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By the Book: 'A Hidden Landscape Once a Week'

In this excerpt of a history of the UK music press, A Hidden Landscape Once a Week, Tony Stewart recalls his time as writer and deputy editor at NME (1971-85) — the strengths and pleasures of teamwork and the vital role of the visual in the energies of a rock paper.

Books

A Journalist Interrogates the Liberal Aversion to Violence in 'Being Numerous'

Punching Nazis, Natasha Lennard contends, is merely the natural edge of a spectrum which also includes controlling our own tendencies toward fascist acts in everyday life.

Books

Short Stories: Animals, Part II

The selected stories this month have a touch or more of surrealism and their writers — Daniel Mallory Ortberg, Sarah Hall, Robert Olen Butler, Beth Goder, and Jackie Kay — explore the humanity of our species and our relationships with other living species.

Books

'The Barefoot Woman' and Writing Against Genocide

As political partisanship grows more fierce let us realize what happens when such bluster and rage escape the realm of the abstract. Scholastique Mukasonga's The Barefoot Woman is a thoughtful tribute to her mother, who was murdered in the Rwandan genocide.

Books

Inspiring Empathy by Removing the Abstraction: Tey Meadow's 'Trans Kids'

With Trans Kids, Tey Meadow educates readers and gives them hope for societies that are just now learning to address gender beyond the strictures of presumed binary biology.

Books

Should America Negotiate with Terrorists? An Interview with Joel Simon

Joel Simon, Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, discusses his new book, We Want to Negotiate, which argues for sweeping changes to the way the US responds to hostage-taking.

Culture

Edward Gorey, Agent of Chaos

Two recent books on screenwriter, illustrator and author Edward Gorey, Born to Be Posthumous and Gorey's Worlds, are engaging works that show that Gorey's mystique remains safely impenetrable.

Books

Short Stories: Animals, Part I

Animals of all kinds have featured in fiction for as long as we have produced fiction. Here are five engaging stories about cats, dogs, herons, and cows by Sarah Orne Jewett, P. G. Wodehouse, R. L. Maizes, Parashar Kulkarni, and R. O. Kwon.

Books

Graphic Sex and the Graphic Form in 'The Perineum Technique'

The world of The Perineum Technique is sort of our own world, and sort of not. It's an area between.

Books

Glimmers of Truth from the Inebriated Work of the Late, Dirty Realist Writer, Charles Bukowski

If many of the pieces in Charles Bukowski: On Drinking are the literary equivalent of watching dirt circle the drain after a vigorous shower, how long will we keep watching?

Books

You Can Feel the Venue's Heartbeat on Every Page of 'Showtime at the Apollo'

How do we measure the status of a performer's Holy Grail like the Apollo Theater in 2019? Ted Fox and James Otis Smith's beautifully realized, updated graphic novel brings this rich history to life.

Books

'Can Democracy Work?' Is the Essential Question We Must Continue to Grapple With

James Miller's Can Democracy Work? is a coming-of-age story for a generation of Americans whose ideals of social, economic, and political progress foundered on the rocks of brute capitalist power.

Books

Why Does Alex Garland's 'Annihilation' Perpetuate the Hidden Figure of Henrietta Lacks?

Alex Garland relied on HeLa easter eggs to proffer a "key" to the Shimmer in Annihilation, but his interpretation mimics the instrumentalization decried throughout Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Film

'On Press' Shows That Journalism Has Survived Tough Times Before

Matthew Pressman's engaging, historical dive into the fourth estate, On Press, looks at the forces that contributed to the decline of news in print, gave rise to interpretive reporting, and the new challenges and advantages available to news reporters and consumers today.

Books

Townes Van Zandt: 'Music, Genius, and Rage'

Townes Van Zandt's longtime road manager and producer, Harold F. Eggers, Jr., looks back on road-life with the haunted songwriter. He has more stories than most.

Books

'Garage': A Visually and Intellectually Rich Study of a Seemingly Blank Space

Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela's Garage challenges the beguiling, energizing, and yet limiting power of the garage in America as a symbol of escape and reinvention.

Books

Pop Ten

Jackie Chan's 10 Best Films

The 70 Best Albums of 2018

The 100 Greatest Alternative Singles of the '80s: Part 1: 100 - 81

The 25 Best Electronic Albums of 2018

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Mixed Media

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