When people talk about Cormac McCarthy, they usually head straight for the monuments. There’s Blood Meridian, the terrifying one, the one with Judge Holden looming through American literature like a philosophical plague. There’s The Road, the ash-covered father-and-son novel that made a lot of readers sit very still afterward and call the experience “beautiful,” which…
I love a giant postmodern novel as much as the next person who has willingly carried around a book large enough to count as upper-body training. There is a real thrill to those huge, unruly systems-novels. Gravity’s Rainbow should feel overloaded. Infinite Jest should feel recursive and slightly unhealthy. Underworld should feel crowded with history…
Jason Isbell is one of those songwriters people love to name drop. You know the usual praise. The craft. The detail. The literary lyrics. The emotional intelligence. The sober grown-man songwriting. The devastating line about a marriage, a bottle, a town, or a memory that lands so cleanly you have to stop what you’re doing…
The scariest pleasures are not the ones that get old quickly. Those are easy. They disappoint you or make you feel bad fast enough that your self-respect has time to stage a small recovery. The dangerous pleasures are the ones that work beautifully. They work so well that the rest of life starts to look…
Don DeLillo is often talked about like a man who had a secret antenna installed somewhere in his skull. There’s the media static. The conspiracies. The terrorism. The celebrity culture. The markets. The screens. The academic absurdity. The fear of death humming beneath the supermarket lights. Read enough DeLillo and it can feel like he…
There are worse fates than being remembered for “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” Plenty of bands get stuck with a novelty hit, or one accidental smash that barely sounds like the rest of their catalog. Crowded House got stuck with one of the most graceful pop songs of the 1980s. That’s a better problem than most….
For many, South Korean literature arrives with something of an unexpected jolt. Maybe it’s The Vegetarian, where a quiet domestic premise turns strange and impossible to shake. Maybe it’s Human Acts, where history stops behaving like the past and starts pressing on the living. Maybe it’s Cursed Bunny, where capitalism, patriarchy, and general modern misery…
There is a kind of modern weirdness that can look like a supermarket aisle so overstocked it starts to feel theological under the fluorescent lights. Or maybe like a man in a too-large suit singing about air, cities, paper, buildings, and other things that absolutely should not feel this suspicious. And yet somehow they do….
If any discography deserves a ranking that feels slightly unstable, it’s P-Funk: two band names, one giant mutant organism, overlapping players, shifting labels and lineups, metaphysics, cartoon villains, liberation theology, and enough mythology to keep an entire comic-book imprint busy for years. Trying to turn all that into a neat ladder from worst to best…
1980s New York City certainly wasn’t tidy or coherent. It wasn’t one scene, one genre, one politics, one mood, one glamorous downtown myth lit just right for later documentaries. It was too loud for that. Too broke. Too ambitious. Too stylish. Too neglected. Too funny. Too angry. Too wired. Too full of brilliant ideas, terrible…