In Vasily Grossman, the lost and nameless victims of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – soldier and civilian, ordinary men and women – found their literary chronicler.
Mark Fisher's insights are often obscured in Matt Colquhoun's personal/academic hybrid, Egress, which ranges far and wide over philosophy and pop culture.
Dave Eggers and Colin Meloy take on the antagonistic and nativist rhetoric in American politics and culture with children's books intent on generating empathy.
A Vietnamese family's song resounds over the effects of decades of tumult in Nguyen Phan Que Mai's excellent novel, The Mountains Sing.
Ian Zack's biography gives the often-overlooked Odetta a chance to keeping shining that little light of hers.
Never Anyone But You is an inspiring tale of surrealists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, who defied homophobia, Nazis, and gender norms while pushing the boundaries of art and love.
The unheralded and underappreciated PR exec. Moss Kendrix is the de facto hero in Brenna Wynn Greer's enlightening history of Black marketers and the evolving depiction of Black people in mass media.
Many fantasy writers have incorporated the visual footprint of the Third Reich into their fictional worlds. Few, however, have done so as extensively as the creator of Attack on Titan, who revisited this terrible chapter of history not to find inspiration for a fearsome antagonist, but to excavate the divisive ideas that lay buried there.
#Powertothepeople! The humble hashtag has given power to the powerless, thus helping to engage citizenship and cultural belonging. Enjoy this excerpt of #HashtagActivism, courtesy of MIT Press, written by influential members of hashtag activism networks.
#Coronafirus #COVID19 #Pandemic: Love in the Time of Corona Virus is a new and hopefully short-run PopMatters series of art and life and the art of living in these times of global health crisis.
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir's Miss Iceland Is at once a poetic, light-hearted narrative and a sharply edged social critique that is caustic and righteous in its portrayal of the enduring nature of sexism, misogyny and homophobia.
There's something not-quite-right, something distinctly off-kilter, about the Mermaidens' feminine voice in New Zealand's music scene.
Where fiction typically emphasizes plot, Yeon-Sik Hong's Umma's Table emphasizes a rich layering of events that creates the artful impression of memoir-like fiction.
Reading the Library of America's comprehensive anthology, Joan Didion: The 1960s & 70s, is like walking out of the rain and into a time warp.
Serenade for Nadia's complex plot allows Turkish author Zülfü Livaneli to sermonize on topics as varied as anti-Semitism, secularism and modernity, the role of faith in the modern world, diversity and multiculturalism, media and journalism, and more.
Media critic Elana Levine's Her Stories explores television history and the conflicts of generation, gender, and race in the heyday of "women's" soap operas.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens' debut novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q, is filled with exciting ideas and quirky characters, but the book's surfeit of style can't make up for a lack of personality or perspective.
When activists cooperate with a repressive state, who gets left behind?
The authors included in Harold Bloom's The American Literary Canon conform to a singular American aesthetic that, in Bloom's world, makes them superior to the spectrum of the American experience.
Polymath Girolamo Cardano was beaten, imprisoned, survived a plague, and was banned by the church. Yet his work in medicine, engineering, mathematics and more is present in our lives today.
Moa Romanova's "semi-auto-bio" graphic fiction, Goblin Girl, explores the dating world with a mysterious mix of art and influences.
Tian Veasna's superb yet harrowing graphic portrayal of the Khmer Rouge regime, Year of the Rabbit, conveys what damage a living nightmare can do to a country and its people in a mere four years.
Matter of fact in its presentation of difficult material -- sexism, child marriage, emotional and sexual abuse -- what's most striking about Samra Habib's memoir, We Have Always Been Here, is the sense of compassion with which she writes.
Steph Cha's depiction of systematic racism in Your House Will Pay is compelling, attesting to the complicated social structures at play.
The latest two Red Circle Minis, by Takuji Ichikawak and Kanji Hanawa, deal in archetypes; one set in the distant past, the other in the all too near future.
Producer Ted Templeman and biographer Greg Renoff successfully capture a wide-ranging career in Ted Templeman: A Platinum Producer's Life in Music.
We are living in a season of manifestos and Breanne Fahs is our queen. Our guidebook: Burn It Down!: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution.
Maura Spiegel's biography provides a thorough and compelling look at the life and films of the progressive New York icon filmmaker, Sidney Lumet.
David Jesus Vignolli's graphic novel, New World, chronicles Indigenous resistance to European monsters in gorgeous art and mythic undertones.
Matthew Gutmann's Are Men Animals is and interesting but flawed, rushed look at masculinity that suffers from digressions and an unwillingness to be as political as it could have been.
George Cain's 1970 semi-autobiographical novel Blueschild Baby, recently republished by Ecco, is a difficult and unapologetic work about the life of a functioning drug addict. In this interview Imran Khan discusses Cain's work and life with his ex-wife, Jo Lynne, and son, Malik.
Conveyed with urgency and mindfulness, Johnson's Black. Queer. Southern. Women. creates a space for revisioning critical race and sexual ideologies while affirming the voices of queer black women.
Ben Passmore's Sports Is Hell is an apocalyptic parody of racism in US sports and politics.
Though the bluster has asserted the opposite, Jeanine Cummins' prose in American Dirt washes away the gore and grime to show the human faces that make up the migrant crisis of the Western Hemisphere.
Anti-fascist militants have played an important role in protecting community and democracy. Daniel Sonabend's We Fight Fascists brings light to that battle against fascism in post-war Britain.
What do evolutionary biology and its founding father, Charles Darwin, have to do with love songs? As it turns out, quite a lot. Enjoy this excerpt of Ted Gioia's Love Songs: The Hidden History, courtesy of Oxford University Press.
We determine what song is worthy of the "A" or "B" side -- not the music industry. On Will Stockton and D. Gilson's 33 1/3 B-Sides.
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