Audacious and genre-defying, Black and Blue is steeped in melancholy, in the feeling of being blue, or, rather, black and blue, with all the literality of bruised flesh. Roland Barthes and Marcel Proust are inspirations and subjects of Carol Mavor's exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to c[...]

On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, "Hitch-22," Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found hims[...]

This is the best-researched, best-presented, most comprehensive cultural guides in the English language covering art, history, architecture and archeology.[...]