By: Lucy Sante

His best stuff hits the ear like music — dirty saloon music.

By: Lucy Sante

You are the host of a virus; the virus is life; you are fucked.

By: Lucy Sante

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART (Don Van Vliet, born 1941) is — like Thelonious Monk or Alfred Jarry — an artist who describes a world a few clicks away from the one that pedestrian sorts like you or […]

By: Lucy Sante

HANS MAGNUS ENZENS­BERGER (born 1929) is a poet, critic, playwright, translator, magazine editor, and author of children’s books about science and mathematics. He has often been called Germany’s greatest living poet. T. W. Adorno, introducing […]

By: Lucy Sante

No one has come closer than NESTOR MAKHNO (1888-1934) to establishing that paradox, the anarchist nation. Born in rural poverty in the Ukraine, he got his education as a teenager in prison, where he had […]

By: Lucy Sante

“Don’t waste time in mourning. Organize.”

By: Lucy Sante

JIM THOMPSON (1906-77) was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in a room above the jail, the son of a crooked sheriff. A good part of his destiny was cemented then and there. Early on he became […]

By: Lucy Sante

A great theorist and taxonomist of eroticism.

By: Lucy Sante

Like the ant, the teenage stoner labors ceaselessly and uncomplaining, pursuing an arduous task that casual onlookers would dismiss as pointless, yet which is essential to the little creature’s survival. Like the ant, the stoner […]

By: Lucy Sante

The first time I met Jean-Michel Basquiat was in November or December 1978, at the Mudd Club. His hair was dyed orange and cut very short with a v-shaped widow’s peak in the front. He […]

By: Lucy Sante

What caused me to pick this item out of the trash heap was not its title — there are better editions of DeQuincey’s book out there (if none so pocket-sized) — but its publisher. Appeal […]

By: Lucy Sante

This was the view out my back window in New York City for more than ten years. That time (1979-1990) was the heyday of Wild Style, when graffiti truly became an artform, as is documented […]

By: Lucy Sante

Reminiscing about my early days in the used-paper trade, I find that I can become tender if not actually moist-eyed at the thought of the publications that were both produced and purchased by the raincoat […]

By: Lucy Sante

Just about as rare as if it had never been published at all, this may be the only extant copy of Dave Carluccio’s only book — typed, photocopied, folded, and stapled by its author in 1980 […]

By: Lucy Sante

JOSEPH MITCHELL (1908-96) arrived in New York City from rural North Carolina the day after the stock market crashed in 1929. Following a few years as a newspaper reporter, he went to work for the […]