David Gates

While reading journalist Ann Hagedorn's "Savage Peace," a wide-ranging, information-rich, sometimes frustrating study of the United States in 1919, you can't help thinking you'd even prefer to live in 2007.

Before she died in 2004, Susan Sontag mapped out what would be her last book of essays. (Not her last book—as always, she just wanted to get back to fiction.) Some planned pieces never got written, and she didn't have a title.

Before she died in 2004, Susan Sontag mapped out what would be her last book of essays. (Not her last book—as always, she just wanted to get back to fiction.) Some planned pieces never got written, and she didn't have a title.

Finn," by first-time novelist Jon Clinch, seems like your usual standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants contraption. Its main character is Huckleberry Finn's alcoholic father, who cuts such a scary figure in Mark Twain's novel.

Last month the New York Times took note of the half-dozen pages of bibliography at the end of Norman Mailer's forthcoming "The Castle in the Forest," recalled recent novels similarly equipped and, with a spin of the Rolodex, confected a controversy that must have lasted hours.

It's been almost 40 years since james brown gave the most overwhelming concert I've ever attended, or ever will. On April 5, 1968, he played the Boston Garden--less than 24 hours after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

It's been almost 40 years since James Brown gave the most overwhelming concert I've ever attended, or ever will. On April 5, 1968, he played the Boston Garden—less than 24 hours after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

It was a bum year for the publishing biz, dignity wise. In January, James Frey went on Oprah to admit fabricating parts of his bestselling memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." In December, the family who'd sheltered the young Augusten Burroughs spoke publicly at last (in Vanity Fair) to accuse him of fabricating parts of his best-selling memoir, "Running With Scissors." (Burroughs denies it.)There was more.

In the 1940s and '50s, serious jazz listeners loved her almost as much as they did Billie and Ella. At the most fearsome tempos, her singing and scatting sounded relaxed, and she swung like mad.

If you watched the rebroad-cast of PBS's "Eyes on the Prize" last month, you might want a look behind the footage. In their new book, "The Race Beat," journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff tell the story of the press (now the "media") and the civil-rights movement.

Donald Barthelme had a strange writing career. He became famous for publishing his uncompromisingly avant-garde short stories in The New Yorker. After his death in 1989, his allusive intellectual fantasias fell out of fashion, but lately cool younger writers whom Barthelme influenced have been championing him: Dave Eggers wrote an introduction to the collection "40 Stories," and Donald Antrim to the novel "The Dead Father." Once again, Barthelme is becoming an M.F.A.-program icon.Barthelme's...

You'd think somebody would have scooped Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff and written a book like "The Race Beat" decades ago. But maybe it's just as well: it's hard to imagine who'd be better qualified to tell the story of the press (now the "media") and America's civil-rights movement.

Styron belonged to a real Lost Generation: the post-World War II American writers (Baldwin, Mailer, Cheever) whose books pleased both critics and a large readership--and who thought that was normal.

If you've ever hankered for the real lowdown on Mickey Mouse's creator and alter ego—it's worth the hankering, since he was one of America's most influential mythographers—Neal Gabler's "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination" has it, sort of.

Many people who revere Bob Dylan already know what they think of the Broadway musical "The Times They Are A-Changin'." Granted, it was Dylan who approached the choreographer Twyla Tharp after her hit show with Billy Joel's songs--but I planned to blame it all on Tharp anyway.

I imagine the 80th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's first novel, "The Sun Also Rises," fires your imagination about as much as it does mine. There must be few people still alive who actually stumbled onto the book back in 1926 and wondered what the heck that title had to do with anything; if they were as young as 12 then, they're now 92.

The three dots said it all. Former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani last week released a secret letter penned by the late Ayatollah Khomeini outlining his reasons for accepting a ceasefire with Iraq in July 1988.

If they keep putting out books to get you up to speed on what everybody else knows, eventually there won't be any more Bluffers or Dummies. At the high end are the 100-page biographies and 50-page extracts selected to make you think you've really read Darwin, Ruskin or Thomas à Kempis.

Chicken With Plums by Marjane SatrapiThe title of this graphic novel is borrowed from a Persian dish, the first line is "I'm hungry," and the characters are starved for love and community.

You'll never lose by picking up any book with Harold Bloom's name on it. (As Bob Dylan sings on his new album, "I say it so it must be so.") And I mean everything from the monumental ("The Western Canon") to the drive-bys ("Jesus and Yahweh") to those of his anthologies to which he wrote just an introduction—and a glimpse of yet another area in which he's read more widely and thought about more deeply than you have.

Moral Disorder by Margaret AtwoodIf only we had Margaret Atwood around us always, making our lives' hard choices and awkward impasses seem not only inevitable but graceful.

There's not much doubt anymore that Bob Dylan is the greatest force in American music now living, though his last No. 1 album was still on vinyl (the 1976 "Desire," with "Hurricane" and all that Gypsy-esque violin).

"Rise and Shine," Anna Quindlen's fifth novel, kicks into motion when top-rated morning chat-show host Meghan Fitzmaurice has a didn't-know-the-mike-was-still-on moment after interviewing a big-deal politician. (Quindlen, a NEWSWEEK contributing editor, would have to use an "f," an "a" and 12 dashes to quote such a gaffe in her biweekly column.) It could be that Meghan's feeling a little raw because her husband of 21 years had just told her ...

You may not recognize his name, but you know the picture he took on Iwo Jima in 1945. Even Cartier-Bresson, who spoke of "the decisive moment" in photography, never captured a more astonishing instant of formal beauty, aching tension and profound emotion than Rosenthal's image of Marines raising that flag.

John C. ReillyJohn C. Reilly costars in the Will Ferrell comedy "Talladega Nights." He spoke last week with NEWSWEEK's Nicki Gostin.I have a lot of respect for Gene Hackman, but I think we're very different.

Ginzburg's beautifully designed arts quarterly Eros lasted just four issues in 1962 and '63. But his conviction for obscenity made him a First Amendment hero.

My parents had no idea what they'd given me when that plastic Admiral radio showed up on my night table. It was 1956, in a small Connecticut town; I was 9.

Last year Claudia Emerson, a poet who teaches at Virginia's University of Mary Washington, published a collection called "Late Wife": one of those quarter-inch-thick volumes whose spines you cock your head to read on the six-foot shelves.

Back in 1991, the novelist Don DeLillo told an interviewer that even before the Salman Rushdie fatwa, real-world political terror was starting to overshadow the work of novelists. "Today, the men [hey, it was 15 years ago] who shape and influence human consciousness are the terrorists." This is silly: in what golden age did novels ever affect "human consciousness" more significantly than acts of political violence?

Taking the Long WayThe Nashville mavericks meet purist producer Rick Rubin (who got Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond back to basics). Result: fresh, smart country music--which country radio probably won't touch.