By: Sarah Weinman

Alban Berg’s “Woz­zeck” in­fused atonal music with emotion­al power.

By: Mark Kingwell

Ordi­nary objects shim­mer with trans­cend­ent energy in Bishop’s poetry.

By: Patrick Cates

Adler want­ed to turn psycho­analysis into pragma for the people.

By: Lynn Peril

Meet the woman who trans­formed paleo­anthro­po­logical field re­search.

By: Lucy Sante

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

By: Joe Alterio

GEORGE A. ROMERO’s (born 1940) movies are charming, because they aren’t ashamed to send the same counterintuitive message, again and again. Before Romero, “zombie” was strictly a voodoo term; in horror movies, zombies were slaves […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Perfect detach­ment enables us to see things…

By: Brian Berger

EUCHRERISK, MERCI BUCKUP, AND MIND WHO YOU’RE PUCKING, FLEEBY.

By: Tim Carmody

Audio recordings of LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-67) are disarmingly contemporary. On those recordings, he sounds like no one more than his least likely heir, Allen Ginsberg, who borrowed both his incorporation of loose musical forms from […]

By: Matthew De Abaitua

GRANT MORRISON’s (born 1960) house was on a distinguish­ed street in Glasgow, purchased with the proceeds from his 1989 Batman graphic novel, Arkham Asylum. In the attic was a replica of his teenage bedroom; downstairs […]

By: Brian Berger

One of America’s greatest comic writers, RICHARD BRAUTIGAN (1935-84) was also, shockingly, one of its most successful. Raised in the northwest by a waitress mother, after a rough early adulthood (mental hospital, electroshock therapy) he […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Given his much-imper­son­ated rasp and gift for Menckenesque quips (“Horse sense is the thing a horse has that keeps it from betting on people”), it’s surprising to find W. C. FIELDS (1879-1946) telling Photoplay, as […]

By: Douglas Wolk

The greatest rapper of all time? That’s a contentious one. But if we rephrase it as “most quotable rapper,” then there’s a shoo-in: William Michael Griffin Jr., the god-on-the-mic better known as RAKIM (born 1968). […]

By: Brian Berger

How can something so goddamn loud be so mysterious? That’s only the most obvious question listeners to the explosive music of ELMORE JAMES (1918-63) will confront. His biography until age 33 tantalizes: raised in the […]

By: Sarah Weinman

Back Into Forward, JULES FEIFFER’s (born 1929) forthcoming autobiography, will devote a great deal of close attention to the impossibly long-legged, stretched-out figures who populate his cartoons — and who, the author claims, “take the […]