best music essay books

Six Books That Music Lovers Should Read

Because music is uniquely tied up with memory, the best writing about it inevitably gets personal.

Music, of all art forms, is uniquely tied up with memory. It’s stitched into the fabric of daily life: Think about the mixtape you made for your first crush, the pop star whose posters were plastered in your teenage bedroom, the album that got you through your divorce, the jam band whose tour you followed across the country. All provide tantalizing insights into your past—and present—selves.

It’s no wonder, then, that the best music writing gets personal. The writer can turn herself into a prism, refracting her subject, allowing us to see its components. Why does this song move me? she asks. Why does this band matter to me? And most important: Why should we care? The ability to answer this last question can distinguish a good critic from a great one.

In her 1995 essay “Music Criticism and Musical Meaning,” the musician and philosopher Patricia Herzog wrote, “For interpretation to carry conviction, it must be based on intense appreciation—indeed, on love.” These six books masterfully explore what the songs we cherish (and, in one illuminating case, hate) reveal about us.

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest , by Hanif Abdurraqib

Abdurraqib’s music writing proves that criticism and memoir are inextricable. His essay collections, A Little Devil in America and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us , look as intimately at the output of artists including Aretha Franklin, ScHoolboy Q, Don Shirley, and Carly Rae Jepsen as they do at the author himself. Go Ahead in the Rain , his homage to the trailblazing hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, is another shining example of this signature approach. As a “decidedly weird” teenager at the turn of the ’90s, forever plugged into his Walkman, Abdurraqib fell in love with the group—especially founding member Phife Dawg—because he sensed that “they, too, were walking a thin line of weirdness.” Even at his most introspective, Abdurraqib embraces nostalgia without succumbing to it, and honors the experience of fandom while interrogating it. The book is ultimately an elegy: A Tribe Called Quest broke up in 1998, and Phife Dawg died in 2016, just after the band reunited to record its first new album in 18 years. “A group like A Tribe Called Quest will never exist again,” Abdurraqib writes. With Go Ahead in the Rain , he manages to both celebrate their achievements and “lay them to rest.”

Read: Phife Dawg’s walk on the wild side

Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste , by Carl Wilson

At the outset of this pivotal entry in Bloomsbury’s 33 ⅓ series of books (each focusing on a single record), Wilson—a critic and fairly omnivorous lover of music—professes his hatred for the Quebecoise pop diva Céline Dion. The book, he says, is an “experiment” intended to answer questions about taste, fandom, and popularity using Dion’s 1997 album Let’s Talk About Love as a case study. Wilson tries to uncover the reasons for the power-balladeer’s remarkable popularity, mining philosophy, sociology, history, and his own Canadian roots. He talks with diehard Dion fans and even attends a show of her Las Vegas residency, a “multimedia extravaganza” that surprisingly “coaxed a few tears” out of the freshly divorced author. Dion’s allure proves to be more complicated than expected, and his lines of inquiry lead him, by the book’s end, to examine the very purpose of music criticism itself. Wilson doesn’t exactly come out on the other side a Dion convert, but he acknowledges her widespread appeal to be not just valid, but valuable. “There are so many ways of loving music,” he concludes.

Nina Simone’s Gum , by Warren Ellis

In 1999, the Australian musician Warren Ellis attended a performance by Nina Simone. After the show, he snuck onstage and swiped a piece of chewed gum that Simone had stuck to the bottom of her Steinway. Twenty-two years later, Ellis’s obsession with this bit of refuse spawned this mixed-media memoir, which interweaves text and images to exalt the everyday objects and experiences that represent “the metaphysical made physical.” In it, he recounts how he took Simone’s gum with him on tour, wrapped in the towel she’d used to wipe her brow during the concert—a “portable shrine”—before storing it in his attic for safekeeping and, finally, making a cast of it for posterity. He describes the concert with pious zeal—it was “a miracle,” “a communion,” a “religious experience.” He’s self-aware enough to know his devotion is odd, but not self-conscious enough to let that stifle the joy it brings him. In a screenshotted, reproduced text exchange from 2019 with his friend and frequent collaborator Nick Cave, Ellis reveals that he kept the gum. “You worry me sometimes,” Cave replies. “Haha,” Warren writes back. “I guess I do.”

Read: Nina Simone’s face

I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton , by Lynn Melnick

During what she calls “the worst year of my adult life,” Melnick, a poet, went to Dollywood, the country icon Dolly Parton’s Tennessee theme park. Part retreat, part pilgrimage, her trip moved her to write I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive , a memoir that puts her harrowing story into conversation with Parton’s biography—and discography. Across 21 chapters, each cleverly pegged to a different song (the book’s structure alone makes it worth picking up), Melnick, a self-professed “diehard Dolly fan,” recounts a life marred by drug addiction, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. Along the way, she looks to Parton as a model of resilience, gleaning lessons from her nearly six-decade career and interviews. She also unspools the tensions in Parton’s hyperfeminine persona, which leads to a broader consideration of women’s self-fashioning. The author writes with remarkable vulnerability and candor yet ensures that the often-painful memories she relates don’t cloud her critical gaze. She moves gracefully between confessional and analytical registers, her prose both sharp and full of heart.

My Pinup , by Hilton Als

Als’s ambivalence toward Prince’s mutable persona propels this slim memoir about aura, authorship, and authenticity . As a young man at the turn of the ’80s, Als admired how the singer-songwriter embodied Black queerness with his bombastic androgyny and genre-bending virtuosity, and he was awed by the way Prince flouted the rules of race, gender, and sexuality to “remake black music in his own image.” So he experienced a sense of betrayal when, for albums such as 1999 and Purple Rain , Prince took to tailored suits and poppy hooks. “He was like a bride who had left me at the altar of difference to embrace the expected,” Als writes. “Could my queer heart ever let any of this go, and forgive him?” The parasocial relationship Als has with Prince is a rich site for study, on both a personal level (What does it mean to feel hurt by someone you don’t know?) and a political one (What does it mean to endow one person with so much representational power?). That parasociality is finally shattered when Als is sent to interview his idol during Prince’s 2004 Musicology tour. Here, the book’s knotty, conflicted emotions come to a head. During their interview, on a whim, Prince asks Als to write a book with him; Als demurs. “I could not look at Prince,” he writes. “Nor could I look away.”

Read: Prince the immortal

Why Solange Matters , by Stephanie Phillips

In this installment of University of Texas Press’s Music Matters series, Phillips makes a convincing case for the singer-songwriter Solange as one of our most important and ambitious chroniclers of Black womanhood. Phillips, a musician who plays in the Black-feminist punk band Big Joanie, draws amply from her own experience navigating mostly white musical spaces to trace Solange’s fraught history with—and radical defiance of—the music industry. Phillips is from England and the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, which helps her illustrate Solange’s impact beyond America for women across the Black diaspora. Phillips’s analysis, for instance, of When I Get Home , Solange’s full-length ode to her hometown of Houston, shows how the artist both leverages and transcends cultural specificity. But she has a particular reverence for Solange’s “zeitgeist-shifting” third album, A Seat at the Table , which, Phillips says, “felt like it was written specifically for me” when she first heard it. From across the Atlantic, she writes, Solange “gave me space to learn to love … my Black girl weirdo self.”

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7 Essential Books on Music, Emotion, and the Brain

By maria popova.

MUSICOPHILIA

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC

Never ones to pass up a good ol’ fashioned erudite throw-down, we can’t resist pointing out that the book’s final chapter, The Music Instinct , may be the juciest: It’s a direct response to Harvard psycholinguist Steven Pinker , who in a 1997 talk famously called music “auditory cheesecake” and dismissed it as evolutionarily useless, displacing demands from areas of the brain that should be handling more “important” functions like language. (Obviously, as much as we love Pinker, we think he’s dead wrong.) Levitin debunks this contention with a mighty arsenal of research across anthropology, history and cognitive science, alongside chuckle-worthy pop culture examples. (It’s safe to assume that it was musical talent, rather than any other, erm, evolutionary advantage, that helped Mick Jagger propagate his genes.)

