Indeed, was Irène Némirovsky, herself a Jewish victim of the Shoah, also an anti-Semite?

“Exits & All The Rest,” the Texan rock trio’s fourth release, features some powerful anthems and a couple of moving melodies. But the entire album comes off as an exercise in musical suspense and suggestion, a rock ramble that manages to evoke everything from coy sensuality to dramatic defiance without investing any of that with the least speck of importance.

In his attempt to comment on the political altercations surrounding the opium trade, Ghosh neglects to endow his own language and characters with the same depth he gives to their meals and dialects.

It is precisely the lack of any kind of feel-good factor that makes this last installment in the Harry Potter epic so compelling. This is no longer a story about magic itself, but about childhood and its bittersweet demise.

But even though Yoshimoto might dabble in the whimsical and the light, her most recent novel, “The Lake,” deals deftly with grief, death, and fear during an intense romance.

“Leeches” emerges from its entanglement with Serbian politics as a powerful postmodernist struggle with the impotence and emptiness of language.

Here are the ten most groan-worthy specimens of puns from the past twelve months.

Richard Avedon, one of the greatest American photographers of the last century, once took an unforgettable portrait of Salman Rushdie.

Franco’s failure to extract meaning from the chaos he depicts seems not so much a natural reaction to the teenage condition, but rather a trivial consequence of the poverty of his insight.

“I said that you were not conceived of mutual orgasm and that it probably affected your ability to empathize, remember?”