He won the Giant Bible of Mainz in a poker game.

Which of the four hot sauces rules your personality?

The Venn Platter explains the culinary world.

Umami is the savory opium of the people.

Tom Nealon’s Foucauldian-condimental history of the West.

He was the void around which orbited a magnificent pantheon.

The parataxic pyrotechnics of hip-hop’s Ishmael Reed.

He saw and rejected the end of post­modernism.

Recovering the tomato’s place in cannibal cuisine.

His criticism was easy to parody, infuriating, and brilliant.

DAVID CRONENBERG (born 1943) has been lauded for his blurring of boundaries…

Mayonnaise: the sauce that launched a thousand ships.

His head-on col­lision with con­sumer society’s mutat­ed yearning…

At Pazzo Books, the shop my brother Brian and I keep in…

Before Merry and Pippin, before Elvish, and before Orcs, J.R.R. TOLKIEN (1892-1973)…

With the profusion of anti-heroes on television in recent years, from Tony…

It’s true that guitarist and drummer J MASCIS (Joseph Donald Mascis, born…

If OL’ DIRTY BASTARD’s (Russell Tyrone Jones, 1968-2004) madness was a tumor…

It is as impossible to think of the 20th century absent Cosimo…

No anti- middlebrow in recent memory has gotten more mileage (and grief)…

Were his novels written by half-crazed, single-minded machines?

During the Reagan Era, CHUCK D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, born 1960), the…

Before NORTHROP FRYE (1912-91) there was no Literary Theory, only criticism. He…

It seems impossible that the various identities — Prince Rakeem, Bobby Digital,…