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Hot Pink: by Adam Levin
Adam Levin’s The Instructions should have been a bigger deal. Sure, it received a fair amount of publicity and rave reviews when McSweeney’s published it in 2010, but insular literary credibility isn’t enough for
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Turing’s Cathedral: by George Dyson
It doesn’t matter whether you’re reading this review on an e-reader, laptop display, mobile device or silicon-wired oracular implant, that device is parsing countless pieces of information and acting on them in the exact
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Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices: by Noah Feldman
“So there’s this Yankee, a Westerner in a cowboy hat, an ex-Klansmen and a Jew…” Though this may sound like the beginning of an off-color joke or the panel for a trashy daytime talk
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The One: The Life and Music of James Brown: by R.J. Smith
While it’s only been five years since his death, reading about James Brown today feels almost like studying Greek mythology. As influential as he was infamous, Brown is rivaled only by Elvis Presley and
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The Vanishers: by Heidi Julavits
Give Heidi Julavits credit for swagger. In The Vanishers, she walks right up to the endless trend of paranormal/fantasy/genre saturation in fiction, and then promptly turns around and heads in another direction—in a dozen
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Silver Sparrow: by Tayari Jones
For children, sharing the same toy can be a struggle. The boundary between “mine” and “yours” is programmed at an early age, and the concept of unfairness can be understood and fussily asserted by
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The Flame Alphabet: by Ben Marcus
Language can be weaponized even under the most banal of circumstances. Like any other manmade tool, language is neutral in itself, but when wielded by humans it can be used for both creation and
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Arguably: by Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens may have been intelligent, but as a writer he had the gift to make his readers smarter. Though cocksure and quite often smarmy with his opinions, Hitchens did not hoard his intelligence
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Root For the Villain – Rap, Bullshit and a Celebration of Failure: by J-Zone
The music autobiography is often one of embellished claims of debauchery and inflated egos. While they can make for interesting first-hand accounts of important cultural movements or introspective character self-studies, the author most likely
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Fresh at Twenty: The Oral History of Mint Records, 1991-2011: by Kaitlin Fontana
Oral histories can be notoriously unreliable: they’re entirely at the mercy of its contributors’ sometimes faulty memories, tendencies to whitewash certain events while mythologizing others and petty desires to settle old scores or otherwise
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