MUSIC, LANGUAGE, AND THE BRAIN

Patel also offers this beautiful definition of what music is:

Sound organized in time, intended for, or perceived as, aesthetic experience.

It’s worth noting that Music, Language, and the Brain makes a fine addition to our list of 5 must-read books about language .

LISTEN TO THIS

MUSIC, THE BRAIN AND ECSTASY

THE TAO OF MUSIC

MUSIC AND THE MIND

— Published March 21, 2011 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/03/21/must-read-books-music-emotion-brain/ —

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Best music books: Writers with that musical ear and something to say

From stuart bailie on belfast’s terri hooley — 75 revolutions, to martin popoff’s the who and quadrophenia … and much more.

Terri Hooley in his shop Good Vibrations in Belfast. Photograph: Fishman/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Some birthdays need to be celebrated, and none more so, perhaps, than the 75th of Belfast’s Terri Hooley, the Good Vibrations record shop/label owner, the DJ, and the enduring symbol of where there’s a will, there’s a way. “Bullied at home and derided at school,” writes Belfast-based writer Stuart Bailie in Terri Hooley — 75 Revolutions (Dig With It, £18.99), the subject is a crucial cultural figure who “rejects the bigotry, bad faith, avarice and poor vision that damage our civic life …” Bailie’s intentions, however, lay not so much in going over the past (which, of course, he does with no small skill and handfuls of insight and kindness) but “to locate Terri in the now. After 75 rotations around the sun, how does it feel?” The storyline drifts from Bailie’s memories (as a punk rock teenager frequenting Belfast venues such as The Pound and the Harp Bar, he recalls Hooley “rousing the kids, prepping them with power chords and insolence”) to contemporary interviews with him (”I’ve always hated the music industry with a passion”). The upshot is a book that applauds the virtues and understands the flaws of a unique individual who, says Brian Young of the band Rudi, rejoiced in “the value of the DIY ethic and the power of self-reliance and initiative.”

Also celebrating a 75th anniversary is commercial vinyl, which is celebrated in swish coffee table style by In the Groove: The Vinyl Record & Turntable Revolution (Quarto, £28). Co-written by five well-regarded music writers (Matt Anniss, Gillian G. Gaar, Ken Micallef, Martin Popoff, and Richie Unterberger), and sectioned into five chapters, numerous bases are covered for, essentially, new or casual fans of vinyl. The premise is simple but effective: outline the history, manufacturing, aesthetics, culture (browsing, buying, collecting) in a writing style that won’t cause Greil Marcus to furrow his brow — and then make sure the text is enveloped by eye-catching design. It’s winning blend of information and images, with snappy inserts highlighting legendary record labels (Sun Records, Folkways, Tamla Motown, Blue Note, Stax, Factory), remarkable record stores (Los Angeles’ Amoeba Music, London’s Rough Trade, Tokyo’s Tower Records), iconic covers (Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures), and the psychology of A-Z filing.

Another celebration in print — this time the occasion of the 50th birthday of Quadrophenia, the 1973-themed album by The Who. While the album has been lauded as a notable example of “rock opera” (and regarded as The Who’s most cohesive record), little has been seen in print to document its significance. Cue The Who and Quadrophenia , by Martin Popoff (Quarto, £35). As birthday presentations go, it is an impressive artefact with high-end design principles enveloping detailed text (The Who’s role in Mod culture, recording sessions, song-by-song breakdowns, band member biographies, post-album activity, the 1979 film adaptation) and many vivid performance and off-stage photographs. There is also detail on matters that only a Who obsessive would want (tour dates, discography, charts/sales rankings, ephemera), but overall, this is a fine tribute to an enduring album and its makers.

As each year passes, there are Bob Dylan books coming out of the walls, but Bob Dylan: Mixing up the Medicine , by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel (Callaway Arts, €95) is something different, you might say special. The reason is that it’s authorised by the Bob Dylan Center (located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA), which for Dylan fans, pupils, and scholars is akin to holding on to the Holy Grail. As the authors were handed the keys to the heretofore locked archives, previously unavailable (or unknown) material was accessed, but there is much more than draft lyrics, drawings, images, personal documents, recordings, et al. The meat of the book is the collection of 30 original essays by the likes of Peter Carey, Amanda Petrusich, Ed Ruscha, Greil Marcus, Michael Ondaatje, and Lucy Sante. For those who like to either flick through Dylan’s back pages or study them, this coffee table book is nigh on unbeatable.

Sarah McNally moved to New York, worked in a bar: A very Irish life, cut violently short

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Mark Knopfler on the end of Dire Straits: ‘Maybe I should have kept playing, let it get as big as Brazil’

Developer Johnny Ronan emerges as owner of Dublin city’s only private park

Another notable coffee table book for the devoted fan is Curepedia — An A-Z of The Cure , by Simon Price (White Rabbit, £35). To say that Price has uncovered everything that a Cure obsessive might want to read about Robert Smith’s band is a vast understatement, but to the author’s credit he just doesn’t stick to the facts and figures. Alongside microscopic analysis of concerts, singles, albums, bootlegs, and industry issues (including Smith’s recent contretemps with Ticketmaster), he also offers a broader and informed overview of how the band’s music aided investigations into mental health and the less explored areas of male sensitivity (when The Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry was first released, in 1979, writes Price, the phrase toxic masculinity “was non-existent”). There are some interesting Irish snippets of information included, too: the first song the teenage Cure played was a cover of Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak, and Paul Bell, the lead singer of ‘80s Irish band Zerra One, once recorded with The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst for a splinter group project.

Former Sonic Youth’s guitarist Thurston Moore begins Sonic Life — A Memoir (Faber, £20) with an epiphany: when he was five years of age, he heard Louie Louie, by The Kingsmen. The song was, he writes, “a seductive noise machine from on high” and the start of his obsession with music that more often than not was left of centre. From visiting New York’s downtown music scene in the late ‘70s to see bands (“our punk rock voyages”) to co-forming Sonic Youth in 1980, Moore and his bandmates aimed to redefine the parameters of what would be considered dissonant music. As if to prove his point, there is a blurry home photograph of Moore, eyes closed, listening blissfully to Lou Reed’s atonal/white noise 1975 album, Metal Machine Music (“on heavy rotation”). In what is a finely written and detailed book (albeit with minimal comment about his private life or the fallout of his 27-year marriage to Sonic Youth co-founder Kim Gordon), Moore’s path as an acutely attuned intellectual misfit continues.

As does Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who in the introduction to World Within a Song (Faber, £14.99) reveals that “I don’t know what I’m doing, and I probably don’t have any business writing another book …” The subtitle (Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music) acts as a spoiler as Tweedy writes about not only 50 songs that were pivotal episodes in his creative development but also asks fundamental questions such as why people love music, and how certain songs act as lightning rods for ourselves and others. A mere three songs are from the 2000s (Rosalía’s Bizochito, Arthur Russell’s Close My Eyes, Billie Eilish’s I Love You), which testifies to the importance of music that seeps in during early years. In a neat surprise, Tweedy admits to not loving all of his selections. It pains him, he writes, to admit that Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water “made the first dent in my musical mind” and was the “first thing I ever played on a guitar”. Making belief transferable is what a great song is all about, Tweedy claims, pointing to Eilish’s I Love You as truthful enough “for all of us to feel it. There is no greater feat a songwriter can achieve.”

Tony Clayton-Lea

Tony Clayton-Lea is a contributor to The Irish Times specialising in popular culture

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The Best Music Books of 2022

Miki berenyi, ‘fingers crossed: how music saved me from success’.

