Classic French novels have a reputation for being elegant and philosophical, and perhaps slightly intimidating. These five have other ideas. They bring sword fights into drawing rooms. They send innocent men to island prisons and bring them back as terrifyingly wealthy counts. They cram actors into wagons, princes into disguises, criminals into Parisian cellars, and…
Anderson .Paak almost always sounds like he knows exactly how charming he’s being. He can sing like a soul record with a little dust still on it, rap like he’s landing just behind the beat on purpose, drum like rhythm is his first language, and slide through a song with the energy of a guy…
After the symphonies, the room gets smaller. That’s the simplest way I know to think about Beethoven’s piano sonatas at first. The symphonies are public Beethoven, all huge gestures, famous openings, and orchestras pushing the air around, with the Ninth standing there like a cultural monument that keeps a chorus waiting in the lobby. They’re…
Marilynne Robinson does not usually raise her voice, and that quietness is part of what makes her dangerous as a writer. From a distance, her novels can sound tender, filled with pastors, small towns, memory, grace, family, faith, the sunlight falling on ordinary things. It is easy to mistake that surface for softness. Then you…
The public canon tells us what lasted. The private canon tells us what we carried: the books and albums that found us at the right time and never quite left.
Tom Waits has one of the strangest careers in popular music. At first he is the guy at the piano after last call, evoking busted romance, neon in dirty windows, and sad men talking too much because the alternative is going home. Then the floor drops out. The piano gets dragged into an alley. The…
For a lot of English-language readers, Turkish literature begins and ends with Orhan Pamuk, and honestly that makes sense. He is the Nobel winner, the writer most likely to be sitting on the “world literature” shelf looking elegant and just intimidating enough to send you back toward a detective novel instead. But Turkish literature is…
At a certain point, Willie Nelson’s discography stops looking like a catalog and starts looking like a dare. You start with the obvious records: Shotgun Willie, Phases and Stages, Red Headed Stranger, Stardust. Maybe Waylon & Willie too, if you want the outlaw-country buddy-movie version of the story. Then you look up the rest and…
José Saramago is brilliant, but not exactly breezy. This is a writer who looked at quotation marks and apparently decided they were too eager to help. His sentences wander all over the place. His narrator interrupts, jokes, scolds, doubts, moralizes, doubles back, and occasionally grabs the steering wheel like an old uncle who does not…
Disco is one of those genres people have preconceived notions about. Mirror ball. White suit. Studio 54. Huge chorus. Even bigger hair. Someone walks into a club in a movie, and suddenly the screen starts screaming that the seventies are happening. Then comes the tired part of the story. Disco gets huge. Disco gets mocked….