Indonesia is made up of thousands of islands and hundreds of languages. Its literary history stretches across Dutch colonial rule, Japanese occupation, revolution, dictatorship, mass political violence, religious conflict, migration, and regional traditions. Translation gives English-speaking readers only a small piece of that world. Fortunately, it is a very interesting piece. And more and more…
The Clash had a classic run that was short enough that, if you play it straight through, it almost feels both improbable and necessary that a band this alive burned through itself so quickly. The real problem is that The Clash have at least three endings, and which one you believe in says a lot…
Barbara Kingsolver is one of those writers I’ve sometimes heard people talk about as if she’s good for you. That’s true, in a way. She writes about poverty, ecology, labor, addiction, colonialism, motherhood, science, Appalachia, migration, land, and the kind of moral blindness that usually arrives wearing very nice justifications. But the best Kingsolver novels…
Some artists make the first move. They give you a melody to hold onto, a character who tells you what she wants, or an emotion that arrives with its meaning neatly attached. Fleur Jaeggy and Nico don’t do that. Jaeggy writes in short, precise sentences that can feel almost unnervingly calm. Nico’s music after the…
A house is supposed to keep the worst things outside. You lock the door. Turn on a lamp. Learn which floorboard complains at midnight and which window swells shut every winter. Eventually, the rooms become so familiar that you stop really seeing them. Haunted-house fiction begins when that familiarity turns against you. The hallway is…
Mac Miller’s catalog is very easy to try to make a nice, tidy narrative out of. You know the version. The goofy Pittsburgh kid makes bright internet-era mixtapes about weed, girls, skipping class, and being young enough to think momentum might last forever. Then the backlash comes. Then the music darkens and he becomes the…
1983 is the year pop music starts acting like the camera is already in the room. You can hear it almost immediately. The drums hit harder and the synths get shinier. Hooks arrive cleaner, more repeatable. Hair, makeup, dance moves, lighting, jackets, poses, video concepts, all of it stops feeling extra. It becomes part of…
Some national literatures have a very obvious front door. Australian literature, in my experience, does not. You do not walk in and immediately get one neat, official mood. You get a haunted house in Perth, a group of schoolgirls vanishing into a landscape that refuses to explain itself, a feverish explorer trying to cross a…
Let’s face it, Yukio Mishima has one of the worst biography-to-book ratios in literature. Before most readers get near the novels, they already know the body-building, the politics, the theatrical self-creation, the nationalism, the spectacular death, the whole impossible legend. It all arrives first, loud enough that the fiction can start looking like evidence in…
Nina Simone did not leave behind one road, she left escape routes. That is why her influence is so hard to map. Some artists create a sound that later musicians follow. But where do you put someone who was trained as a classical pianist, worked in jazz clubs, sang blues and folk songs, turned standards…