Tracing punk’s mutations, Iain Ellis’ Punk Beyond the Music is a robust and kaleidoscopic survey of this once-outsider subculture’s continuing, pervasive influence.
Premee Mohamed’s We Speak Through the Mountain is a school story set in a future that looks startlingly close to our times, sentient fungal infections notwithstanding.
Photographer John Divola’s LAX NAZ series exterior and interior views ooze with useful, fun, and satiating dualism. However, dualism gets messy.
If there is any consolation to be had in Teju Cole’s slippery and sinuous Tremor, it’s not found in art or literature but in the music that permeates its pages.
Academic Hunter Hargraves’ Uncomfortable Television considers the postmillennial spectator an active participant and contributor to the neoliberal society that is shaped by today’s television.
In Scritti Politti’s Songs to Remember, Green Gartside comically challenges hegemonic structures in a perfect harmony of philosophy and pop.
In Daniel Dockery’s Monster Kids Pikachus usher the pandemonium of Pokémania into the US, but his account of the phenomenon leaves readers wanting more.
In Playing Oppression, scholars Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson lay bare the colonialist origins of board games.
McKenzie Wark’s understanding of ravespace as a constructed situation in nonlinear ketamine-time comports with my experience raving on weekends as a freshman in college.
Lauren Berlant’s oeuvre provokes ambivalence. As with their posthumous collection On The Inconvenience of Other People I consume Berlant, and Berlant consumes me.
The Real World of College offers a research-backed, level-headed, non-political assessment of higher education. It’s a breath of fresh air let in stuffy rooms.
Stimulated by, then stimulating, certain writings, punk has been a change agent of literature, injecting energy and disruption into multiple genres.