Lush were rock stars back home in London. In the U.S., they were a Nineties dream-pop cult band, starring Miki Berenyi as the iconic chanteuse with the neon-scarlet hair. Fingers Crossed is her candid, often brutally hilarious memoir of the mid-level rock hustle in the shoegaze and Britpop scenes. But it’s also the story of a loud woman in a male world that plainly doesn’t want her there. She hits the Lollapalooza tour, flirts with fame, meets loads of misogynistic men, many of them in bands. Yes, she names a name or two. (Anthony Kiedis’ pickup technique gets high praise, though it doesn’t work on her.) But you don’t need to know a thing about Lush to love Fingers Crossed — Berenyi makes her story so relatable, so poignant, so emotionally intense, it’s an irresistible rush of a book. —R.S.

James Campion, ‘Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude”’

A fascinating deep dive into the cultural history of one song: “Hey Jude,” the Beatles’ biggest hit and in many ways their weirdest. It’s a seven-minute song, half of it giving up to the most indelible “na na na na” chant this side of “A Long December.” Paul McCartney wrote “Hey Jude” in a time of turmoil for both the world and the band, yet it’s been consoling and uplifting people ever since. Campion, who has written studies of Warren Zevon and Kiss, brings fresh insights to the question of why this one Fabs tune keeps resonating so widely over the years. You might have heard it so many times you can hum every “na na na na” in your sleep, but Take a Sad Song makes it feel brand-new — and makes it all sound better-better-better. —R.S.

Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan, ‘Faith, Hope and Carnage’

“Music has the ability to penetrate all the fucked-up ways we have learned to cope with the world,” Nick Cave says to his friend the journalist Seán O’Hagan early on in Faith, Hope and Carnage . The same could be said of death. The book, a 304-page conversation conducted during the early days of Covid, is styled in a stark Q&A format, but it is incredibly moving, hopeful, and at times very funny. While Cave muses about the power of art and tells “fucked up” tales of rock-star  shenanigans , the book’s power is its quiet but deep reflection on the obliteration of loss — particularly the death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015. Crushingly, in May, after the book was published, Cave’s son  Jethro Lazenby , 31, died. “Each life is precious and some of us understand it and some don’t. But certainly everyone will understand it in time.” Cave has no pat answers, but in opening himself up to the questions, he and O’Hagan provide more solace then scores of bestselling self-help books . —L.T.

Dan Charnas, ‘Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm’

In Dilla Time , journalist and New York University professor Dan Charnas delivers an authoritative biography and a provocative thesis: The enigmatic producer James “Dilla” Yancey invented a new metric structure of rhythm before passing away in 2006 at the age of 32. While Charnas illustrates his analysis with musical notations and Detroit city maps, he constructs a portrait of a quiet, wildly creative man from Conant Gardens whose life, lusts, and health were centered around his love for hip-hop culture. Elegantly written and deeply sourced, Dilla Time o ffers a story of a brilliant artist whose influence persists long after his death . —M.R.

Jarvis Cocker, ‘Good Pop Bad Pop: An Inventory’

As the slinky, pervy poet of Pulp, Jarvis Cocker wiggled his way into rock history with Nineties Britpop classics like “Common People.” But with Good Pop Bad Pop , he gives a delightful symposium from one of pop culture’s wisest, funniest philosophers. Cocker spends the book clearing out clutter from his tiny attic loft — old clothes, photos, ticket stubs, his first guitar. It’s a clever way to walk through his life story as a gawky kid, an obsessive music fan, an intellectual indie poseur. But he keeps returning to the eternal mystery: Why does pop trash play such a crucial role in our lives? As Cocker writes, “The idea that a culture could reveal more of itself through its throwaway items than through its supposedly revered artefacts was fascinating to me. Still is.” —R.S .

Joe Coscarelli, ‘Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story’

New York Times reporter Joe Coscarelli‘s Rap Capital offers a vivid account how rap music in Atlanta rose from the city’s Black community and created an industry stronghold for a generation of Black entrepreneurs. Through vignettes with the eclectic cast of characters that make the scene tick — rappers and businesspeople alike — Coscarelli paints a vivid portrait of the city’s unique wealth of talent and the opposing tensions inherent to Black wealth in America. The book’s concern with 2013 until 2020 lands right as the forces of racism and capitalism confronted the dawn of the streaming era. Throughout the book, Coscarelli makes complex business realities of the rap world feel colloquial. Streaming figures and social media followings all coalesce with the impressively sourced account of key moments in Atlanta rap lore. An essential history of one of rap’s most dynamic and influential movements. –J.I.

Bob Dylan, ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’

The songs Bob Dylan analyzes, from vintage country, blues, and R&B artists up through the Clash and Cher, aren’t remotely modern, and the philosophy is too male-centric. But in this idiosyncratic, sometimes maddening, and often wondrous and funny set of essays, he zeroes in on why certain songs and records work so well, and he sprinkles those observations with historical nuggets and even a few peeks behind the Dylan curtain (his views on divorce and touring). His riffs on the characters in the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” and Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider” are proudly uncouth, to say the least, and his takes on genuinely modern pop won’t make him any new fans. But the book adds up to a deeply personal tribute to the days when folk, country, and blues were the concrete-floor foundations of music, even if that era is now largely behind us. —D.B.

Michael Hann, ‘Denim and Leather: The Rise and Fall of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal’

Starting in May 1979, when the British rock weekly Sounds coined the term in a headline for a piece about a triple bill of Iron Maiden, Samson, and Angel Witch, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, as the London-based author Michael Hann argues, was when “metal as it came to be understood was codified.” A former Guardian music editor, Hann’s generous oral history starts with that canonical May ’79 show and ends when flagship NWOBHM band Def Leppard issued the studio-buffed, deca-platinum Pyromania in 1983. Denim and Leather taps into an enormous store of goodwill. This was a fan’s subculture, built on fanzines and tape trading, and the biggest stars are often the biggest fans, from Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott extolling the glam canon to Metallica’s Lars Ulrich recounting his famous 1981 trip to the U.K. to see Diamond Head, where he realized: “I could go back to America and do this myself.” —M.M.

Hua Hsu, ‘Stay True: A Memoir’

New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu met his best friend Ken in the 1990s when they were undergrads at UC Berkeley. It was a time when the music you liked was inextricably linked to your identity and personality, and Hsu sees it as a sign of “personal growth” that he can get along so easily with a Pearl Jam fan. “Yet the more we hung out, the less certain I was of these distinctions,” he writes. Ken was killed in a carjacking three years after meeting Hsu, and this gorgeous, generous-hearted memoir is both a fond remembrance of a pivotal friendship and a vivid reflection on coming of age in the Nineties. —M.M.

Steven Hyden, ‘Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation’

Steven Hyden is a brilliant rock chronicler, whether he’s writing about great bands or terrible ones. But with Long Road , as Eddie Vedder would say, he’s unleashed a lion. It’s a cultural/personal biography of Pearl Jam, the Nineties’ most popular rock heroes. What a weird story: Seattle punk dudes hit the big time, speak out about feminism and abortion rights, rebel against Ticketmaster, go in and out of style, yet refuse to die, with a Deadhead-level following. Hyden writes as a lifelong fan who’s listened to all 72 live albums from their 2000 tour. But Long Road is his opinionated account of why the music matters, how the music reflects the times, and how Pearl Jam’s story sums up all the ideals, dreams, and failures of Gen X. —R.S.

Greil Marcus, ‘Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs’

Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan is basically a sure thing, like Scorsese directing De Niro. Folk Music is The Irishman of this combination — elegiac, rough, languid, looking for new stories in the past, but finding old stories changing shape. The legendary music critic adds seven new essays to his Dylanology, which includes definitive studies like The Old Weird America and Like a Rolling Stone. In the finest and funniest chapter, Marcus discusses Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” revealing why it’s secretly the same song as “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” Almost 50 years after the classic Mystery Train (which isn’t officially about Dylan, but argues with him on every page), Marcus keeps chasing America’s greatest songwriter down the highway. It’s cultural criticism as a long-running detective story — and a musical love story . —R.S .

