Written by J.R.R. Tolkien as a book for children, The Hobbit is widely regarded as a prelude to the darker and more complex Lord of the Rings trilogy. The One Ring that is the focus of The Lord of the Rings, and which threatens to destroy Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth, is first discovered in The Hobbit by the protagonist Bilbo Baggins. The true nature of the ring is never revealed in The Hobbit — it is depicted simply as a magic ring that conveniently endows Bilbo with the ability to become invisible.

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I am terrified that everything I believe about photography, about this work, is over because of the computer and easy manipulation of images it facilitates. This work was always about reality, the hard truth, and there was never any artifice. I have always believed that my photographs capture a moment that is real, without setting anything up.

Later, she continues:

Now, it is so distressing: no one any longer believes that a photograph is real. Almost every time I give a talk or teach, I ask this question about truth and photography. If all but four or five in an audience of two hundred artistic people don’t believe that photographs are true, then what does that say about the rest of the world? So this eliminates the larger reason for having done this book — not for me, but if nobody believes it as having happened …what is the point? The belief that a photograph can be True has become obsolete.

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AT OVER 500 POUNDS, the title character of Michael Kimball’s Big Ray is too big to fit in most chairs so he usually sits on the floor. After he dies, his son remembers that the only way Big Ray could stand up was “in stages”:

He needed to hold on to something he could push or pull — a door, a chair, or another piece of furniture. Then he would roll over onto his side and up onto his knees while pushing or pulling his upper body up. From his knees, he would get one foot flat on the ground and then the other foot. [...] Once his legs were under him, he could raise his upper body until he was standing upright.

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With a single song, Susan Boyle, a 47 year-old Scottish nobody, became an internationally famous somebody, prompting humorist Andy Borowitz to pen the headline “Talented, Ugly Person Baffles World.” But anyone who knows the musical version of "Les Misérables," from which Boyle took her song, knows her overnight success was more a product of the right singer picking the right song at the right time. In the show, “I Dreamed A Dream” belongs to Fantine, a fired factory seamstress forced into prostitution as a last resort. Her final song is a remembrance of her youth, when her dreams for a beautiful life seemed achievable. Fantine’s “What a Life I Could Have Known,” and lyrics like it were obviously applicable to Boyle, a middle-aged woman with learning disabilities who, for most of her life, took care of an ailing mother. Her unselfishness and amazing turn in fortune (she is now a recording artist with three best-selling albums) fit the novel that preceded the musical.

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WHEN LES MISÉRABLES ARRIVED on Broadway in 1987, New Yorkers came to the theater ready to cry. Pretty much everyone knew someone young who was dying or dead, usually after terrible suffering. The death toll was growing exponentially, with no relief in sight. Outside the theater district, a certain heartlessness pierced the air. AIDS gave every bigot an ostensible reason to despise gay men. Reaganomics was well underway, and cities were dealing with unprecedented numbers of the homeless as mental health facilities lost their funding and threw patients onto the streets. On Wall Street traders were indulging their new love of junk bonds, which fueled an October stock market crash. The scales of wealth and misery were not yet at the tipping point, but we were at the point where we could imagine a tipping point, like the one depicted in Les Misérables.

It was the right musical at the right time.

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The novel, which until this point has been flatlining through page after page of perfunctory-seeming scenes of Susan being angry at herself for not mourning her late husband enough, suddenly perks up as the reader thinks: What a great place to set a novel. Then, for another hundred pages or so, it becomes clear that this weird old house full of dead animals isn’t so much the setting for Millet’s novel as a distressingly accurate metaphor for the experience of reading it.

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As far as neighbors went, the sex workers were fine — quiet, courteous, not prone to cooking stinky tofu. The few times my clothes fell from the bamboo poles used to dry laundry in China, they saved the garments for me until I could make the trek downstairs to retrieve them. We didn’t share an entrance, though a window in the back of the parlor opened onto my stairwell, and on my way home on hot nights I would see the women brushing their teeth. (Even the room that doubled as a kitchen and bathroom glowed fuchsia.) As the years passed I rarely had reason to think about the brothel. But it remained a difficult thing to explain to overseas guests, invariably evoking one of those questions about China that evade any quick, pat answer.

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Despite the fact that the film focuses on a short period of time in Lincoln’s presidency and deals primarily with the political cut and thrust associated with the passage of the 13th Amendment, there is a real sense in which the film can be described as deeply philosophical. Lincoln is portrayed as a man of discipline, concentration, and energy, all characteristics that sociologist Max Weber defined as part of the serious politician’s vocation. By forging an effective and realized political character — one aspect of Weber’s definition of charismatic authority — an astute politician can change the nature of power in society. By controlling his all-too-human vanity, he can avoid the two deadly political sins of lack of objectivity and irresponsibility. For Weber, a certain “distance to things and men” was required to abide by an “ethic of responsibility” for the weighty decisions that leaders are often required to make.

