When Eisie Met Loren
“She was the most captivating and the nicest and the most hardworking actress I’ve ever met”: a new coffee-table book collects the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt’s timeless pictures of the Italian cinema icon Sophia Loren
The Making of Charlotte Brontë
How a controversial biography of the Jane Eyre author overcame accusations of slander from the novelist’s hellish former headmaster, her critics, and even her father to establish her enduring myth
Editor’s Picks
This week, don’t miss a new history of China’s path to Communism, a re-examination of the Bernie Goetz subway shooting, and McNally Editions’ reprint of a forgotten dark comedy
The Movie Brats
For the past 50 years, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg have been collaborators, competitors, critics, and, most incredibly, close friends
The Offensive Line
Inside the love-hate relationship between two of the most powerful men in the N.F.L.—Patriots owner Robert Kraft and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones—and the media
Editor’s Picks
This week, don’t miss the secret history of the fund that reshaped American democracy, a memoir by Andrew Cuomo’s divorce attorney, and a chronicle of the fight to save the Siberian tiger
The Last Great Media Mogul
At 94, Rupert Murdoch—who just launched a new tabloid, California Post—is the last vestige of the golden age of press barons, from Hearst to Pulitzer
The Empress Has No Clothes
Sir Edmund Backhouse, the author of a highly influential book on the Qing empress dowager Cixi, claimed affairs with everyone from Oscar Wilde to the empress herself—but was any of it true?
Editor’s Picks
This week, don’t miss a study of John Cheever’s short stories by his daughter, a fresh look at the siege of Leningrad, and an analysis of plagiarism for the age of A.I.
The Curious Case of Mike Lynch
A toxic culture—complete with piranha tanks and Bond-villain rooms—ran rampant at the company founded by the British tech tycoon, who died in a freak yacht accident
“The Holy Grail of Shipwrecks”
A new book charts one man’s decades-long search for the lost Spanish galleon featured in Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in a Time of Cholera
Editor’s Picks
This week, don’t miss a biography of the literary critic who championed Faulkner and Kerouac; a study of “vampire panics”; and a fresh translation of Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War
Rodney Everlasting
With the magic of Wes Anderson, the imagination of René Magritte, and the mystery of Alfred Hitchcock, Rodney Smith’s photographs—collected in a new coffee-table book—create a fantastical world untouched by time
Daddy Issues
To the outside world, my father was a gifted and accomplished author. To his family, he was a self-destructive and deeply flawed man
The Oddest Couple in American Literature: Part IV
Norman Mailer snubbed Lawrence Schiller when accepting the Pulitzer Prize for The Executioner’s Song. But that didn’t stop Schiller from cutting Mailer in on his latest exclusive: Lee Harvey Oswald’s K.G.B. files
The Cult of Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Norwegian writer inspires a reverence bordering on worship among his mostly male fans. He can bring grown men to tears with a single sentence
Gone with the Winds
How an unexpected shift in the weather brought news of the Chernobyl disaster to the West—and marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union