Marissa R. Moss, ‘Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be’

The first book from Rolling Stone contributor Marissa R. Moss is a masterful mix of musical criticism, interventionist history, and in-depth reporting that illuminates profound new insights about 21st century country music and its ongoing and ever-present structural gender inequities. Particularly revelatory are the well-researched, narrative-upending accounts of the Texas backstories of its three protagonists: Mickey Guyton, Maren Morris, and Kacey Musgraves. “This book is the story of how country’s women fought back against systems designed to keep them down,” Moss writes in the book’s introduction. “About how women can and do belong in country music, even if their voices aren’t dominating the airwaves.” By interrogating country music’s recent history while pointing toward a possible brighter future for the genre, Her Country is an urgent and vital history that comes at a much-needed time for an industry searching for its identity . —J.B.

Margo Price, ‘Maybe We’ll Make It: A Memoir’

Most musicians wait until their twilight years to tell their life story, but Margo Price has already lived many. Inspired by Patti Smith’s Just Kids , the 39-year-old country star’s memoir chronicles her tumultuous life pre-fame — you won’t find any rock & roll decadence here. Instead, you’ll get an account of a struggling musician and her partner encountering substance abuse, trauma, and poverty, with a relentless drive to survive and create music. It’s as heart-wrenching and unflinchingly honest as Price’s songs — you might rip through it in just one sitting. “I’m not proud of all of it,” Price tells us in an upcoming interview. “But the way I figure, we’re all going to die. I want to be real with people.” —A.M.

Richard T. Rodríguez, ‘A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk & U.S. Latinidad’

One of music’s long-running romances: the bond between British 1980s New Wave stars and their Latinx fans in the U.S. What is it about Adam Ant, Siouxsie, Boy George, or the Pet Shop Boys that inspires such devoción thousands of miles away? A Kiss Across the Ocean explores the question, with Rodríguez drawing on his own experience as a fan — growing up as a queer Latino teenager, in the hostility of Southern California, identifying with “these fabulously made-up creatures.” He examines why young fans keep hearing their own Latinidad in the glam weirdness of outsiders like Soft Cell, Bauhaus, Scritti Politti, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It’s an intriguing study of how music builds connections between different communities, and how pop desire translates over time and space. —R.S.

Jim Ruland, ‘Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records’

Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn started SST Records to put out his band’s music — because nobody else wanted it. Yet SST became the most legendary of American punk labels, the one every outlaw band wanted to be on. (Until they saw their royalty checks — or didn’t.) Jim Ruland tells the whole messy saga in his un-put-downable Corporate Rock Sucks . You might expect it to focus on the big names: Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, The Minutemen. But it covers every record by every obscure punk band in the story, upholding the legacy of Saccharine Trust and Würm. All these years, fans always wondered why the hell SST released so many Zoogz Rift albums, but it turns out most of the SST crew wondered the same thing. (“Sweet Nausea Lick” is still a banger, though.) A classic story: It begins with punk ideals, then ends with everyone hating each other and lawyering up. But in between, a heroic shitload of music. —R.S.

Danyel Smith, ‘Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop’

Danyel Smith — a writer, magazine editor, and host of the excellent podcast Black Girl Songbook — weaves together a unique memoir that mixes in the story of musical icons like Whitney Houston,  Maria Carey , and Aretha Franklin, as well as less celebrated artists like Marilyn McCoo, the Dixie Cups, and Deniece Williams. “I weep because I want Black women who create music to be known and understood as I want to be known and understood,” Smith writes early on. For readers of  Shine Bright , mission accomplished. —L.T. 

RJ Smith, ‘Chuck Berry: An American Life’

Chuck Berry did more than anyone to establish the lyrical and musical parameters of rock and roll. RJ Smith, author of the definitive James Brown biography The One , brings Berry to vivid life, doubly impressive given his subject’s legendary caginess. He lays the terrain so adroitly — from Berry’s St. Louis youth to his multiple imprisonments — that when tiny bombs go off, he doesn’t have to explain that they’re bombs; they resonate. Smith is also first-rate on the electric guitar’s galvanic effect on music and the culture at large. “You have to remember, we didn’t have anything to compare it to,” he quotes Phil Chess as saying of “Maybellene.” “This was an entirely different kind of music.” —M.M.

Jann S. Wenner, ‘Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir’

Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone as a 21-year-old Berkeley dropout in 1967 and conducted some of its most memorable interviews, including revelatory chats with John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Bono. But most music fans knew little about his incredible life until this year, when he published Like a Rolling Stone . It’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes journey through five decades of American musical and political history, a frank look at the challenges all magazine publishers face in the age of the internet, and a chance for Wenner to confront some of his deepest regrets. “This book is about my own nine lives and about my failure to observe posted speed limits,” he writes. “Our readers often referred to Rolling Stone as a letter from home. This is my last letter to you.” —A.G.

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12 Contemporary Books That Will Have You Rethinking Music History

The best contemporary music books on this list are specific and sweeping, creating new narratives that challenge dominant orthodoxy on music and its histories.

This list evaluates 12 of the most ambitious music history books from the last decade, ranked for quality and the degree to which they reveal and uncover new facts and interpretations. These music books often survey genres, themes, and/or music more broadly, though some are more successful than others.

The best books on this list are both specific and sweeping, using a particular lens to uncover larger issues. In addition, several of these books focus on gender and sexuality, all pointing to new directions in which music scholars, critics, and historians can point to the field. The focus here is on books that attempt to tell, retell, and/or create new narratives that challenge dominant orthodoxy on music and its histories.

12. The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs

Greil marcus, yale university press, 2014.

This is a nonlinear history of rock ‘n’ roll based on songs illuminating the genre’s key ideas or themes. The idea was a great one, and Marcus is one of our most important and brilliant critics and intellectuals. Unfortunately, not one of the generally incisive essays in The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs answers the question, how do these songs illuminate the history of rock ‘n’ roll? In addition to not addressing that conspicuous gap, Marcus’ book sometimes reads like a middle-aged straight white male music critic raving about the good old days (that never existed), especially when contrasting Etta James with Beyoncé. So, while Th e History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Song s is worth reading, it’s more insightful than it is useful for the field of music history.

11. Music : A Subversive History

Basic books, 2019.

I really wanted to love Gioia’s book. Music: A Subversive History contains useful interpretations for the field of music history about music’s connections to such unseemly matters as murder, sex, and trance, but it is so hung up on its own supposedly subversive interpretations that it fails to recognize how it’s points are not subversive at all .

Gioia fails to realize that subversion is contextual, and in the field of music history, a focus on supposedly colorblind universalism, as opposed to the differences between music cultures, reinforces dominant (white) ethnocentrism while ignoring, well, most of the world’s music. In addition, Gioia dismissing the previous four decades of music as lacking innovation is blatantly wrong and frankly lazy.

The narrative that Gioia, an eminent scholar on jazz and blues, paints here is seductive, but it is also unendingly condescending to other interpretations that might subvert dominant ideas and norms. Music: A Subversive History ‘s focus on the functional uses of music—more than the development of chords, harmony, and so forth—makes it more accessible to the average reader. However, it’s unfortunate that many who read it without knowing much about music history will find it to be subversive.

See also Chadwick Jenkins’ essay, “ Music History, the Conspiracy Theory : On Ted Gioia’s Music: A Subversive History”

10. Love for Sale : Pop Music in America

David hajdu, picador, 2016.

Here, with Hajdu’s book, is where the books on this list start getting good. Love for Sale is not as comprehensive as some, but it is one of the most accessible, witty, and insightful histories of American music that I have read. Love for Sale is one of several books on this list that includes personal history as part of the narrative. Despite moments when Hajdu sounds more like a critic than a historian, particularly regarding his views on contemporary pop and trends like Auto-Tune, the book manages to reveal much more about its subject than I anticipated. Hajdu’s research is excellent, and Love for Sale is more ideal for a general reader of American music and pop music than most others I’ve seen, including those above.

