Devoted to his wife, Brenda, his son, John Andrew, and to Hetton, his very ugly neo-Gothic homestead, Tony Last will lose all three. As his name is always announcing, Last lives at the end of a dying age, the brittle, exhausted 1930s, when England, at least Waugh’s England, is a place where Brenda can throw herself at the feet of a childish lover and where Last can discard his life on an absurd caprice. Waugh’s own marriage was disintegrating when he wrote this, and his unhappiness led him into wider realms of feeling — pathos, rage — than any you find in his earlier triumphs of nasty wit, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. Sound dreary? Not even slightly. If this is Waugh at his bleakest it’s also Waugh at his deepest, most poisonously funny.
When Carson McCullers was a teenager, she came to New York City to study piano at Juilliard. She never matriculated; she lost the purse with her tuition money in it. Such small, unredressed tragedies as these are at the silent, solitary heart of McCullers’ first novel, which centers on a deaf-mute and a teenage tomboy living in a small Georgia town in the 1930s. McCullers’ characters reach out to one another for sympathy and understanding, but not all of them can complete the connection, and their isolated thoughts form a choir of amazing, transcendent poignance — music only the reader can hear.
New system launch games are usually pretty dismal — look at what happened to the Nintendo 3DS — but the PS Vita’s looks unusually promising. Here’s a rundown of the seven Vita games we’re most looking forward to (and why).
In light of the Material Girl performing at Super Bowl XLVI, TIME takes a look at her life and career, both of which have been lived firmly in the public eye.