There’s little relief to be found in Roxane Gay’s riveting debut novel, An Untamed State. No air in the madly hot room Mireille Duval Jameson is forced to live in for thirteen harrowing days. No sense of self as her armed kidnappers erase every boundary she tries to preserve. No escape from the polarized economic realities of Port-au-Prince that resulted in her situation in the first place. Mireille, the US-born-and-raised daughter of a self-made Haitian construction magnate, was kidnapped in front of the family estate in Port-au-Prince to extract a $1 million ransom from her wealthy father. But Sebastian Duval,

Ellen Willis, whose music writing recently received a much-deserved revival, was often drawn to the counterculture, progressive politics, and how the two overlapped. In this essay, originally published in 1989 in the Village Voice and reprinted in the new book The Essential Ellen Willis, she dwells on feminism, the concept of excess (sex and drugs), abstinence, gay rights, parenthood, and AIDS. Willis often finds her stride in complexity, and here she intricately examines and interrogates the notions of freedom she holds dear. Do all liberation movements set you free? Do conservative ways of life always result in constraint? It’s a

I’ve long admired Lynne Tillman’s criticism. Her writing is founded on curiosity and deep feeling. It’s precise and imaginative, devoid of jargon or cliché. It’s the opposite of what I dislike in criticism, and I know I’m not alone in my appreciation of what she does. “What she does” is hard to pinpoint, though, and the title of her new collection is a good-natured fake-out for all of us who might look to her as a model for how to live—or just how to write.

Academics might be forgiven for losing sight of just how pampered they are. Their young audiences, bullied into alertness by strict grading systems and the knowledge that their parents have forked over vast sums to secure for them the privilege of listening to digressive theorizing on a given subject, rarely make for what’s known as a “tough crowd.” Students are expected to stifle their boos and eye rolls in the face of the most excruciatingly dull lectures, and to refrain from questioning the strange assumption that convoluted academic analysis always presents the best opportunities to solve the world’s puzzles and

It’s been forty years since John Ford passed away, but filmmakers continue to wrestle with his legacy. The directors of three recent Oscar contenders—Django Unchained, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty—are a case in point. Quentin Tarantino, accused of gross insensitivity by Spike Lee in portraying slavery as material for a spaghetti western, deflected Lee’s charge by damning Ford’s westerns (still the genre standard) as true racism. “Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies,” said Tarantino. “It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity.” Django Unchained’s direct Oscar competition,

Arianna Huffington is a person with quite a few moments. She relays one at the beginning of her fourteenth book, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (Harmony, $26).