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Most Voluble Players

When Amusement Reigned

The pavilions and garden follies of pre-revolutionary France are collected in a charming new coffee-table book

Hilma of the Spirits

Facing the Music

A look back at the early days of the recording industry, before the advent of microphones and volume control

Editor’s Picks

This week, don’t miss a sprawling anthology of the true-crime genre, a look at Teddy Roosevelt’s longest friendship, and a compact history of music

The Cult Around the Corner

For nearly 30 years, a fringe psychologist exerted total control over the lives of his followers. His not-so-secret headquarters? A town house on Manhattan’s Upper West Side

A Tale of Two Richards

To All the Demon-Lovers

The Secret History

Jackie O spent the years after her husband’s assassination trying to keep out of the public eye. Years later, her job as a book editor encouraged her to see the value in revealing private people’s secrets

Editor’s Picks

This week, don’t miss a memoir from a trial attorney for the rich and infamous, a novel about naughty aristocrats, and the history of Billionaires’ Row

Holding Court

A look at the glamorous and long-forgotten life of the 1930s tennis star Alice Marble

High Stakes and Light Kink

“Pursuit Doesn’t Get Any Hotter”

Being Bardot

A dazzling new coffee-table book collects Douglas Kirkland’s and Terry O’Neill’s photographs of Brigitte Bardot behind the scenes of some of her best films

Walking Wounded

An excerpt from the upcoming book Wounds and Other Blessings offers a meditation on physical, emotional, and worldly slights

The Legend of Bogie and Bacall

Theirs went down in history as that rare thing: a fairy-tale Hollywood marriage. But a new book reveals a rocky start to Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s life together

Fact Is Fiction

In an interview, Colson Whitehead discusses his new novel, Crook Manifesto, cancel culture, and why he avoids reading contemporary fiction

Editor’s Picks

This week, don’t miss a biography of the oft overlooked 20th U.S. president, James Garfield, a new edition of The Economist’s writing-style guide, and an eccentric coming-of-age novel

The Big-Bang Theory

Eyes on the City

Evelyn Hofer’s photographs of New York, Paris, and Dublin offer a look at 1950s-and-1960s-era city life and its evocative street scenes

Some Girls

Murder, They Wrote

Martin Amis’s twin obsessions with Hollywood and serial killers are explored in four new mystery novels

In Search of Lost Whimsy

In a new coffee-table book, the eccentric Italian artist and designer Gaetano Pesce looks back on his life and career, and reflects on his longtime enemy: coherence

Chronicling Bohemia