Guillermo del Toro and his co-writer, Cornelia Funke, stay faithful to the script, but ramp up the bleakness in this tale of a princess living through a brutal war.
In Thanhha Lai’s “Butterfly Yellow,” a Vietnamese refugee finds the brother taken from her family as a toddler. Much more than just time separates them.
In 1958, Langston Hughes wrote for The Times about “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin’s 1955 collection of essays meditating on race in America and Europe.
“Seeing what people worried about or complained about a hundred years ago always gives a lot of perspective,” says the creator of the web comic XKCD, whose new book is “How To.”