Galvanized by the interview with Ursula Le Guin in our current issue, and recalling my love for her first three Earthsea books, I’ve embarked upon the second set in the series, which she began nearly two decades after the original trio. The long stories in Tales from Earthsea have been keeping me company late at night, the perfect companion for my recent bouts of insomnia. Though they function as back stories for characters and events in the earlier books, they’re also highly enjoyable as standalone narratives. What the best fantasy does—and what Le Guin does in spades—is give the impression that even when the book stops, the world inside its pages continues to exist beyond the bounds of the author’s invention. Upon her return to writing about Earthsea, Le Guin herself found that to be true: “What I thought was going to happen isn’t what’s happening, people aren’t who—or what—I thought they were, and I lose my way on islands thought I knew by heart.” —Nicole Rudick

After Sadie wrote about The Disaster Artistlast week, I couldn’t help but pick up the book myself. I had seen The Roomyears ago—and the film’s as inexplicable as you’ve heard—but I was captivated by the unlikely bromance between a struggling actor and an enigmatic filmmaker at the core of the story. Yes, there are plenty of hilarious making-of stories, but it’s a sincere portrait of the rewards and peril of having an artistic vision you’re 100 percent committed to expressing. For the uninitiated: check out the book trailer here. —Justin Alvarez

Blek le Rat’s solo exhibition “Ignorance Is Bliss” lured me to the Jonathan LeVine Gallery this week, and his stenciled canvases have since been burned into my retinas. In these large, often monochromatic images, strewn with thick swashes of black, the viewer sees such forms as the oracle Sibyl from Greek antiquity, via appropriation of Michelangelo’s Libyan Sibyl. Grace permeates the canvas; Blek subverts this with a skull tattoo on Sibyl’s arm. In a six-foot canvas we see several children playing tug-of-war with one of his iconic rats. On a nearby pedestal is Blek’s first work in sculpture, a small bronze statue of David holding a Kalashnikov while a rat gazes up from below. Seeing the culmination of thirty years of the Parisian-born street artist’s work, we experience both its sociopolitical resolve and the familiarity of his tightly controlled spray-paint forms; he innovated stencils and rats, and others took cues from him, or, indeed, lifted his entire style. For those who know street art through Banksy, here’s what the famously elusive artist allegedly said of Blek: “Every time I think I’ve painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it as well, only twenty years earlier.” And should you notice a stenciled Andy Warhol or a gas mask surrounded by rats on a wall in Brooklyn, that too, was Blek. —Adam Winters

Long before I went to work at Jezebel, I was a devoted fan of Lizzie Skurnick’s late, lamented “Fine Lines” column, in which she paid tribute to unjustly forgotten YA classics. So, like many people, I was thrilled when I heard about Lizzie Skurnick Books, an imprint devoted to just these titles. The series kicks off with a bang: the great Lois Duncan’s 1958 Debutante Hill. The book, Duncan’s first, is a classic coming-of-age page-turner with a protagonist you root for. But like all her fiction, it deals with real issues of class, social consciousness, and growing up with seriousness and sensitivity, and is as fresh and engaging today as it was upon its publication. But then, that is what Skurnick has always understood about these books: at their best, they areliterature in the true sense of the word, and by no means only for young readers. (Although it’s exciting to think of a new generation discovering them.) —Sadie Stein

Since the current issue of The Paris Reviewfeatures an excerpt from Jonathan Franzen’s upcoming translation of Karl Kraus, I figured it would be thematically appropriate to tout Stefan Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday. (A shame, incidentally, about that title translation. In English, it sounds a little too much like a depressing expo installation; the book’s elegiac tone is more successfully rendered in the German original, Die Welt von Gestern.) As Kraus’s contemporary, Zweig’s memoir is useful reading for anyone interested in the social milieu of fin de siècle Vienna, and the precipitous decline of the Hapsburg Empire. Zweig’s dewy-eyed recollection of the prewar years in Vienna, not to mention his gushing description of boy wonder Hugo von Hofmannsthal, also provide a nice counterbalance to the eternally acerbic Kraus. —Fritz Huber