The debate about whether women can “have it all” has aged only slightly better than stock photos of women in skirt suits with babies on their hips. Yet the questions at the heart of that worn-out conversation are freshly animated in Ariel Levy’s new memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply. Levy defines “it all” as not simply “a career and a family,” but a woman’s ability to live her life exactly as she wants to. “We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising,” she writes. “We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged

The unusually striking photograph on the cover of Mary V. Dearborn’s new biography Ernest Hemingway shows the writer in his prime in 1933 sitting on the cushioned stern of a boat, possibly his thirty-eight-foot cabin cruiser the Pilar, and aiming a pistol at the camera. He always carried guns on board to shoot sharks or, when bored or annoyed, seabirds and turtles. He was thirty-four when this photo was taken and he had recently discovered Key West and the fabulous Gulf Stream with its gigantic marlin, sailfish, and tarpon. He fished and fished and fished, insatiable. There were the heroic

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

SOUL OF A NATION: ART IN THE AGE OF BLACK POWER (ARTBOOK DAP/Tate, $40), the catalogue for a recent show at Tate Modern in London, covers a period, from the early 1960s through the early ’80s, when Black Power exhibitions proliferated in the United States. Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley’s volume is an impressive feat of research, presenting and contextualizing many artists who never became household names. Alongside the well-known photographs of Roy DeCarava, we see a fuller history of the Kamoinge Workshop, including rich gelatin silver prints by Louis Draper, Anthony Barboza, Al Fennar, and Beuford Smith—to name just