The keen catalogue CONSTANT: SPACE + COLOUR; FROM COBRA TO NEW BABYLON (NAI010 Publishers, $40) inadvertently bathes the utopian artist Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920–2005) in a surprising light. It assiduously contextualizes his mildly bold, tidily irregular paintings, his three-dimensional wire and unusual-for-their-time Plexiglas constructions, and his visualization of “unitary urbanism” (a total human habitat where “life is a game” that merges “the science fiction of social life and urban planning”). Situationist International cofounder Guy Debord christened Constant’s plans for better-living-through-poetry environments “New Babylon,” though Constant didn’t stick with the Situationists for long. There is an affirmative, even (shh!) utilitarian spirit to

My first experience of Angela Carter was The Sadeian Woman, her 1979 belletristic defense of the Marquis de Sade as a moral pornographer and protofeminist. Titillating, brilliant, and clearly deviant, it was a perverse introduction to an alchemy of postmodern theory and frankness I didn’t know possible. At twenty, I heavily underlined assertions like this one:

They saw dead people. They heard them too. When summoned, dead people rang bells, wrote on slates, levitated tables. Sometimes their faces hovered in the air. The dead made this commotion for their parents, children, siblings, and friends at the behest of gifted individuals capable of readily communing with the world beyond. If the movement associated with this phenomenon, known as spiritualism—which was popular to varying degrees from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century—now appears a quaint relic of a benighted past, we should consider the vigorous currency of aura reading, crystal healing, and psychic consultations. These descendants of

THE VIVID DESCRIPTIONS of human suffering in Dante’s Inferno have long attracted visual artists. It’s no surprise that Sandro Botticelli, Gustave Doré, William Blake, Auguste Rodin, and Salvador Dalí all tried their hand at depicting the Italian poet’s demonic landscape. That dark world is rich in dramatic occasion (“an old man, his hair white with age, cried out: / ‘Woe unto you, you wicked souls’”) and irresistibly pictorial (“These wretches . . . / naked and beset / by stinging flies and wasps / that made their faces stream with blood, / which, mingled with their tears, / was gathered

Take it from hedge funder Florian Homm, now a witty fugitive who appears in Lauren Greenfield’s Generation Wealth (Phaidon, $75) hanging out with his bounty hunter pal and his bodyguard: “What you’re sold in this world is a bag of rotten goods. The striving for more and bigger will never, ever lead you to the right place. All of us are following a dream, a toxic dream.”

There are fifty-five thousand drawings in Frank Lloyd Wright’s archive. Even for an architect so famously aeonian and prolific—he worked ceaselessly from his early twenties until his death, in 1959, at ninety-one—this seems like a suspiciously high number. The inescapable conclusion is that Wright himself created only some fraction of these images. But then who drew the rest? It is often impossible to tell. Making a building is a complex undertaking, and architecture is by nature a sprawling, conjunctive practice. Wright worked with dozens of students, employees, consultants, and collaborators over the years, and their output, too, ended up in