Arts

Though it's as dazzling as you'd expect from a Pixar animation, Toy Story 4 is also more ungainly than its predecessors, with coarser humor and audacious plot leaps that don't always pay off.

The new edition is in some ways like the retelling of a familiar tale for a new generation; but parts of the discussion that the book first inspired have moved beyond what an update can encompass.

The pseudonymous Reed King's new novel is a loopy, violent, funny Technicolor road trip across a post-apocalyptic America. There are robots, talking goats, and even the occasional lone songbird.

Mark Haddon's new novel uses Shakespeare's Pericles and its founding myth of the villainous king Antiochus to explore aberrant family relationships, loss, depression, judgment and cowardice.

Daniel Brook has written a book that goes a long way toward injecting thoughtfulness into popular notions of the history of race and racism in America but doesn't delve far enough into class conflict.