9. The Story of Music : From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Shaped Civilization

Howard goodall, chatto & windus / vintage, 2013.

While not the most absorbing narrative compared to Ted Gioia’s above book, The Story of Music is a better book because it feels more inviting to further listening, rather than obnoxiously snobbish, in its admitted didacticism. Goodall focuses on the development of music over time, especially European classical forms, and on formal characteristics like notation, harmony, and tuning systems. There is some social history and some international and non-Eurocentric coverage, including of Latin rhythms in jazz and classical and pop collaborations. For a condensed version of all of music history, this book does an excellent job.

8. Major Labels : A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

Kelefa sanneh, penguin , 2021.

In Major Labels , Sanneh focuses on the last half-century of popular music by tracing and connecting developments in rock, R&B, country, punk, rap, dance, and pop. The best thing about this book is its enthusiasm and openness to a wide range of music, infusing the reader with the joy of discovery. Sanneh is one of the best music writers I’ve ever read; his descriptions of songs and artists are impeccable, and his extensive use of sources in the music press is unique and illuminating. Given the instability and overlap of genres, however, Major Label ‘s “literally generic” framework isn’t always convincing.

Describing Black pop artists, including Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, as R&B because of their race–and not really tracing the development of pop, instead tracing the development of the philosophy of poptimism in the chapter on pop–undermines the virtues of a generic approach. In addition, no matter how much it sounds like common sense to define country music as white music for white people, ignoring issues of class and other racial groups’ involvement with country, scholars like Francesca T. Royster , Nadine Hubbs , and Diane Pecknold are rightly redefining that perception of country music.

So, while Sanneh’s focus on definitions is justified, Major Labels is both brilliant for its unique insights and frustrating for its re-inscription of dominant ideas about some genres. Like Hajdu’s Love for Sale , Major Labels is accessible and personal, but especially noteworthy, the prose is stellar.

See also Robert Loss’ essay, “ No Apologies : A Critique of the Rockist v. Poptimist Paradigm”

7. Country Music : An Illustrated History

Dayton duncan and ken burns, knopf , 2019.

Duncan and Burns’ work may be the best available survey on country music and its history because it tells a mostly convincing, though flawed, narrative without getting distracted by purism—which makes sense for a genre that was never pure. Duncan and Burns mostly made up for Burns’s disastrous  Jazz  documentary, which included glaring inaccuracies and very few commentators, with their surprisingly strong  Country Music  series. This companion book, though not the same without the music playing, betters the film by including crucial figures that the film overlooks, including Hank Snow and Don Williams.

Although Country Music and the miniseries often focus more on certain musicians’ lives than on the music and the business, they nonetheless do an admirable job of painting a broader picture of country music and its history than most people—whether country purists or radio programmers—would want. However, it’s not as progressive as it would like to think it is, as its limited focus on race leaves much to be desired, especially when compared to the scholarship of Francesca T. Royster, whose book Black Country Music : Listening for Revolutions , was recently released. That said, Country Music ‘s interviews with the likes of Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, and other giants of the genre make this a must-read, including for the archival photographs.

A recent list calls this the best book on country music ever, and it’s easy to see why. Despite being less comprehensive than Bill C. Malone’s landmark Country Music USA (reissued with coauthor Tracey E. W. Laird in 2018 for its 50th anniversary), Duncan and Burns’ Country Music may be as solid a survey of the genre as we’re ever going to get, even though it ends in the mid-1990s.

6. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé

Bob stanley, w.w. norton, 2013.

It may shock some that I rank Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! ahead of Sanneh’s Major Labels , but Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! is often more comprehensive, encyclopedic, opinionated, and inclusive than the more beautifully written book from Sanneh. Like Major Labels , however, Stanley’s book brims with the joy of discovery for all kinds of popular music, and Stanley, a British musician from the band Saint Etienne, manages to upend most clichés about music from a half-century while focusing more on the UK than a typical Americanist music text. There is a greater discussion of issues in class as well.

Many will disagree with Stanley’s assessments, including his notable lack of praise for the Clash. A weak point of Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! is frequent comments on artists’ physical appearance, but overall, this is a unique and strong survey of a half-century of music that educates and inspires with its love of pop. Stanley also recently released a prequel of sorts, Let’s Do It : The Birth of Pop , that looks promising as well.

5. David Bowie Made Me Gay : 100 Years of LGBT Music

Darryl w. bullock, abrams, 2017.

With an eye-catching title and some of the most impressive music history research of the last decade, Bullock creates an exceptionally useful text for highlighting LGBT contributions across music history of the last century. Although sometimes the book is gossipy, that quality can make David Bowie Made Me Gay more fun to read than a more dry, typical music history text.

Though some might find his “dishing” on musicians’ personal lives distracting, Bullock nonetheless reveals a plethora of new names, facts, interpretations, recordings, and other documents that add to the world’s understanding of music history. Bullock examines LGBT contributions in everything from ragtime to punk, electronica to country, and especially towards the end, his focus on transnational LGBT political issues and music gratefully works to decenter the U.S. and UK from how music history is often told.

See Megan Volpert’s review, “‘David Bowie Made Me Gay’ Raises the Question , How Do We Define LGBT Music?”

4. Shine Bright : A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop

Danyel smith, rock lit 101, 2022.

Smith’s Shine Bright is more autobiographical and less scholarly than, for example, such excellent books as Maureen Mahon’s 2020 survey, Black Diamond Queens : African American Women and Rock and Roll , or Daphne A. Brooks’ 2021 book on archives of Black female creativity, Liner Notes for the Revolution : The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound . However, Shine Bright is more important because it examines a wider range of music artists – from opera giant Leontyne Price to Mariah Carey, as well as less recognized artists like Marilyn McCoo and Jody Watley. Shine Bright is a larger investigation into how Black women in pop music, broadly defined, are often underappreciated and exploited, with their disproportionate contributions to the world’s culture overlooked. 

Smith’s research on the political economy of the music business highlights areas of culture that aren’t always discussed in journalism or scholarship. While Shine Bright is not as cohesive as a standard music history book, it is simultaneously more useful, joyous, and heartbreaking, as Smith weaves in her life story in ways that will make readers respond and want to engage more with the music and musicians she writes about. Smith convincingly shows why American music is built on the work of Black women. The audiobook of Smith reading Shine Bright enhances the experience and is well worth listening to.

3. Good Booty : Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music

Dey street, 2017.

Powers is easily one of the most important music writers of the last few decades, and in 2017 she published the best contemporary survey text on music history. This history of sex and American music is one of the most authoritative books on the importance of music I have ever read. Powers combines cultural history with sharp criticism, and the balance between criticism and history is a big part of why Good Boo ty ranks high on this list.

Though Powers is exceptionally insightful about well-known giants like Madonna and David Bowie, it is her uncovering of the roles of overlooked figures in gospel music and early pop that push Good Booty ahead of most in terms of its research. Powers’ focus on race as key in the history of sex and American music is critical, and her focus on geographic specificity makes it all the more significant for American Cultural Studies.

American music, Powers argues, is the primary medium through which we experience the erotic in the US. Many people view the study of music history as a boring buzzkill, but Good Booty is anything but that, adding to the joy and pleasure of great music.

See David Chiu’s review, “ Ann Power’s ‘Good Booty’ and the Connection Between Eroticism and Popular Music”.

2. The Meaning of Soul : Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s

Emily j. lordi, duke university press, 2020.

Though in some ways more an aesthetic survey than history, Lordi’s The Meaning of Soul may be the most important, game-changing book on soul—the music, the concept, and its history—ever published.

