A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK, yes, long-winded) this satire of the 18th-century picaresque novel—think Fielding’s Tom Jones or Sterne’s Tristram Shandy —is also an earnest picture of the pitfalls awaiting innocence as it makes its unsteady way in the world. It’s the late 17th century and Ebenezer Cooke is a poet, dutiful son and determined virgin who travels from England to Maryland to take possession of his father’s tobacco (or “sot weed”) plantation. He is also eventually given to believe that he has been commissioned by the third Lord Baltimore to write an epic poem, The Marylandiad. But things are not always what they seem. Actually, things are almost never what they seem. Not since Candide has a steadfast soul witnessed so many strange scenes or faced so many perils. Pirates, Indians, shrewd prostitutes, armed insurrectionists — Cooke endures them all, plus assaults on his virginity from both women and men. Barth’s language is impossibly rich, a wickedly funny take on old English rhetoric and American self-appraisals. For good measure he throws in stories within stories, including the funniest retelling of the Pocahontas tale —revealed to us in the “secret” journals of Capt. John Smith — that anyone has ever dared to tell.
Flannery O’Connor’s nickname for Faulkner was “the Dixie Limited.” She didn’t mean it entirely kindly: His huge talent and towering ambition made him a literary freight train that other southern writers were often forced to dodge. Both qualities are on full display in The Sound and the Fury, which describes the bitter, incestuous dealings of a Mississippi family fallen on hard times. A formal and stylistic tour de force (in other words, a tough but profoundly rewarding read), the book unfolds in four sections, centered in turn on each of the three Compson brothers — Benjy, a mentally disabled man; Quentin, a depressed, neurotic Harvard student; and Jason, an avaricious jerk — as well as on a black servant named Dilsey. All the brothers are obsessed with the dishonored Caddy, the slutty Compson sister, and with the family honor (and the family fortune) that the Compsons have frittered away. From these ruined fragments and damaged spare parts Faulkner builds a brutally moving epic of love, lust and endurance.
It’s Fashion Week in New York City and Manhattan is crawling with eccentric designers, stylish socialites and hungry models looking for next season’s big trend. It seems that our invitation to Marc Jacobs’ show got lost in the mail, so to console ourselves we’ve put together a stylish Spotify playlist.
TIME remembers the legacy of Don Cornelius by looking back at the TV shows that brought — and still bring — a rich trove of music into the living rooms of America
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.