In The American Robot, Dustin A. Abnet explores how robots have not only conceptually connected but literally embodied some of the most critical questions in modern culture, as seen in this excerpt from chapter 5 "Building the Slaves of Tomorrow", courtesy of University of Chicago Press.
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.
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.
The powerful graphic novel Grass documents the atrocities against WWII "comfort women" through the recollections of a survivor. This is an incredibly powerful and urgent work that, frankly, should be read by the governments of all nations that must face, admit to, and begin real reparations for their country's atrocities.
In The Skin We're In, Canadian journalist Desmond Cole reveals the shocking scale of racism in a country that prefers to look the other way.
Women gunslingers engender justice in new fantasy Westerns from Charlaine Harris and Lyndsay Ely.
Social historian Sam Wasson's The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, is a graceful and compelling elegy to both Roman Polanski's landmark film, and the end times of old Hollywood.
Mike Edison's biography on the Rolling Stones' Charlie Watts, Sympathy for the Drummer is a full-throated assault on the notion that, in music, more is better, and that perfection is a friggin' virtue.
Supernatural Historian John Kachuba deftly demonstrates in Shapeshifters: A History that change is the only constant in life.
Escaping abjection's usual confines of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, the contributors to Abjection Incorporated examine a range of media, including literature, photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga. Enjoy this generous excerpt, courtesy of Duke University Press.
Joni Mitchell's latest book denotes the next step in the Joni evolution, and indicates that perhaps those different languages for her—of visual art, poetry, and music—will finally be held in equal regard.
Exploring the interplay of Irving Berlin's life with the life of New York City, noted biographer James Kaplan offers a visceral narrative of Berlin as self-made man and witty, wily, tough Jewish immigrant. Enjoy this excerpt of Kaplan's book, Irving Berlin: New York Genius.
André Aciman's long-awaited sequel to Call Me By Your Name, Find Me, isn't so much an extension of the previous book's queries about romance and sexuality as it is a work of convenient revisionism.
Folk tales, fantasy, pop culture and family weave gracefully throughout Carmen Maria Machado's harrowing yet graceful memoir of domestic abuse, In the Dream House.
Reading Kerouac, I saw in living flesh all of the Cody Pomerays, Dean Moriartys, Sal Paradises, and Alvah Goldbooks in each and every sailor I bunked with, each and all from every corner of America, revealing all and true as only comrades can do in the cocoon of shared experience.
Paul Theroux is among PopMatters' favorite travel writers. In this excerpt of On the Plain of Snakes, wherein he traverses the Mexico/US border, Theroux takes us to the ancient city of Oaxaca, bringing forth the dignity of its Zapotec and Mixtec people.
Underground palaces in communist spaces provide not only transport but also refuge in the former USSR. Enjoy this excerpt of photographer Christopher Herwig and author Owen Hatherley's Soviet Metro Stations, from FUEL Publishing.
Actor Amber Tamblyn is aspiring to something deeper than just the chronicle of herself as a young ingénue who came of age as a TV star in her memoir, Era of Ignition. In our politically tumultuous times, does she succeed?
Jon Savage's This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else, marks a time for considering how Joy Division became, and continues to be, so popular.
In this excerpt of '70s music, Pick up the Pieces, John Corbett puts his critique of Kraftwerk's Autobahn to poetry and pogos with his conflict for the Clash and their album, The Clash.
Jemar Tisby's historical overview of the American church's complicity in racism, The Color of Compromise, will help provoke dialogue, but we face significant challenges, still.
In an apparent attempt to generate understanding and contextuality in film history, David Thomson only ends up perpetuating myths and stigmas against homosexuals in his latest, Sleeping with Strangers.
These days, when personal grief becomes a public performance on social media, it's heartening to have a book such as Katharine Smyth's All the Lives We Ever Lived, wherein deep introspection is given space and literature provides both solace and inspiration.
When progressives adopt an ahistorical critique of feminism, they risking aiding and abetting its subversion. Historian Kirsten Swinth offers a remedy with Feminism's Forgotten Fight.
Had Stephen King and Bryan Smith "met" on that same street on 19 June 2019 -- 20 years after the Accident -- the physical consequences would have probably been complicated by media drones, TMZ helicopters, Instagram and Twitter posts, and Facebook livestream coverage.
In After Certainty, Robert Pasnau constructs a history of knowledge and concludes that most theories of knowledge aren't up to par. But, he says, we can hope.
In graphic novel Belonging, Nora Krug takes a single idea – her family's involvement in the Second World War and Nazi Germany – and pursues it with relentless, forensic determination.
If art is about the fostering and maintenance of traditions, then the Russians were proposing a kind of anti-art. An exploration of the exhibition catalog, Russian Dada 1914-1924.
Henri Cole's Orphic Paris mines the city of light to illuminate the ends of his art.
Chekhov is engaging with an underlying, rumbling, non-event that pervades life and yet is nearly always blithely ignored. His stories move us in their ability to excavate this subterranean, haunting static that informs all experience.
Hagy's new novel, Scribe, a beautiful work clearly rooted in the ethos of the Program Era, seems the very example of a return to the bourgeois novel of art for art's sake.
Revisiting the moon landing via graphic fiction work, Apollo, offers a vital reminder of hope and possibility in these dark and petty times.
Donna Zuckerberg's Not All Dead White Men is a powerful study of the ways the alt-right distorts the understanding of ancient Greek and Roman literature to serve hateful interests today.
Forget everything you think you know about Paul Auster, as with the release of his New York Trilogy manuscripts, the award-winning author talks typewriters, telephones, and why he doesn't think of himself as a novelist.
The reissue of autobiography Elsa Lanchester, Herself, brings forth an engaging woman who helped to queer Hollywood well beyond her role in The Bride of Frankenstein.
This reissue of Thomas Ligotti's most frightening work about the ultimate terror, human existence, might be just what you need in these times.
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