Arts & Life

FILE PHOTO: View of the renovated tomb of Oscar Wilde during the ceremony at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris November 30, 2011. REUTERS/Charles Platiau/File Photo AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Oxford University said on Monday a golden ring given by Irish author Oscar Wilde to a close friend will be returned …

The new Michel Houellebecq novel, “Serotonin,” is an exhausted and exhausting book. It makes you wonder if he has played out his string as a fiction writer. The narrator is Florent-Claude Labrouste, a French agricultural engineer (Houellebecq once held a similar job) who feels he is “dying of sadness.” Florent-Claude …

Good news for viewers ready to take a break from the drama in our capitol: The third season of “The Crown” has landed on Netflix. In the recently released trailer, as Queen Elizabeth (played by Olivia Colman) is getting ready for her Silver Jubilee, she says, “On days like today, …

THE MOVIE MUSICAL! By Jeanine Basinger There’s a particularly poignant scene in “Stormy Weather” (1943), one of the great all-black musicals made during the studio era, in which the bandleader Cab Calloway has his orchestra play the title song before a crowd of nightclub patrons. The curtain opens on Lena …

A pair of female “Survivor” contestants say they’re sorry for taking advantage of a third woman’s complaints about unwanted physical contact in order to advance in the game. The apologies came after a two-hour Wednesday night episode of the popular CBS show, in which the women said that a male …

James I. Robertson Jr., an authority on the Civil War who published several dozen deeply researched books that humanized historical figures like Stonewall Jackson, died on Nov. 2 at a hospital in Richmond, Va. He was 89. His wife, Elizabeth Lee Robertson, said the cause was complications of metastatic cancer. …

Adam Frankel was part of Barack Obama’s speechwriting team from the beginning of Obama’s presidential campaign through his first term in the White House. But Frankel’s memoir, while it offers glimpses of his interactions with Obama and of his time in government, is about something far more personal than his …

THE CONFOUNDING ISLANDJamaica and the Postcolonial PredicamentBy Orlando Patterson For a tiny island in the Caribbean, Jamaica has long enjoyed an outsize global reach — there are the songs of Bob Marley and the gold medals of Usain Bolt, as well as the millions of sun-seekers flocking to the island’s …

The life YoungBoy Never Broke Again raps about on his new album, “AI YoungBoy 2,” is a harrowing swirl of personal trauma, treacherous relationships, murderous fantasies and ice-cold bluster. How he renders it is striking: a sing-rap drawl, sometimes emphatic and sometimes absent-minded, flecked with light touches of the blues. …

FILE PHOTO: The cast of the popular comedy television series “Friends,” which will end its ten year run on May 6, 2004, are pictured on a giant billboard promoting the series finale, at the NBC television network office in Burbank, California, May 3, 2004. Cast members (L-R) are Courteney Cox …