Whit Stillman

Whit Stillman wrote and directed the films Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco, the last of which he also adapted as a novel. Here he chooses the best books for “slow reading.”

Balzac: A Biography by Graham Robb (Norton, $15). A classic—the sort of imaginative identification that inspires page pondering rather than page turning. For a merely 400-page book, Robb’s opus has a delightfully interminable quality, as if one could, and really should, dine out on every paragraph.

The Claws of the Dragon by John Byron and Robert Pack (out of print). A Gothic biography of the Stalinist-trained chief of Mao’s secret police. It lives up to its subtitle—Kang Sheng: The Evil Genius Behind Mao—And His Legacy of Terror in People’s China. Kang was the instigator or inspiration for murderous ideological campaigns ranging from China’s Rectification Movement, in the early 1940s, to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.

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Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia by E. Digby Baltzell (Transaction, $30). Baltzell, the charismatic Penn sociology professor who coined the term “WASP,” spent years preparing this, his magnum opus—a social and intellectual history of “Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership.” It could make for some years of stimulating reading.

Max: A Biography by David Cecil (out of print). The relics of a saint. The fascination of critic and caricaturist Max Beerbohm might now rest—more than on his works—on his stance, perspective, and manner of facing experience or avoiding it entirely. Cecil provides the complete picture, while the inspired hero worship of S.N. Behrman’s A Portrait of Max remains closer to the hearts of the faithful.

The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan (Wiley, $20). How, in our first civil war, armed Whigs led by Nathaniel Greene, Daniel Morgan, and Francis “the Swamp Fox” Marion set the stage for a Tory defeat and American independence. A social, political, and military history of the falling apart and coming back together of the Whig cause in the crucial 1780–81 Carolinas campaign.

The English Novel