St. Anne’s Church fire that destroyed rare frescoes now being investigated as possible arson

Every October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, readers receive a gift: we are reminded that literature is vast—vaster than empires, to coin a phrase. Chances are, the laureate for literature will be—at least for English-speaking readers—foreign in every sense. Even ardent book lovers might concede that they haven’t kept up with Elfriede Jelinek of Austria or Jon Fosse of Norway. How many of us were saving this year’s winner, Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, for an especially rainy day? (And how many are pretending we knew his name all along?) True, no one can read everything...