Nancy Chapple
In 1979, Jonathan Raban journeyed down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to New Orleans in a specially equipped 16-foot motorboat. Quite the loner, he makes the trip on his own, exploring a river that has fascinated him from afar since ...
Akiko Hart
Robin is nine and hangs from a tree. His neck is broken and no one knows who has killed him. Ten years later, his little sister tries to find out. The Little Friend is of that most vulnerable ...
Phil Freeman
Lou Reed’s career is a mystery on at least two levels. The first, of course, is the series of artistic tangents and blind alleys he’s caromed down at one point or another since his emergence with the Velvet Underground ...
Phil Freeman
Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy played with pianist/composer Thelonious Monk for four months in 1960. He’s made explorations of Monk’s music a significant part of his career and discography ever since. In 1961, Lacy formed this quartet specifically to interpret ...
Nicole Williams
In one of the essays collected in Making Museums Matter, Stephen E. Weil quotes Alfred H. Barr on the principal task of New York’s Museum of Modern Art: “the conscientious, continuous, resolute distinction of quality from mediocrity.” Reading Weil’s ...
Phil Freeman
Are the media biased? Well, it depends on how you look at it. Fox News Channel, for example, is a right-wing propaganda outlet, but everyone knows that, and no one goes there expecting objectivity. In What Liberal Media?, Nation ...
Nicole Williams
In the author’s note that opens Nonrequired Reading, Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska writes about a reader’s freedom: to read intelligent books or stupid ones, to stop long before the end of a book, to eavesdrop, to ...
Phil Freeman
Out-of-print records, suddenly reissued, can serve as a kind of secret history. The paradigmatic example is the Nuggets garage-rock compilation, originally released in the 1970s and recently expanded into a four-CD boxed set, with an equally large follow-up set ...
Eva Hunter
In his ninth novel, Forever, Pete Hamill tackles a number of classic themes: the longing for eternal life, the sins of the fathers passed to the sons, humankind’s unremitting quest for freedom, and the existential question of what makes ...
Phil Freeman
Jazz is all about making personal statements. The introspection which earns surprised plaudits in pop is routine in jazz. A jazz performer is expected to turn each album, each tune, into a journey through his own heart and mind, ...