¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”“Audition” features an unnamed female narrator, an actor of some renown, in rehearsals for a difficult new play. When she is not on stage, she lives a quiet life in the West Village with her art historian husband, Tomas. Halfway through the novel, everything changes. The relationships between her, Xavier and Tomas are turned upside down in head-spinning fashion like the figure/ground illusion known as Rubin’s vase. Look at the picture one way, and it is a container for flowers; look at it another way, and it is the silhouettes of two heads facing each other.

Kitamura’s two previous novels also featured unnamed female protagonists whose work was bound up with interpretation: in “Intimacies,” a female interpreter at the Hague, and in “A Separation,” a translator. In this book she evokes a stylish city built out of glass, a sort of Mastercard ad where people have personal assistants and nibble on charcuterie trays in tastefully furnished apartments.In this facsimile of New York, which does not include disheveled people sleeping on the street or garbage spilling out of trash cans, Kitamura does a good job of creating a sense of the uncanny and feeling of dread. Reality is unstable; nothing is as it seems.The cleverly constructed plot ends with the narrator wrestling with big, abstract ideas including the possibility that a family is nothing more than a “shared delusion, a mutual construction,” a group of actors performing their parts.

whose “Fool” trilogy is beloved for the characters he created to populate a fictional upstate New York town, freely admits he’s always pulled from his real life to write his novels. “I was born in exactly the right place at exactly the right time,” he writes in one of 12 essays that make up his slim new volume “Life and Art.”Russo scholars — there must be some in American literature departments somewhere, right? — will devour this book. Russo writes lovingly of both his father and mother, draws explicit connections between his characters and people from his real life, takes a road trip back to his hometown Gloversville, and even throws in an homage to

whose portrayal of Sully in his “Nobody’s Fool” helped Russo’s work find an audience well beyond readers.

The 12 essays here are divided into the two parts noted in the title. “Life” is more memoir, with Russo sharing what he did during theThe producer, writer and comedian gazed at the shiny key handed to her by Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker and quipped: “Wow! I want to ask the question on everybody’s mind: What does it open?”

Brunson used the ceremony held at Andrew Hamilton School to celebrate the power of public education, public schoolteachers and music and arts education. Her parents and siblings were in attendance, along with Joyce Abbott, the teacher who inspired the name of the show’s fictional school, the “real life Gregory” and other teachers and classmates.The mural, titled Blooming Features, was created by artist Athena Scott with input from Brunson and Hamilton students and staff. Its brightly colored depictions of real people from the school wrap around the outside of the school’s red brick facade.

Brunson described taking inspiration from the murals painted along her subway route as a kid, especially when she saw one of her own teachers featured. She said she hopes this mural has the same effect.The actor said she nixed an initial mock-up brought to her by ABC that featured actors from the Emmy Award-winning show in favor of actual community members — because “that’s how you know there is a future.”