The New Yorker

He’d become a house guest, noncommittal and impassive. She tried to see to it he wasn’t disturbed, nothing to trip him up: a book, perhaps, laid down in some rash motion might scare him off an edge, although he had a talent, it seemed, for focussing . . .

A collection of cartoons from the issue, plus this week's Cartoon Caption Contest.

Infidelity and romantic disconnection pervade the fourteen stories in this brisk book, which ranges from a tale of familial dissolution on a lunar colony in 1989 to a factory that manufactures Karmic Boomerangs in a place called Australindia. Greenman, an editor at this magazine, conjures an infatuated man in 1940 . . .

In this slim but illuminating biography, Peters, the founder of Washington Monthly, combines original reporting with his own recollections of the era to create a resonant portrait of a man of prodigious political abilities, who was driven, but ultimately undone, by his temperamental flaws. Writing in calm, plainspoken prose, Peters . . .

Athill, now ninety-two years old, won admiration here for her recent memoirs “Stet” and “Somewhere Towards the End,” but this book, one of two earlier memoirs that have now been reissued, shows that her talent has been evident for decades. Supple, frank, unafraid of contradictions . . .

The fall of the Berlin Wall is the backdrop for more intimate collapse in this autumnal novel. It’s November, 1989, and Arvid Jansen, Petterson’s recurring alter ego and antihero, is facing, simultaneously, the disintegration of his fifteen-year marriage and his mother’s diagnosis of . . .

paragraph class="noindent">Richard Thompson has been turning out literate, moody, spiky albums for four decades, three on his own and a decade before that in partnership with his wife, Linda. There are so many highlights in his catalogue (“Shoot Out the Lights,” “Hand of Kindness,&#8221 . . .

The former Pixies front man Frank Black—who is, these days, recording once again under his Pixies name, Black Francis—is the Michelle Duggar of alternative rock. During the past seventeen years, he has released more than a dozen studio albums, not to mention numerous singles and EPs . . .

A tear slides from the eye of a young woman. In one evening, she has lost both her father and, to judge by the slash on her neck, her immortal soul. Soon, however, she stops weeping, looks up at her innocent sister, and smiles with bared teeth. This blend of . . .

Food movies are an acquired taste. I have lost count of all the lip-smackers, the heart-warmers, and the spicy-noodle-slurpers, not to mention such molar-wrecking fables as “Chocolat” and “Like Water for Chocolate.” Few of them endure in the digesting mind longer . . .

Recently, Rebecca Pidgeon, the actress and songwriter, had an encounter at Kelly’s Logan House, in Wilmington, Delaware, with a young woman named Megan. (She didn’t get Megan’s last name.) A few months earlier, Pidgeon had decided that she wanted her music heard more widely . . .