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The Index of Self-Destructive Acts: A Novelby christopher behatin house, 528 pages, $27.95 r Missionaries: A Novelby phil klaypenguin, 416 pages, $28 In 2013, Dana Gioia argued in these pages...

Original Prin: A Novelby randy boyagoda biblioasis, 224 pages, $14.95 Pity the satirist: He labors under a double burden. There is, first and foremost, the need to be funny....

Ninety-Nine Stories of God by joy williams tin house, 168 pages, $19.95 Joy Williams has often been celebrated, but it seems safe to say that her prose is more...

The Finishing School by Muriel Spark Doubleday. 192 pp. $16.95 Muriel Spark, Dame of the British Empire, expatriate Scot living in Tuscany, has been practicing her peculiar brand of...

Tony Hendra’s Father Joe was given a front page review in the New York Times Book Review in which it was very nearly damned with shrill praise. The reviewer,...

Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling by ross king walker and company, 373 pages, $28 According to Giorgio Vasari, author of the monumental Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects,...

Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual by lynn gamwell princeton university press, 344 pages, $49.95 In 1959, the British writer and science popularizer C. P. Snow published...

Within three years of its completion, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper began to flake and fade. The artist had staked his masterpiece, which he spent over two years...

The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War by hilton kramer ivan r. dee, 398 pages, $27.50 In the summer of 1952, Hilton...