David Gates

He was a music legend and a legendary oddball. Now that he's gone, perhaps we can finally answer the question: who was Michael Jackson?

Like old friends and favorite haunts, some books reward revisiting.

Bob Dylan reinvents himself (again) on album No. 33. Some fans will love it. Us—we're still not sure.

Everything you need to know about literature's most misunderstood girl, including her real name

An author of infinite erudition who found artistic and moral value in simply registering his dread.

Critic James Wood wrote the book on how to write a book—and how not to.

In a new history of Niagara Falls, a natural wonder is reshaped by man—and its surroundings become a toxic wasteland.

Peruvian-born tenor Juan Diego Flórez, 35, sang "La Fille du Régiment" at the Metropolitan Opera last week, and was cheered wildly after the showpiece aria "Ah!

John R. Brinkley was a dangerous quack—and a cultural change agent.

In the arts, the march of progress has reached its destination. Happy now?

Like most NEWSWEEK writers, I'm a quick study. Somebody dies whom you know a little about, you take a couple of hours to eke out familiarity with solid fact, and you kick in the piece.

These short Samuel Beckett plays go from hopeless to more so. No reason you can't have a good time.

With the death of writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, the once-rollicking world of the New York intellectual is a diminished, lesser place.

Postmodernist Donald Barthelme's posthumous revival gets a little help from friends old and new.

In Todd Haynes's film, one Dylan's not enough.

The times they were a-changin', but in the arts only music kept pace.

From the 1890s until he died in 1963, Robert Frost wrote down ideas, homemade aphorisms and fragments of poems. As one of his jottings says (God knows in what context), "I reel them off with one brain tied behind me." As you'd expect of a man who fetishized plainness, he used cheap spiral notebooks and flip pads and school composition books.

Remembering the brilliant poet Liam Rector—master administrator, showman, rigorous wild child and splendid hipster.

Philip Roth puts his longtime alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, out of his misery. Roth won't miss him—he's on to the next—but what about us?

Ken Burns's in-your-face documentary on World War II revisits the battlefield and home front of yesteryear. But for viewers, the subtext will inevitably be today—and Iraq.

Junot Díaz's first novel is worth all the waiting.

Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" gets the full 50th anniversary treatment next month, and both cheerleaders and hand-wringers acknowledge that it radically changed American culture—somehow or other.

Since the news broke that the Chicago White Sox had thrown the 1919 World Series, has the sports world had a nastier week? Or should we forget even that qualification?

Jane Austen probably can't compete yet with Shakespeare or Dickens—and certainly not with the Bible—for the greatest number of adaptations, tie-ins, tchotchkes and other epiphenomena.

Evelyn Waugh considered P. G. Wodehouse the greatest comic writer of his time: that would be from 1900, when he sold his first magazine article, to 1974, when his last book came out. (He died a year later, at 93.) And Waugh predicted that his determinedly escapist stories and novels "will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own." Right on both counts.

An artist dies, the work's on life support. Should the living make it get up and walk?

Seven years after his debut, the award-winning story collection "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges," Nathan Englander has finally published a second book.

Seven years after his debut, the award-winning story collection "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges," Nathan Englander has finally published a second book.

It's hard to imagine why Kurt Vonnegut was called a "pessimist" or a "cynic." He lived through three quarters of the worst century ever and saw enough of the next one to know it was already shaping up as a contender.

"The head takes the longest to burn; two little blue flames flicker from the eyeholes ... the entire process lasts twenty minutes—and a human being, a world, has been turned into ashes." A Polish Jew named Zalman Gradowski wrote this account of what actually happened, step by step, in the gas chambers and crematoriums of Auschwitz, where he'd been sent in late 1942, along with seven members of his family, including his wife and mother.