Becky Zhang: “The Precipice” is set at a private all-girls school in Los Angeles in the Nineties, but is written from the ...

At that moment we somehow knew that it was the beach where the artist, with a perfect taste for drama, for a great story, for a piercing ray of light, had met his end. His signature might have been ...

On a hot day last June, near the shores of Lake Suwa, in the mountains of central Japan, hundreds of spectators gathered around an earthen stage roughly two feet high and two dozen feet wide. The ...

is a writer based in Berlin.

From The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy, out in February from Dutton. Leon Trotsky’s whitewashed study, which abutted his simply furnished bedroom, was ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...

During the worst romance of my life, I often fantasized about holding a funeral for the relationship. Over time, I worked the fantasy out in detail: I had picked a location and imagined congregating ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

Chuck Berry: An American Life, by RJ Smith. Hachette. 432 pages. $32. By the time Chuck Berry had his breakout hit “Maybellene” in the summer of 1955, he was already nearly thirty years old, with ...

Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in U.S. and Mexican Culture, by Oswaldo Zavala, translated by William Savinar. Vanderbilt University Press. 206 pages. $34.95. The Dope: The Real History of ...

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies, by Paul Fischer. Simon and Schuster. 416 pages. $28.99. On the morning of October 14, 1888, Louis Le Prince set ...