You Must change Your Life by Rachel Corbett (Norton). The author, an editor at Modern Painters, tells the story of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s fractious friendship with the man he called his “Master,” the much older sculptor Auguste Rodin. The book, which covers the lives of both men, illuminates their central—if not always enthusiastic—roles as the Belle Époque gave way to the avant-garde. The true subject, though, is Rilke’s desolate but fascinating inner life and the effect it had on his poetry: as Corbett writes, he “believed that art was its own kind of death because it consumed the artist.” This empathetic and imaginative biography, deeply researched, is anchored by the friendship between two of the twentieth century’s greatest artists.