Though the term genius is used rather promiscuously, few comics merit the label as much as Richard Pryor did. He was masterful—a truth teller, an incisive social critic, a man who opened up a great deal of the black experience to a general audience. He also plumbed his own personal experience with a flair for self-deprecation that could be as discomfiting as it was funny. Onstage, he hid little of himself: While performing at a gay-rights benefit in San Francisco, Pryor startled the crowd by declaring, “I’ve sucked dick … and it was beautiful.” Then, after inviting them to “kiss my rich happy

The playwright and the novelist may try to share the same skin, but historically, they haven’t made a good fit. The signature case would be Henry James, all but bankrupted by his work in theater. Going the other way, David Mamet has published two novels that generated nowhere near the excitement of his plays. So just picking up Mira Corpora, the debut novel by the New York dramatist Jeff Jackson, you fret for this still-young talent. He’s with the Collapsible Giraffe company, a group that combines imaginative experiment and philosophic inwardness. The Times listed their Botanica among the “

Janet Maslin was not thrilled about having to review Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries. The book is "long and demanding," and it "isn’t invested in its characters." Catton may have won this years Man Booker Prize, but the New York Times critic is not impressed.

My favorite character on Boardwalk Empire, Eddie, Nucky Thompson's obsequious Prussian bagman, killed himself because FBI agents used personal information to coerce him into collaborating against his beloved Nucky. After a Pilsner-fueled night of fraternizing with other German ex-pats (and Al Capone’s brother), sweet old Eddie was picked up by US agents. They held Eddie at an offsite location for 12 hours, offered no lawyer, and harshly interrogated (tortured) him, but still—Eddie did not crack!

But after the G-Men make some calls back to the Fatherland, they threaten to send Eddie back to

When, in 1910, a dozen Romanian Jews set out to cultivate a plot of land next to a marooned Arab village in Palestine, their mission seemed suicidal. But that bewildering act laid the foundation for the socialist utopia of the kibbutz, or collective farming community, examples of which would soon sprout all across Israel. Within a century, the country boasted over two hundred and fifty kibbutzim. Though their members only ever accounted for about five percent of the Israeli population, the kibbutzim’s cultural influence was outsized—they were hailed as the “army of Zionist fulfillment,” their

In Nelly Reifler’s new novel, we’re introduced to a diminutive protagonist with a good heart and a robust furry belly. A widower, and, yes, a mouse, H. Mouse loves his two daughters, Susie and Margo, with a profound and sometimes melancholy adoration. His campaign for State Judge, based on his generous philosophy that “we are, each of us, born in a state of grace and innocence,” has strong public support. In darker moments, though, when his past slips out from the shadows, it is hard for H to include himself in his belief “that no matter what someone may do, even if it causes great harm, it is