THE COVER OF TARYN SIMON’S newly reprinted 2008 monograph, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, is unlikely to catch any casual viewer’s eye. Bound in nondescript gray cloth, with its title inscribed in gold lettering over a black background, the book looks like a volume of an encyclopedia or a legal periodical. But […]

Dozens of murders liven up Judith Flanders’s omnibus of Victorian crime. But the real villains of the piece aren’t the poisoners and bludgeoners and throat slitters and dismemberers; they are, rather, the police, investigators, lawyers, coroners, judges, and journalists who pursued these malefactors. As Flanders describes it, crime and punishment in nineteenth-century Britain was a parade of inept investigations, suppressed or contaminated evidence, travestied courtroom proceedings, and botched executions.

Isaac Julien, Still Life Studies Series, No. 1, 2008, color photograph in light box. IN THIS AMBITIOUS SURVEY, editors Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer tell a story of increasing visibility for every permutation of homosexuality in visual art, making a case for the importance of queer culture in art history. Queerness contains multitudes, of course, […]

Unheard melodies are sweeter, proposed John Keats, and Craig Dworkin, it seems, can only agree. In his new book, No Medium, Dworkin, a poet and critic who has been among the most active proponents of “conceptual poetry,” treats silent scores and mute records, books with blank pages, white canvases, erased drawings, and other such “foster-children of Silence and slow Time.” He considers, among many other works, Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings” of 1951, Aram Saroyan’s untitled 1968 publication of a ream of blank typing paper, and Tom Friedman’s 1,000 Hours of Staring, 1992–97, an unmarked sheet of paper whose title, as

In China, any unmarried woman over twenty-seven is considered a spinster, or a “leftover woman,” to translate the Chinese phrase more literally. “Do Leftover Women Really Deserve Our Sympathy?” asked the headline of an article that went up on the website of the All-China Women’s Federation shortly after International Women’s Day in 2011. “Pretty girls don’t need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family, but girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult,” the piece read. “These kinds of girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The

The wish to be taken care of or looked after past the childhood years, to have our basic needs administered to without great exertion on our part, is not one, or so it seems to me, that is much addressed outside of the therapist’s office—or, perchance, the rehab culture, where such primal longings get articulated by way of a dependence on drugs and alcohol. For the rest of us, who secretly yearn to have someone to help us lace up our shoes in the morning, like Julian English does in John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra—or, more generally, to have our

There exists a long, passionate, and somewhat batty tradition of writerly appreciation for feline ways, its entries cropping up among the serious work of many otherwise serious people. In The Informed Air (New Directions, 2014), a new collection of Muriel Spark’s criticism and occasional prose, Spark joins the chorus with a paean to her own cat, Bluebell. Spark is known for her novels, not her nonfiction. Yet in this volume’s frequently short and sometimes oddball selections, drawn from the full arc of her career, Spark’s precision and wit are much on display. “Ailourophilia,” too, is funny—but not only that. The

There are three decent books about the World Series of Poker. Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town recounts the first World Series held at Binion’s in Las Vegas in 1981—a ragtag gathering of clever cowboys jousting with one another for bragging rights. James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street captures the breaking wave in 2000, when the poker fad was expanding exponentially, the cowboys were sliding back into the foamy soup, and the bourgeois techies and digital corporations were rising into ascendancy. The book under review here, Colson Whitehead’s The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death (Doubleday, $25), presents the