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That there is an inherent theatricality to the presentation shouldn’t be surprising. Levy is a noted playwright, the author of Macbeth — False Memories and Honey Baby Middle England, among others. The swimming pool serves as the main stage — a platform for arrivals and departures, bee stings, skinny dipping, misunderstandings, and menstruations — and there is a French country house attached to the pool where more intimate moments unravel.

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There’s something so New York about this — as New York as the Ramones, really. New York City offers up inimitable cultural experiences along with an inimitable self-regard for those experiences, like gazing out a window at an expanse of beauty while keeping one eye fixed on your own reflection in the glass. “You weren’t there” is hipness accumulating at the expense of generosity.

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At over 1,000 pages, The Executioner’s Song is considered by many to be Mailer’s best book, a Pulitzer Prize winning “true life novel” depicting the 1977 events surrounding the parole, release, and execution of Gary Gilmore by the state of Utah for murder. Mailer relied extensively on notes, documents, letters, and interviews with both the family and friends of Gilmore and his victims, bestowed to him by the part visionary, part promotion-opportunistic machine of a man, Larry Schiller.

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BACK WHEN TRACK AND FIELD was a popular spectator sport, my dad used to take me to Madison Square Garden to watch the Millrose Games in the dead of winter. Invariably, he would nudge me and point to an elderly gentleman in black tie standing in the infield.

“There's Abel Kiviat!” he'd exclaim. “Your grandfather knows him. He was the best.”

Kiviat was then in his 80s, a shrunken gnome with bowed legs. In his prime, just before World War I, he was a top-rated distance runner. He held the 1,500-meter world record and took the silver medal at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.

Family lore has it that Kiviat and my grandfather worked as counselors at the same summer camp. Later, as cogs in the judicial system, they would stop and chat in the marbled hallways of the state and federal courthouses.

The connection transcended the personal: Abel Kiviat was a Jew. This was of supreme importance to our family because so few Jewish athletes succeeded at the elite level. Those who did — the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax being the prime example — acquired a distinctive aura. Kiviat and Koufax were the real Chosen Ones, SuperJews, able to whip the Goyim on their AstroTurf.

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Philip Roth saw it coming in 2010, when he expressed concern that the “multiple screens” vying against the novel were causing its decline: “The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence, all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people's reach anymore.” So did Michiko Kakutani, who wrote at length about the subject in her seminal essay “Texts Without Contexts,” that same year, exploring how “most emailed” lists and social media shares were causing writers to pander to audiences. Kakutani posed the question, “Are literary-minded novelists increasingly taking into account what their readers want or expect?”

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Alfred is the guide. He’s a marine turned gangbanger turned entrepreneur. He’s cracking Inner City Jokes. His phrase. We don’t need the windows open cuz we don’t do drive-bys. Also, we can’t have them open because the bus is air-conditioned. He’s hired three other guys to help lead the tour — ex-gang-members who had trouble finding other jobs with felonies on their records. They’ve turned their experiences into stories for travelers. They are curators and exhibits at once. When they’re not giving tours, they’re doing conflict mediation in the communities these tours put on display. The $65 will fund this work.

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God has particular languages, and one of them is music and one of them is mathematics.

— David Foster Wallace, The Boston Globe, 2003

TO THE EXTENT THAT HE WAS AT HOME anywhere, David Foster Wallace was at home in the world of math. As an undergraduate, he studied modal logic; Everything and More, his book on infinity, explained Georg Cantor’s work on set theory to a general audience, and Infinite Jest includes a two-page footnote that uses the Mean Value Theorem to determine the distribution of megatonnage among players in a nuclear fallout game.

But Wallace didn’t just talk about math. He structured his work with it. In a 1996 Bookworm interview with Michael Silverblatt, Wallace explained that he modeled Infinite Jest after a Sierpinski Gasket, a type of fractal in which a triangle is infinitely subdivided into smaller triangles using the midpoint of its borders. Pressed by Silverblatt on why he chose such a formation, Wallace elaborated: “Its chaos is more on the surface; its bones are its beauty.”

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“The Bad Thing.” I like this phrase because the state it describes doesn’t deserve a more nuanced name. The Bad Thing is not nuanced. The Bad Thing is a compassless darkness; it is the bottom of a foul deep well whose view of sunlight exists only to taunt. But even as I say this I know it’s too poetic. There’s nothing poetic about depression. This is why, most of the time, it’s no fun to read about. No matter how gifted the writer, nothingness — not the philosophical kind, but the experiential — is not much of a subject..

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Russell Pool for "House Beautiful" 1951

If, while watching the sun set on a used-car lot in Los Angeles, you are struck by the parallels between the image and the inevitable fate of humanity, do not, under any circumstance, write it down.

— Fran Lebowitz

LONG AGO, IN A TIME OF PEACE and relative innocence, I decided that I would like, very much, to be a writer. At that time, I was just a person who wrote stuff; a swell hobby and a fine way to pass the time while everyone else worked, but what I really wanted was to get paid to write stuff. Besides the obvious fiduciary benefits of such an arrangement, I was most interested in the title it confers. “Writer” would provide identity and security. “Person who writes stuff” provided only stomach pains.

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