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This year's figurative lumps of coal include a "Star Wars" tree ornament, a knockoff Yeti tumbler, faulty training wheels, a mango-tangerine candle, and Finger-Ease Guitar String Lubricant.

The celebrated writer's partner sexually abused her daughter Andrea. The abuse transformed Munro's fiction, but she left it to Andrea to confront the true story.

"The year, that year, had been especially / cruel. Sickness and war."

TV's preëminent office guy has never worked a "regular nine-to-five," but his years as a struggling actor taught him what it's like to toil anonymously.

Funny drawings from this week's magazine.

"I was not alone, that much I know, / though no one was with me."

The prosecutor spoke without emotion: "Your father's been charged with espionage. Spying under orders from the North Korean puppet regime."

The rain it raineth every day, as Shakespeare noted, apparently even on Saturn. The cosmos, it seems, is no comfort at this moment.

In the latest revival of Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, and Jule Styne's iconic musical, George C. Wolfe humanizes a famously monstrous stage mother.

In his latest film, the director Brady Corbet depicts the fate of a brilliant Hungarian architect, who lands in the United States after surviving Buchenwald.