Sun, Sep 23 2018

I came across Young by way of her essay “The Midwest of Everywhere,” a short piece about a series of bizarre sights she claims to have witnessed first-hand in the American interior: Elephants browsing the banks of the Wabash river; an…

Heroes, heroes everywhere… Peeping the Justice League film for the thousandth time brought a thought to mind. That there are actually a lot of superhero movies out now and in the works. That superheroes are finally shedding decades of scorn…

The self-proclaimed 'Dean of American Rock Critics,' Robert Christgau was one of the pioneers of music criticism as we know it—the music editor of the Village Voice from 1974 to 1985 and its chief music critic for several decades after that.

“When you write my epitaph,” Elizabeth Bishop famously told the poet Robert Lowell in 1974, “you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” The sentiment was hardly new for her. She had written, between 1935…

In 2008, reknowned art critic Peter Frank noted that, “nothing focuses the mind on a design genre like its obsolescence.” Album art is indeed dead, part of an entire ethos that has also surrendered its vitality to Father Time. But…

During the last several years, the work of minimalist composer Julius Eastman has been rediscovered and celebrated by both scholars and musicians. Numerous tributes and performances have reclaimed a musical visionary whose death at age 49 in 1990…

October offers writers a bumper crop of writing conferences. There are no fewer than 38 conferences, retreats, expositions, and fairs this month, spanning the country. Genre-specific conferences include romance, science fiction, fantasy, children's…

In the published screenplay for The Big Lebowski, a character named “The Dude” is introduced in the stage directions as “a man in whom casualness runs deep.” Of all the Coens' movies, The Big Lebowski is, at least on the…

Bill Pierce/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images In 2011, the filmmaker and writer Errol Morris published a series of five articles that may rank as the oddest production of his long and varied career. The first began like this: It was…

The Times Literary Supplement – Sep 11, 10:50 AM

I was David Foster Wallace's worst friend. He would send me letters and I wouldn't answer them. He would send works in progress with forlorn notes. “You're under no obligation to read or to pretend you've read the enclosed”, he wrote…