By: Mark Kingwell

The Trinidadian Marxist and cricket expert C. L. R. JAMES (1901-89) pioneered what is now known as post-colonial thought, but did so by being thoroughly colonial. After attending school in the West Indies, James pursued […]

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: Franklin Bruno

Interviews with TODD HAYNES (born 1961) are well-stocked with the film-studies and queer-theory jargon the filmmaker absorbed at Brown and Bard, and several of his movies have the air of academic exercises, at least on […]

By: Mimi Lipson

The documentary films of FREDERICK WISEMAN (born 1930) are usually set in institutions and have institutional titles like Hospital and High School and Welfare. His work is often called cinéma vérité, but it’s a term […]

By: David Smay

There’s no point being dainty about it; Dirty Plotte means dirty cunt. Which evokes the blunt pleasure of JULIE DOUCET’s (born 1965) most famous work, but undersells its artistry and gleeful humor. Her cartoon “If […]

By: Tor Aarestad

Nephew of philosopher W.V.O. Quine, and cousin to the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, ROBERT QUINE (1942-2004) spent the peak of his musical career in the penumbra of such innovators as Richard Hell and Lou Reed, […]

By: Douglas Wolk

MARIANNE FAITHFULL (born 1946) is the rare pop musician who’s turned her comeback into the main body of her work. The initial phase of her career — in which her persona was a posh debutante […]

By: Mark Kingwell

GUY DEBORD (1931-94) was a founder and key intellectual figure in the Situationist International, an avant-garde Marxist collective influential in postwar France, especially during the 1968 uprising in Paris. Debord’s book The Society of the […]

By: Lynn Peril

A virtuoso pianist with a biting wit, OSCAR LEVANT (1906-72) was equally at home with Schoenberg’s atonalism and Gershwin’s jazzy rhapsodies, dated a series of Broadway chorus girls, acted alongside stars like Fred Astaire and […]

By: Annie Nocenti

His books were banned in America for decades, sparked a groundbreaking “obscenity as literature” debate, and were a seminal part of the sexual revolution. “This is not a book,” HENRY MILLER (1891-1980) wrote in Tropic […]

By: Douglas Wolk

For somebody who’s been batting out the hits for thirty years now, ANNIE LENNOX (born 1954) sure doesn’t make a big deal about it: she’s a consistent, reliable entertainer who sails wherever the winds of […]

By: Patrick Cates

I confess: I have a personal stake in lauding LEMMY (born 1945), Hawkwind alumnus and Motörhead frontman, and celebrating his status as a hard-living, hard-playing stalwart of British rock. One of the first albums that […]

By: Lynn Peril

HARRIET MONROE (1860-1936) was the original zinester. In 1912, at the age of 51, the former Chicago Tribune art editor and moderately successful poet (her “Columbian Ode” — “Columbia! Men beheld thee rise/A goddess from […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Even if Brooklyn-born JEAN­MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-88) had never taken brush (or spraycan) to canvas (or wall, or door panel, or helmet), he would merit a berth in New York cultural history for producing K-Rob and […]

By: Erik Davis

Of all the hilo heroes of American music, only FRANK ZAPPA (1940-93) turned the scramble of the brainy and the base into an aesthetic practice so strident it counts as an ethical philosophy. The dialectic […]