The grotesque is central to much of Spanish novelist Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s work. After witnessing horrifying political violence in Latin America and his native Spain in the early years of the 20th century, Valle-Inclán developed the style he called esperpento, which sought to bring out “the comic side of the tragedy of life.” In works of esperpento, reality is contorted until actors come to physically resemble the unwholesomeness of their actions. Evil isn’t so banal when seen though Valle-Inclán’s eyes. Valle-Inclán set the standard for his invented genre with Tyrant Banderas, a novel about

Former President of Iraq Saddam Hussein’s first appearance in the historical record occurs in 1959, as a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored would-be assassin of Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim. Years later, Hussein, after becoming Iraq’s president in 1979, would commit a number of the same missteps that finally led to Qasim’s downfall: threatening Kuwaiti sovereignty, alienating Iraq from its Arab neighbors, and not making the country’s oil reserves more accessible to Western nations. Hussein missed (literally: he was one of the triggermen) in his attempt to kill Qasim. But after

Near the end of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood recalls how her mother, mortified by Esther’s recent stay at an asylum, recommended they simply carry on as if nothing—the fits, the hallucinations, the suicide attempt—had ever happened. “Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them,” Esther thinks. “But they were part of me. They were my landscape.”

Unlike Esther, New York Post reporter Susannah Cahalan says she remembers almost nothing of her terrifying brush with madness, but she’s no less haunted by it. Using evidence gathered from interviews,

Barack Hussein Obama was re-elected president of the United States on Tuesday, overcoming powerful economic headwinds, a lock-step resistance to his agenda by Republicans in Congress and an unprecedented torrent of advertising as a divided nation voted to give him more time.

The Occupy protests of 2011 successfully transformed the issue of income inequality from an under-acknowledged condition into a national problem. This is a victory that has eluded labor unions, progressive activists, and liberal Democrats for over forty years. It is an admirable and, in some ways, very inspiring achievement, given the slapdash, decentralized, and rambling nature of the Occupy encampments.

Despite these accomplishments, I think you can be committed to the cause of economic justice without being enraptured with the Occupy protests. In fact, in some cases, analysis of the protests

J. J. Sullivan finds most of Nicholson Baker's new essay collection agreeable and praises many of the essays, admiring Baker's ability to "snatch little impressions in the chopsticks of his prose." But what to make of Baker's argument about pacifism and World War II?