Arts & Life

MUNICH — Germany’s robust cultural scene was among the first casualties of the coronavirus. On March 10, the country’s hundreds of theaters and opera houses began shutting down. Stages will remain dark until at least April 19. As everyday life here has come to a grinding halt, many theaters have …

Image ‘Afterlife,’ by Julia Alvarez (Workman, April 7) It’s been 14 years since Alvarez, the author of “In the Time of the Butterflies,” “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” and other books, published a new novel. Now she returns with the story of Antonia Vega, a retired professor mourning …

When it comes to reading in an emergency, in a moment of crisis and uncertainty, comfort seems to be the order of the day — old favorites, regressive pleasures, cozy classics. What happens if they fail you? Mine have (et tu, Wodehouse?), so I am here to champion the opposite: …

When Richard Marek was a young editor at Scribner’s in Manhattan in the early 1960s, he was entrusted with one of the literary world’s most important manuscripts, “A Moveable Feast,” Ernest Hemingway’s intimate portrait of his life as an unknown writer in Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway had scrawled his …

The theme song for “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.,” the original cast album for “Fiddler on the Roof” and the play-by-play broadcast of the thrilling 1951 National League tiebreaker between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers are among the 25 recordings just added to the Library …

The top-selling book on Amazon at the moment comes with a completion certificate for readers that says: “Great Job! You’re #1.” It’s a 320-page activity book for 3- to 5-year-olds, designed to help them master shapes, colors and letters of the alphabet, and it’s recently surged ahead of best-selling novels …

The steamboat: For many Americans in the 19th century, it was a symbol of power and progress, a triumph of technology that ferried goods and people upriver with impressive speed. But for certain passengers, it represented something less glorious and more terrifying. In “Unworthy Republic,” the historian Claudio Saunt describes …

[ Read an excerpt from “The City We Became.” ] Structurally, “The City We Became” is largely a sequence of fast-paced set pieces, a series of encounters with the Enemy, with each embodied borough discovering new powers as readers discover their histories and personalities. In quick succession, we’re introduced to …

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury secretary and the Senate Democratic leader voiced confidence late on Monday for a deal to be reached soon on a far-reaching coronavirus economic stimulus package that had been stalled in the U.S. Senate as lawmakers haggled over it. Negotiators made great progress on the …

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A far-reaching coronavirus economic stimulus package remained stalled in the U.S. Senate on Monday as lawmakers haggled over its provisions, but the U.S. Treasury secretary voiced confidence a deal would be reached soon. Democrats said the $2 trillion measure contained too little money for states and hospitals …