A book,” a 20-year-old Franz Kafka wrote to his friend Oskar Pollack in 1904, “must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” ...

“Jazz has absorbed whatever was around from the very beginning,” the writer Francis Davis told Wen Stephenson in a 1996 ...

“This boy who’s holding both of my hands and facing me … Well, he never let go,” Haddad tells us in this slender memoir of a ...