrorist but a disease, AIDS, which scythed a deadly swath through the cast of characters in this absorbing history: performers and artists such as Klaus Nomi, Keith Haring, and Arthur Russell, to name only a few casualties. But Lawrence also means “life and death” in a less literal way: He identifies in club