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

Andre Agassi’s Open was a groundbreaking memoir for a tennis player when it came out in 2009. The writing had verve and pop, as Agassi (and ghostwriter J. R. Moehringer) opted to tell his odyssey in the present tense, as if reliving every drama. And the confessionals along the way felt truly revealing. Agassi presented himself as a lost man: “I open my eyes and don’t know where I am or who I am,” reads the first line, bringing to mind a tennis-pro Gregor Samsa. We follow him from an intimate vantage point: crying in the shower, enduring militant training

Remember the story of Dumbo the elephant? It comes to us by way of two of America’s greatest storytellers, P. T. Barnum—whose “Jumbo the Elephant” was the star of “The Greatest Show on Earth”—and Walt Disney, who made “Jumbo Jr.” (Dumbo’s original name) world-famous in his retelling of Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl’s classic children’s book. After Dumbo gets drunk and passes out, he awakens to find himself dangerously high above the ground, frightened and stuck in the branches of a tree. Timothy Q. Mouse, the circus impresario who is Dumbo’s only friend, convinces him that all he needs to

On a recent episode of the web series Norm Macdonald Live, Jerry Seinfeld told a joke he promised only Jews would understand. This is a bold claim to make in 2017, after more than a century of shtick and oversharing from the borscht belt to Broadway to Broad City (and those are just the B’s!), small globs of Yiddish rising like schmaltz to the surface of the great melting pot. To suggest that there might be a cultural stone still unturned, some crumb of samizdat humor unknown to the goyim, seems like the kind of provocation that keeps conspiracy-minded anti-Semites

“Creating a narrative is a process,” announces Minna Zallman Proctor in “Folie à deux,” the first piece in Landslide: True Stories. This is the kind of silly, self-serious claim about autobiographical writing that would annoy me if it were not delivered with a heavy dose of irony, which, coming from Proctor, it most certainly is. Each of the stories in Landslide is a defiant and gleeful riposte to those who would dare treat narrative as a “process”: the humorless autobiographers and analysts who link sad memory to sad memory in what sometimes feels like a competitive bid for pathos without

The resolute, earnest, and somewhat wistful grandmother whose byline is attached to What Happened (Simon & Schuster, $30) comes across in its pages as someone you’d love to have over to binge-watch The Crown on Netflix, enjoy meeting up with to see Bruce Springsteen on Broadway, or trust with your small children for a long afternoon as you deal with an unexpected emergency. Only the most credulously stubborn, or stubbornly credulous, of readers could come away from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s loser’s-lounge testament believing her to be the malevolent dark angel of Far Right and extreme-Left fantasies.

“This is the Seinfeld cookbook,” Mike Solomonov explained to me earlyish one morning not too long ago. “It’s about nothing.” We were standing in the original Federal Donuts shop, which he and four partners opened in the low-slung, residential, and decidedly uncool Pennsport neighborhood of South Philadelphia in 2011. Sunlight streamed in through a plate-glass window emblazoned with the company’s red rooster logo, and the smells of sugar and coffee and hot fat were in the air. Steven Cook, one of Solomonov’s partners and a cofounder of CookNSolo Restaurant Partners, the pair’s mini empire of Philadelphia eateries, was behind a