Photo: Vulture/Courtesy of ITV/Courtesy of Neon/Courtesy of Netflix/Kevin Mazur/Courtesy of Netflix
TV and Pop Music
1. & 2. Watch and Listen to Springsteen on Broadway
For your hungry holiday heart.
If you couldn’t get tickets to see the Boss’s theatrical turn, then catch Springsteen on Broadway, his witty, occasionally heartbreaking blend of autobiographical stories and stripped-down performances of hits and deep cuts, as a Netflix special and soundtrack album, out just in time for Christmas.
Netflix, December 15, and Columbia Records, December 14.
TV
3. Watch Vanity Fair
Upwardly mobile.
William Thackeray’s novel has been famously adapted on more than one occasion. But strong British reviews of this latest limited-series version, which aired earlier this fall on iTV, suggest it’s very much worth a look.
Amazon, December 21.
Books
7. Read Milkman
Fabulistic and timely.
This novel’s surprising Man Booker Prize victory comes as less of a surprise when you see what Anna Burns has crafted: a narrative at once intimate and universal. The narrator identifies herself as “middle daughter” and her much older tormentor as “milkman” — which he is not. Instead, he’s a paramilitary thug in 1970s Belfast. His coercion of this bookish girl has #MeToo echoes but reflects the ways social mores can spawn abuse in any place at any time. —Boris Kachka
Graywolf.
Books
10. Read All That Heaven Allows
Breaking the waves.
Like Rock Hudson’s life — marked by glory as a Hollywood star and pinup but also the lifelong shame of the closet and his AIDS-related death — his afterlife was blessed and cursed in equal measure. Mark Griffin sets the balance right in a full, empathetic biography, sparing few details about the complicated life of a man who was born (and died) too soon. —B.K.
Harper.
*A version of this article appears in the December 10, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!
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