Gone for over half a century, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois lives on through his thought and his prose. A new edition from Restless Books offers an excellent opportunity to broaden our perspective on questions of race in America by increasing our understanding of racism's history and sociology, enlightened by one of the country's most creative minds.

An intimate, meditative two-hander about the deep resonance of comic-book superhero stories with the kids who read them – and with the 20-somethings those kids quickly become.

Her new album matches the blues-rock-soul singer's honeyed voice with a varied batch of songs by top talents ranging from Mississippi John Hurt to The Weepies' Deb Talan to Black Sabbath.

Floyd's music mixes modernist dissonance with classic lyricism, a recipe that the composer-librettist has mastered and fine-tuned perhaps better than anyone else.

Like crushed train cars telescoping into one another, these seven tracks fuse song and soundtrack-style music, contemporary newspaper accounts and musique concrète, into a gumbo of "you are there" tone poems about real-life train crashes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

A grimly funny, magic-realist portrait of a group of new high school graduates at that scary moment of first flight, assessed and conveyed with the wisdom of hindsight and painted with the brush of an artist.

This exquisite vocal group puts on energetic, high-spirited concerts that free the ancient music of the Renaissance from the museum and dance it out into the town square.

Railroad cars brought the author's father and mother to Auschwitz, but railroad cars also brought them from Auschwitz, eventually to the town where they would try to start fresh and raise a family. His book is a loving, questioning, aching letter from a onetime little boy to the father the Nazis took from him.

A small-boat cruise turned out to be the best way for us to explore Croatia's Dalmatian Coast, beginning in Dubrovnik, then visiting various islands and the city of Split.

In one of the show's most emblematic moments, Asad's friends recoil when he sticks to his principles and accepts a cup of tea from a woman of what they see as an inferior clan. This operatic true tale from South Africa of a Somali refugee's harrowing journey of survival resonates ringingly in today's Europe and America.