Sometimes it’s fun to argue about lists. These rankings tackle novels, albums, and artists with both seriousness and play—countdowns that spark conversation as much as they offer perspective.
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…
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…
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…
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…
Ranking Mitski albums is tough. Do you want the guitar-burn Mitski, the one who sounds like she is turning humiliation into voltage before your eyes? Do you want the miniature-theater Mitski, where every song is a tiny stage with one spotlight? Do you want the early art-school version, all piano drama and self-conscious collapse, where…
Freddie Gibbs is one of those rappers people are weirdly eager to explain through his collaborators. Which is flattering, I guess. Madlib gave him the dusty masterpiece. Alchemist gave him the cold luxury-crime records. Curren$y helped turn one of those Alchemist detours into a beautifully upholstered smoke session. All true and worth discussing. Still, if…
Milan Kundera is one of those writers who can make you feel very clever and very irritated at the same time. He is brilliant, obviously. He can turn one awkward sexual encounter into a philosophical trap before the character has even finished embarrassing himself. He can write about history without making people feel like props…
Italo Calvino is tricky to describe because he’s one of those writers who can sound insufferable if you do it badly. A novel made of imaginary cities. A book about you, the Reader, trying to read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveler. Cosmic stories narrated by an ancient being with the…
Meg Remy’s U.S. Girls began in the fog of tape loops, cheap percussion, voices buried under hiss, songs that sounded like they’d been recorded through a wall by someone who didn’t want the landlord to hear. Over time, the project grew bigger, brighter, weirder, meaner, and more glamorous. Glam rock kicked the door in. Synth-pop…
Aldous Harding makes catchy songs that don’t initially seem like catchy songs. Her music is not difficult in the sense of being harsh or overloaded. A lot of it is pretty. Some of it is funny. Plenty of it gets stuck in your head, although usually after sneaking in through a side door and pretending…