The very title of Roland Barthes’s book “Mythologies,” which just came out in a new translation by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers, is a misnomer. There’s nothing of Sisyphus or Oedipus in the fifty ...

On October 26, 1977, the day after his mother died, French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes began the “Mourning Diary”—a series of reflections written on small pieces of paper the size ...