Dear Wags,

I’m in Prague, a city where a poet led a rebellion that broke totalitarianism. Wag Emeritus Václav Havel was a rumpled literary type who didn’t care that his trousers were too short (even now, locals call high-water strides Václav pants). Yet in 1989, he rallied his people to the cause of democracy. The Velvet Revolution changed the world, without a shot being fired.

Three years later, Czechoslovakia peacefully split into two independent states (the Velvet Divorce). Today, both nations are free republics, though they remain as different as bickering siblings. Affluent Czechia thrives, while gritty Slovakia copes with rust belt problems. Bratislava, the Slovak capital, has medieval charm, but it can’t compete with glittering Prague.

In the Czech Republic, I visited the Mucha Museum to try and understand the gap between the two countries. Alphonse Mucha was a Czech artist famous for turn-of-the-century collaborations with actress Sarah Bernhardt. Living in Paris during the Art Nouveau period, he produced dreamy theatrical posters hyping her performances. These ads are cultural treasures.

Away from the stage, Mucha’s fought to unite Czechs and Slovaks. In particular, he cared about Slovak rights. Often treated as second-class citizens, the Slovaks struggled for representation under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A unified Czechoslovakia enjoyed a period of independence from 1918 to 1938, but then came domination by the Nazis and later, the Soviets. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, Slovakia wanted a chance to govern itself at last.

Both Mucha and Havel wanted Czechs and Slovaks to stick together under a single, Prague-based government. They used their formidable talents to build a dream called Czechoslovakia — and they did not quite succeed. That’s not necessarily a failure. Sitting at Prague’s Café Imperial on a sunny fall morning, I’m convinced that such imperfect endings are the point of democracy. Self-determination is messy, and electoral success typically adds up to half a loaf. It’s the all-or-nothing stakes of today’s politics that are dangerous. Real freedom—the sweet, ordinary liberty enjoyed by both Slovaks and the Czechs—often means letting your siblings go their own way.

Yours Ever,

BKP

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The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl

Renkl, a New York Times columnist, wrote Late Migrations, which made transcendent connections between the natural world and caring for elderly parents. Now, she keenly observes the changing seasons in her own backyard, noting how even tiny transformations in the suburban environment mirror bigger challenges. While listening to cicadas, watching birds, and planting flowers, Renkl weaves humanity into into an elegant matrix. She’s a warm and humble guide. Once again, her collaborator is her brother, illustrator Billy Renkl.

West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman

The game’s afoot — literally — at an upstate New York hunting club. A Fourth of July hootenanny during America’s bicentennial goes awry when guests start expiring. Detective Adam McAnnis investigates, and soon finds himself entangled in a whodunit involving adultery, weed, and more references to famous mysteries than you can aim a rifle at. McDorman, a former MSNBC producer, knows this genre inside and out. If you love Christie, Highsmith, and Hammett, you’ll be highly entertained. And if you are a newbie to literary sleuthing, read some of those classics first, just so you get how clever this homage is.

The Secret Life of John Le Carré by Adam Sisman

The updated version of Sisman’s 2015 Le Carré biography is largely a catalog of extramarital affairs. It’s not so much the infidelity that’s shocking, but the volume. There were so many. But then, betrayal animated the master of the spy thriller, creatively and otherwise. Sisman promised to keep this material private until after the author’s death, in 2020. Now, his access makes for a riveting portrait of a talented scoundrel (check out Errol Morris’s documentary The Pigeon Tunnel for more). All the diabolical factors that nurtured Le Carré — a con-artist father, 20th Century Britain, the Cold War —are as dead he is. We’ll never see his kind again, and this volume suggests that’s likely a good thing.

Night Side of the River: Ghost Stories by Jeanette Winterson

From the moment I read her stunning debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, I knew I’d devour everything Winterson wrote. And I have: Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body. The Passion, FranKisStein, and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Happy childhoods are all alike, but Winterson’s epically unhappy one— as the adopted queer kid of Christian fundamentalists — gave her a rich vein to mine (not that I’d wish that upbringing on an orange, let alone a human being). Her new collection of ghost stories draws on her fascination with bodies, technology, and the supernatural. She also includes essays about her own eerie encounters. It’s a perfect Halloween read.

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Ward gets better with every novel she writes. Her last, Sing, Unburied, Sing was impeccably plotted and distinguished by a particularly heart-wrenching scene. This time out, she riffs on Dante’s Inferno to tell the story of an enslaved African American woman named Annis, who navigates different versions of hell in an odyssey from the Mid-Atlantic to New Orleans. In each ordeal, she relies on love, strength, and newfound power to carry on. The author deploys a more discursive style of storytelling to pull it off, and it all magically works. Bravissima.