“Soul” is a famously amorphous term, but Lordi defines soul logic as resilience from struggle and argues for the late ’60s and early ‘70s, a time when women and queer people held greater dominance in the genre, as the peak period of soul music. This focus deviates from every other author on soul I’ve ever read, from Nelson George to Peter Guralnick to Mark Anthony Neal , and Lordi’s readings of practices like falsetto vocals and false endings show soul logic at work in a range of music across eras.

In The Meaning of Soul ’s conclusion, Lordi’s use of what she calls Afropresentism, as opposed to Afrofuturism, also deviates from contemporary thinkers and helps recenter soul logic in current times. Put simply, The Meaning of Soul is essential.

1. Glitter Up the Dark : How Pop Music Broke the Binary

Sasha geffen, university of texas press, 2020.

Geffen’s 2020 book is a gem. Glitter Up the Dark chronicles and argues for pop music’s critical role in disrupting dominant gender expressions and norms. Their arguments about the music of the last 60 years—from the Beatles to Prince and David Bowie to Frank Ocean and Perfume Genius—are revelatory. The gender binary, they argue, is not simply worth breaking; it has always been broken.

Geffen’s arguments about music and the body, the voice, and machines from recording technology through the internet age, disrupt conventional wisdom on music history and healing. Indeed, by the end, Geffen creates one of the most helpful and useful things a writer can give: hope for a more inclusive future.

Anyone interested in gender would benefit from reading Glitter Up the Dark, and music obsessives can find a plethora of new interpretations of music history as well. Ultimately, that is what the best music books can do.

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Five of the best music books of 2023

A celebration of dance music, a homage to the Cure, a deep dive into Black punk and more

Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor Emma Warren, Faber A dyed-in-the-wool clubber, Warren knows of what she speaks when it comes to the dancefloor: there is a lot of personal reminiscence in the endlessly fascinating Dance Your Way Home. But there’s also science, wide-ranging sociocultural history – folk dancing at Cecil Sharp House coexists with the rise of dubstep; Chicago footwork with the jazz-inspired ban on dancing in 1930s Ireland – and, more unexpectedly, a righteously angry polemical bent. Warren’s formative clubbing experiences were in the 80s and 90s, a golden era, simply because there were more venues. Clubs and youth spaces have since been decimated by councils and property developers, in a culture that, as Warren puts it, “fetishizes youth but doesn’t seem to like youth much”. She makes a compelling argument that dancing – and having the space to dance – matters: “You must let go of self-consciousness, embarrassment, pride and prejudice and embrace what you actually have.”

Curepedia: An A-Z of the Cure Simon Price, White Rabbit It’s tempting to describe the 448-page Curepedia as the ultimate toilet book for ageing goths, but that would be to underplay both the sheer breadth of information here – there are entries on everything from Albert Camus to intra-band bullying to Robert Smith’s relationship with the Japanese cult of kawaii, or “cuteness” – and how sharp its reading of the Cure’s oeuvre is. The opening entry on “the definitive Cure song”, A Forest, is more like a critical essay, involving The Wizard of Oz, Macbeth, the song’s ever-expanding length on stage and a contemporary critic’s appraisal of it as “moaning more meaningfully than man has ever moaned before”. Elsewhere, umpteen obscure facts are dug up – it’s hard not to warm to the sound of pre-Cure punk band Lockjaw and their big number I’m a Virgin – and the entry on Robert Smith’s regular suggestions that the band are about to split is hilarious. Curepedia functions as well as a definitive band history as it does something for that aunt still attached to her crimping tongs to keep in her bathroom.

Black Punk Now edited by Chris L Terry and James Spooner, Soft Skull Last year, the Los Angeles Review of Books published an article by “Black punk” writer Mariah Stovall, detailing an “incomplete” list of punk lyrics that used the N-word. It featured a lot of legendary names: Patti Smith, Stiff Little Fingers, the Dead Kennedys and Crass among them – proof, if nothing else, that punk’s relationship with race has been historically fraught. It’s a state of affairs that makes this compendium of work – in which Black figures from the contemporary US punk scene reflect on their experiences via memoir, fiction, interviews, even comic strips – all the more fascinating. Edited by author Chris Terry and James Spooner, co-founder of the celebrated global festival Afropunk, it takes an impressively broad view of what constitutes “punk”. Defining the term, suggests contributor Hanif Abdurraqib, “is the least interesting debate that can be had” – and while what the writers in Black Punk Now have to say makes for occasionally, and not unexpectedly, grim reading, the book is ultimately a celebratory and inspiring collection.

Queer Blues: The Hidden Figures of Early Blues Music Darryl W Bullock, Omnibus Bullock has form when it comes to uncovering buried stories about music’s queer history: his brilliant 2021 book examining the preponderance of gay men in 1960s pop management, The Velvet Mafia, deservedly won awards. His exploration of LGBTQ figures in America’s early 20th-century blues scene delves deeper still: Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith’s bisexuality is well known, while Jospehine Baker’s impressive list of lovers has long been rumoured to include not just Georges Simenon and Le Corbusier but Frida Kahlo and Colette. But Bullock digs up a host of intriguing lesser names – Porter Grainger, the gender fluid Freddie “Half-Pint” Jaxon – and vividly draws a world of drag balls, rent parties and remarkably explicit homoerotic blues songs flourishing in the face of violent prejudice and illegality.

Reach for the Stars 1996-2006: Fame, Fallout and Pop’s Final Party Michael Cragg, Nine Eight This year has seen a glut of nostalgia for one form of 90s and early 00s music: Blur released a new album to critical acclaim, Pulp reformed for live shows to general delight and, at the time of writing, Oasis’s 1998 B-sides compilation The Masterplan, remastered and re-released, is heading towards No 1 in the UK album charts. But there were always other options, and Guardian writer Michael Cragg’s oral history of 90s and 00s manufactured pop feels perfectly timed: enough water has passed under the bridge that his interviewees, whether iconic or forgotten, feel able to speak freely. The sundry Spice Girls , S Clubbers and Girls Aloud paint a picture of a less self-aware, less polished pop era than the one we currently inhabit – it’s striking how distant it all seems – that’s alternately funny, shocking and profoundly depressing, but always enthralling.

To browse all music books included in the Guardian and Observer’s best books of 2023 visit guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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The Best Music Books of 2023: Lou Reed, Britney Spears, Sly Stone, Girl Groups and More

By Jem Aswad

Executive Editor, Music

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Every year we start off this column in the same way, with a “so many books, so little time” caveat and noting that it represents just a fraction of the fine music tomes released over the past year. And every year, we hope to spread the word on the excellent volumes that we actually managed to finish. The art of the music book is more alive than ever: Dig in…

(Additional contributors: A.D. Amorosi, Steven J. Horowitz and Chris Willman)

“But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz — Girl group fans, stop what you’re doing right now and order this masterfully reported and compiled oral history of the era and the sound. Named, of course, after the Gerry Goffin-Carole King-penned Shirelles song that was their first hit and a prototype of the sound, the book starts off with the dawn of the girl groups — the Chantels, the the Clickettes — but quickly moves into the Bacharach-David hits of the Shirelles and of course the boom, the Shangri-Las and the Phil Spector-produced hits by the Crystals, the Ronettes, and especially Darlene Love, whose voice is one of the defining sounds of girl groups but was often buried (with characteristic controlling behavior) by Spector under a variety of different names. But what comes across most in these stories is how young these singers were — many were just out of if not still in high school — and the abusive behavior they endured in the brutal music business of the era. All of them were cheated; most were treated horribly; many were Black performers facing the perils of traveling through the segregated South on tour; some were sexually assaulted, and nearly all of them were too young or naïve to understand how that what was happening was wrong. Also uncovered is the story of Florence Greenberg, possibly the first female modern label owner and A&R person, who founded Scepter Records and steered the Shirelles’ career. Props and a resounding heavenly sha-la-la chorus to Flam and Liebowitz for getting so many of these people — not just singers but songwriters, producers, business executives and more — to tell their stories, and preserving them for the ages.

