By: Tom Nealon

He saw and rejected the end of post­modernism.

By: Tom Nealon

Recovering the tomato’s place in cannibal cuisine.

By: Tom Nealon

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

By: Tom Nealon

DAVID CRONENBERG (born 1943) has been lauded for his blurring of boundaries between technology and the individual, but this praise has consistently missed the point, for his films have singularly denied the existence of any […]

By: Tom Nealon

Mayonnaise: the sauce that launched a thousand ships.

By: Tom Nealon

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

By: Tom Nealon

At Pazzo Books, the shop my brother Brian and I keep in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, I’ve learned that old books are funny things. Often you catch them looking at you sideways, across a room, and […]

By: Tom Nealon

Before Merry and Pippin, before Elvish, and before Orcs, J.R.R. TOLKIEN (1892-1973) saved Beowulf. In 1936, he published Beowulf: The Monster and Its Critics and forever changed the trajectory of the Anglo-Saxon epic’s critical reception. […]

By: Tom Nealon

With the profusion of anti-heroes on television in recent years, from Tony Soprano’s jolly murderer to House’s belittling a-hole pose and from Jack Bauer’s strident seriousness to Dexter’s huggable serial killer, it’s easy to forget […]

By: Tom Nealon

It’s true that guitarist and drummer J MASCIS (Joseph Donald Mascis, born 1965) and Dinosaur Jr., drunk on jangly post-punk-death-metal, gave birth to an especially virulent strain of impossible-to-enjoy alt-rock. Much of their later work […]

By: Tom Nealon

If OL’ DIRTY BASTARD’s (Russell Tyrone Jones, 1968-2004) madness was a tumor pressing on his genius and making it dance, it also caused him excruciating pain. His anguished, wailing stabs at song remain some of […]

By: Tom Nealon

It is as impossible to think of the 20th century absent Cosimo from The Baron in the Trees (1957), by ITALO CALVINO (1923-1985), as it is to think of the 19th without Raskolnikov, the 18th […]

By: Tom Nealon

No anti- middlebrow in recent memory has gotten more mileage (and grief) because of Middlebrow’s coopting efforts than TALIB KWELI (born 1975). Anointed the savior of hip hop after 1998’s brilliant Mos Def and Talib […]

By: Tom Nealon

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

By: Tom Nealon

During the Reagan Era, CHUCK D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, born 1960), the hard rhymer, gave us “My Uzi Weighs a Ton,” “Prophets of Rage,” and “Fight the Power,” not to mention Flavor Flav and the […]