Lucy Sante

The Count of Monte Cristo is the tense and exciting story of Edmond Dantes, a man on the threshold of a bright career and a happy marriage, who is imprisoned in the island fortress of the Chateau d'If on a false political charge. After staging a dramatic escape, he finds the fabulous treasure of Monte Cristo which makes him wealthy. He then sets upon the course of revenge against his old enemies.

In this collection of stylish and cogent essays, cultural historian Luc Sante offers his incomparable take on icons from Arthur Rimbaud to Allen Ginsberg, Rudolph Giuliani to Robert Mapplethorpe, New York to New Jersey, Buddy Bolden to Bob Dylan, Magritte to Tintin, along with meditations on cigarettes, the invention of the blues, hipness, New Year's Eve, and more.

Without the nineteen upstate reservoirs that supply its water, New York City as we know it would not exist today. From 1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware, Sullivan, and Ulster Counties. This feat of engineering served to meet New York City's ever-increasing need for water, sustaining its inhabitants and cementing it as a center of industry....

G.W. Pabst brought the war movie into a new era with his first sound film, a mercilessly realistic depiction of the nightmare that scarred a generation, in the director's native Germany and beyond. Digging into the trenches with four infantrymen stationed in France in the final months of World War I, Pabst illustrates the harrowing ordeals of battle with unprecedented naturalism, as the men are worn away in body and spirit by firefights, and the disillusion...

Features a collection of essays on expatriates' experiences in post-war France that were used to inspire Wed Anderson's new film, The French Dispatch, including the work of Mavis Gallant, James Baldwin, Joseph Mitchell, and Lillian Ross.