Some books feel like they slipped through a crack in the floorboards. You bend down, pick them up, and wonder how something this odd and this brilliant ended up forgotten in the first place. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns is one of those books. Published in 1954 and quietly reissued…
There are some artists who belong to no era. You can’t trace their sound to a moment, or fold them neatly into a movement. Tom Waits is one of those rare musicians who doesn’t just make music, but crafts something closer to lived-in folklore. The songs are populated by drifters, barkeeps, prostitutes, ghosts, and some…
The Shared Pulse of a Cultural Revolution Picture this: a dimly lit 1920s club, the air thick with smoke and possibility. A battered copy of Ulysses lies facedown on the small round table, its spine cracked from hours of wrestling with its winding sentences. In the corner, a saxophone moans over a restless piano, the…
There’s a certain kind of magic that happens when literature meets a specific place and time. As these books about Paris in the 1920s show, few places have better captured the imagination of writers and readers. It was a moment suspended between wars, when the city pulsed with jazz, art, alcohol, and ideas. A haven…
Where country music loosened its collar and found its wild side. Outlaw country is one of those genres that feels bigger than the music itself. It’s a mood, a myth, a bit of American restlessness captured on tape. These songs smell like highways, barrooms, and stubborn self-invention. They were made by people who didn’t like…
I used to think I needed complete silence to read. Like, vacuum-sealed, monastery-level silence. Any noise was enough to derail me. I’d reread the same paragraph five times, then give up and do something else.Then I discovered ambient music for reading.It started with a Spotify playlist I put on while rereading a novel late one…
It was well into adulthood before I started reading much Japanese literature. Haruki Murakami and Kazuo Ishiguro were the only ones I had read, and while both are infused with Japanese sensibility, they’re also a bit more international than most other Japanese authors. When I finally decided to follow some recommendations I’d seen for the…
If you’re drawn to Kendrick not only for the music but for the ambition, the message, the art, then you’ll find something just as gripping in these artists from outside hip-hop. Here are five artists whose work resonates with Kendrick’s themes and artistic ambition. All of them are builders, each creating complex, emotionally dense bodies of work.