By: Matthew Battles

Kindle, iPhone: both are cool/irksome. But which device is the harbinger of Things to Come? Pointing out that “the Kindle is more like a 7-Eleven than a book,” Jason Kottke urges us to think of […]

By: James Parker

The owl and the pussycat went to jail, for something the piggy-wig said. They sat for a while with no hope of a trial, and paper bags over their heads, Till a man with dark […]

By: James Parker

Fiction being (if you’re doing it right) a slower and more ponderous process than journalism, it’s generally the novelists who arrive last at an epochal scene. In Britain, the publication this year of Ian McEwan’s […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Editor’s note: This is one of the most popular posts, traffic-wise, ever published on HiLobrow. Click here to see a list of the Top 25 Most Popular posts (as of October 2012); and click here […]

By: James Parker

If your father presided over a blood-drinking sex cult whose membership also included the mailman, the doctor, the town drunk, and representatives of the local judiciary; if you ran with wolves as a young person, […]

By: James Parker

Sprezzatura. If there’s a word guaranteed henceforth to discomfit the editors of The New Republic, that’ll be it. For it was under this romantic alias that Lee Siegel, TNR’s television critic, made some now-notorious appearances […]

By: James Parker

The first thing to be said about the concept of the “oral history,” as it applies to rock biography, is that Sigmund Freud — damn him! — has triumphed again. For what purer display of […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Skrulls hiding in great works of literature

By: James Parker

On January 16, 2004, outside the California courthouse where he had just been arraigned on seven counts of child molestation and two counts of administering an “intoxicating agent with intent to commit a felony,” Michael […]

By: Matthew Battles

I’ve been a mere lurker at Infinite Summer, the online book club which sprang up to honor the late David Foster Wallace by exploring his magnum opus, Infinite Jest. Thousands of people have participated in […]

By: James Parker

Director Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has many fine qualities, but they founder and die away to nothing on the eerie smoothness of his leading man’s chin. Johnny Depp may be beautiful, but […]

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: Matthew Battles

THE LIBRARY IS collapsing on itself, trying to digest itself. Renovation has turned the whole place into a vast construction site, where tradesmen build temporary walls surrounding temporary walls surrounding temporary walls, ad-hoc postindustrial labyrinths […]

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 […]