“My Name Is Barbra” Barbra Streisand — You can’t exactly say Streisand didn’t stretch herself across disciplines over the course of her six-decade-plus career — concert performer, recording artist, actor, director, producer — but the surety of the prose in “My Name Is Barbra” suggests she undertapped herself in at least one area: as a (non-screen) writer. When in the past she took pen to paper — literally; Streisand says she can’t type, so she writes in longhand, it’s been an occasional dip into topical events (see her Variety essay “ Why Trump Must Be Defeated in 2020 ”), but that kind of commentary carried the solemnity you’d expect from her uber-diva rep. Not to say that her autobiography is then completely a barrel of levity. But her sly sense of humor is just one of the disarming things about a book so charmingly conversational, you’d swear that implicit within it is an invitation to come over for a game of Rummikub and some McConnell’s Brazilian ice cream. (Don’t try this at home, of course.) Come for the hundreds or thousands of fairly down-to-earth asides within its 970 pages, then stay for the erudite commentary on movies and music… that just happen to be mostly her own. She offers full, satisfying chapters on films that are as essential to the 20th century canon as “The Way We Were” or as relatively obscure as “Up the Sandbox” that — maybe surprisingly to some — prove once and for all that she was paying as much close attention to her colleagues’ contributions as her own. On the music side, she’s just as objective and candid, offering fascinating assessments of how an “Evergreen” or “Way We Were” came to be… and also admitting she had no idea what the hell Laura Nyro’s “Stoney End” was about. Yes, the sheer heft of the physical edition is daunting, but you won’t wish it was only 600 pages, or 800, or even 960. — Chris Willman

“All You Need to Know About the Music Business: 11th Edition” Donald Passman  — Now in its 11 th edition, this book, written by one of the industry’s most prominent and experienced attorneys, remains the single best one-stop for learning about the music business. This latest edition updates many elements of the streaming business, and also includes a very clear-eyed take on AI and music and the still developing legalities around it. Passman’s tone is conversational but also no-nonsense — his conciseness and clarity, as always, break down the complexities of an extremely complex business into understandable elements without speaking down to the reader. Its very nature dictates that it’s hardly a page-turner, but Passman’s style is engaging and his expertise near-unimpeachable.

“World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music” Jeff Tweedy — The eternal darling of rock critics turns out to be an awfully good one himself. It would be self-serving, of course, to imagine that Tweedy took any lessons from the reams of rave reviews that have been written about his band or solo efforts over the years. This is as (almost) as much personal memoir as it is music criticism, holding in balance autobiographical elements and the truths about pop music we or he hold to be self-evident. You probably won’t even have to be a Tweedy fan in the slightest — although nothing about Wilco devotion will hurt — to find delight in his thoughtful but pithy chapters about why songs as disparate as “Both Sides Now,” “Dancing Queen,” “Takin’ Care of Business,” “I’ll Take You There,” “My Sharona,” Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre,” Rosalia’s “Bizcochito,” Billie Eilish’s “I Love You” and the Replacements’ “God Damn Job” mean something to him. This is a “favorite songs” book that belongs on the shelf next to Dylan’s “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” notwithstanding how Tweedy embraces the first-person approach as much as Dylan avoided it. If anything, Tweedy actually has more of an actual philosophy about songs than his admitted idol: “Loving one thing completely becomes a love for all things, somehow,” he contends — and as sweepingly optimistic a statement as that may be, damn if Tweedy doesn’t make you believe it, or at least aspire to it. — Chris Willman

“Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans” Kenneth Womack — The Fab Four had more than a few fifth Beatles (notably producer George Martin), yet none no one was as much of a constant in their lives, or for as long, as Mal Evans, their road manager, confidante, fixer and occasional musical contributor. Womack knows his stuff as a chronicler of Beatles lore with past volumes such as “John Lennon 1980: The Last Days in the Life” and “All Things Must Pass Away: Harrison, Clapton, and Other Assorted Love Songs.” But Womack is also a novelist and gives the little-known biography of this unlikely Beatles bud a sense of epic sweep, examining how a married-with-kids telecommunications engineer with zero music biz background became the Liverpudians’ go-to guy. Even Evans’ last year of life is the stuff of a novel: His wealth of unpublished archives, journal entries and other reminiscences were scheduled for his own book, titled “Living the Beatles’ Legend,” until he met a tragic end so strange that you have to read Womack’s account. Through Evans’ mind’s eye and recollections, and a wealth of fresh interviews, Womack pieces together the days in the life of one of the music business’ most colorful and previously unheralded characters. — A.D. Amorosi

“All the Leaves Are Brown: How the Mamas & the Papas Came Together and Broke Apart” Scott G. Shea — As the friendly face of hippiedom, the Mamas & the Papas blazed across the TV screens and transistor radios of mid-‘60s America in a wash of glorious harmonies and good vibes, but it all turned dark very quickly. After the group’s origins in folk-era Greenwich Village, they found a welcome home in the burgeoning Los Angeles music scene and burned bright for a few vivid months — John Phillips penned some of the most distinctive songs of the era (from “California Dreamin’” to Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco”) and helped produce the groundbreaking Monterey Pop Festival; Cass Elliott was one of its most distinctive singers and Phillips’ wife Michelle was one of the most beautiful. But it all began falling apart almost as quickly as it came together — Michelle and bandmate Denny Doherty began an affair right when the group’s debut album was released — and it all spiraled in a cascade of jealousy and drugs, and John Phillips went on to become one of the most odious drug casualties in music history. The trainwreck of the group’s existence is recounted in vivid detail in Shea’s excellent history.

“Loaded: The Life (and Afterlife) of the Velvet Underground” Dylan Jones — In capturing such a wrenchingly unsentimental band, English journalist Dylan Jones manages to tenderly capture the love (then lore) that existed with all whom the Velvet Underground touched during their brief existence, the author included. Like many listeners who caught onto the Velvets’ mythology of hard drugs, S&M, discordant music and mercurial poetry at an age when they should still be riding bicycles, Jones found Reed, Cale and company through his youthful devotion to David Bowie, a subject on which the Brit has authored several books. While Nico, Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgewick are given a rarely seen openness, lesser-known names, such as actress Mary Woronov and the late visual artist Duncan Hannah, are so quick-witted and cattily humorous when recounting their personal recollections of the band, you almost don’t care if Jones also uses choice interview elements with actual Velvets, living (Mo Tucker) and deceased (Reed) to tell this full-figured literary tale. — A.D. Amorosi

“Prine on Prine: Interviews and Encounters With John Prine” Holly Gleason, editor — Gleason, a now-Nashville-based journalist, gets started with this collection of published conversations that Prine had over his five-decade career by noting that the revered singer-songwriter actually hated doing interviews. Thankfully, you’d never know it from this compendium, and maybe the man did protest too much: His sometimes acerbic songwriting not to the contrary, Prine came off as a Will Rogers-esque figure who never met a man he didn’t like, and that didn’t exclude the many interrogators that came to his door from the early ‘70s up until his untimely COVID-era passing. A few of the interviewers Gleason rescues from festering in moldy print or lost oxide are celebrities in themselves: Studs Terkel, Cameron Crowe. But he always gave even better than he got from the press, whether he was sharing the secrets of unassuming master-class songwriting or his pork roast recipe. Reading this book of his collected musings is the next best thing to getting just one more song. — Chris Willman

“60 Songs That Explain the ’90s” Rob Harvilla — This veteran of the Ringer and the Village Voice curates a Spotify music podcast based on the multi-cultural mien that made the ‘90s iconic, tying its tunes to culture, both then and in the present. Harvilla knows what made the mess and minutiae of the 90s tick and twitch, and brings his humorous yet incisive storytelling to Britney Spears, Guns N’ Roses and the sad and broken legends of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain. If you never really knew the correct lyrics to Hole’s “Doll Parts,” Harvilla rights that wrong; if you never really appreciated “I Will Always Love You,” he explains why you’re wrong not to adore Whitney Houston. If you ever forgot the deep spiritual bliss and interpersonal connection you got rattling through somebody’s CD collection or making a lover a mixtape, Harvilla brings it all back home, tenderly. — A.D. Amorosi

“Magic: A Journal of Song” Paul Weller with Dylan Jones — Weller, founder of the Jam and the Style Council, has a niche but fanatical following that will find a wealth of catnip in this lavishly illustrated book, which combines photographs from across his career with reminisces of the songs, the lyrics and their context. More of a career history than a personal one, Weller keeps his focus on the songs and the musicians, and the photographs show that the look of Swinging London, which he experienced as a child from the distance of suburban Woking, has never left him.

“Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy” Stephen M. Silverman — Since his passing in 2021, Stephen Sondheim has had no shortage of tributes. Along with his final, posthumous work, “Here We Are” (currently playing off Broadway), Sondheim musicals such as “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Sweeney Todd” are smash, sell-out hits on Broadway. “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” with Bernadette Peters, is running on London’s West End. Throw a rock in many major cities, and you’ll hit a revival or road tour of “Assassins” or “Company.” Beyond spending thousands of dollars to see these shows, the next best thing is this glamorous coffee table biography from Silverman, who knows the lay of the land and puts Sondheim in only the best light. This large volume offers some critical dissection of the composer-lyricist’s life and work, peering into the process of lesser-known Sondheim musicals such as “Anyone Can Whistle,” “Passion” and “Pacific Overtures.” Mostly though, the volume brims with archival photos of an artist who most shied from the camera, along with rare snaps of past productions such as “Follies,” “A Little Night Music” and his earliest Broadway triumphs, “West Side Story” and “Gypsy.” — A. D. Amorosi

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The 30 Best Books about Music

The best books about music translate this art form in ways we humans can appreciate. It’s probably no surprise to anyone that most humans enjoy music, so naturally the best books with musical themes cover plenty of topics. Whether you’re looking for the best music appreciation books, best books about the music industry, or the best books on music history, there’s something here for you on this mega list of the best music books.

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And now for an epic list of the 30 best books about music…

The beatles: the biography by bob spitz.

The first entry in this list of the best books about music starts with the definitive biography of The Beatles. Unlike many biographies of this iconic band, Bob Spitz’s book dispels the myths and lore that still surrounds what many consider the best band of all time. The result is an engrossing epic you won’t want to miss.

How to read it: Purchase The Beatles on Amazon

Choosing death: the improbable history of death metal & grindcore by albert mudrian.

In this intriguing book, one of the best rock music books, Albert Mudrian compiles the quintessential history of the death metal and grindcore subgenres. You’ll learn all about the rise of this kind of niche favorite music, with comprehensive guides to death metal and grindcore, including interviews, chapters on the historical origins of these subgenres, and can’t-miss-it essays by leaders in this corner of the music world.

How to read it: Purchase Choosing Death on Amazon

Every good boy does fine: a love story in music lessons by jeremy denk.

From concert pianist and MacArthur “Genius” grant-winning musician Jeremy Denk, a book that the New Yorker listed as one of the best of the year and one that certainly ranks on this list of the best books about music. In Every Good Boys Does Fine , Denk writes a tribute to the various music teachers in his life, from your friendly neighborhood piano instructor to elite professors. The result is a tender story that any classical music fan—or anyone who loves music—will enjoy.

How to read it: Purchase Every Good Boy Does Fine on Amazon

Every song ever: twenty ways to listen to music in the age of musical plenty by ben ratliff.

In Every Song Ever, New York Times music critic Ben Ratfliff takes a deep dive into the way we listen to music today in the digital age. Whereas once you had to hunt down obscure albums in record stores or hope to hear a song you loved on the radio, today you can easily explore more artists, bands, and genres with the click of a button. Ratliff focuses on universal music “traits,” like speed and virtuosity, helping readers become more familiar with how to listen. One of the best books about music, Every Song Ever will transform the way you hear music.

How to read it: Purchase Every Song Ever on Amazon

Fangirls: scenes from modern music culture by hannah ewens.

If you’ve ever wondered why Taylor Swift’s Ticketmaster ticket debacle crashed from too many people trying to buy tickets, this book will help you understand the power of the young women who are full-time fans of contemporary groups, bands, and solo performers. A celebration of fandom and the way younger fanatics steer music culture, Fangirls is a unique look at the people buying tickets, rocking merch, and living their best life celebrating the musicians they love. This affectionate love song to fans is one of the best music books.

How to read it: Purchase Fangirls on Amazon

Fargo rock city by chuck klosterman.

This music memoir—one of the best rock music books—tells the story of how cultural critic Chuck Klosterman became a metalhead growing up on a farm in the small, rural town of Wyndmere, North Dakota, with a population of less than 500 people. Among the silos and cows, Klosterman became a major fan of bands like Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses as he came of age as a culture-hungry kid in the sticks. Anyone who has ever looked back fondly at the way they experienced fandom while they were young will for sure identify with Klosterman’s tender, poignant, and hilarious memoir.

How to read it: Purchase Fargo Rock City on Amazon

Guitar zero: the science of becoming musical at any age by gary marcus.

The best books about music can also be about making music. Maybe you’ve thought about taking up a keyboarding hobby, but you felt like you were too old. Enter Guitar Zero , Gary Marcus’ book that you need to read. In Guitar Zero , Gary Marcus opens your world to learning how to be a musician no matter what your age. A cognitive neuroscientist, Marcus talks about the elasticity of the human mind to learn new things. Marcus reassures readers that you don’t have to be a piano prodigy by age 10. Instead, you can find a good instructional model, practice, and give it your all. It’s an inspiring book that argues you’re never too old to make music.

How to read it: Purchase Guitar Zero on Amazon

How music works by david byrne.

Looking for a primer on how humans relate to music? If so, you’ll need to check out David Byrne’s How Music Works . In this eye-opening book, Byrne translates the power of music as we humans experience it. From talking about how we create music to the distribution of music, Byrne has compiled a necessary book for anyone seeking to learn more about music that belongs on any list of the best books about music.

How to read it: Purchase How Music Works on Amazon

The indispensable composers: a personal guide by anthony tommasini.

Ever wondered how to get started with the vast world of classical music? If so, you need to pick up Anthony Tommasini’s The Indispensable Composers . As the chief classical music critic at The New York Times , Tommasini is the perfect person to give readers a tour through the most significant composers of classical music. Blending personal memoir with an accessible instruction manual on how to get started with classical music, this book is the perfect way to dip your toe into the realm of classical music and for sure among the best books on music history.

How to read it: Purchase The Indispensable Composers on Amazon

Just kids by patti smith.

This bestselling memoir by punk rocker Patti Smith won the National Book Award, and it’s not hard to see why. In Just Kids , Smith recalls her close friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. As they both made a major impact in the arts and culture scene of the late ’60s and ’70s, the friends had an intense relationship. Just Kids is an autobiography as much about Smith’s early years as a musician as it is about her bond with a young man who died young and shaped her life forever. Just Kids has become a modern classic and one of the best music books.

How to read it: Purchase Just Kids on Amazon

Louder than hell: the definitive oral history of metal by jon wiederhorn and katherine thurman.

Louder Than Hell is exactly what it says it is: the definitive oral history of metal. In this essential read, one of the best books about music, you’ll hear from the biggest players in the history of this beloved subgenre, including Metallica, Megadeath, Black Sabbath, Slayer, and more. Metalheads know that the genre is not merely a type of music, it’s a lifestyle, one celebrated in this oral history that is a must-read for any metal fan and among the best books about the music industry.

How to read it: Purchase Louder Than Hell on Amazon

The lyrics: 1956 to present by paul mccartney.

Unquestionably one of the most influential songwriters of all time, The Beatles member Paul McCartney here collects his thoughts on the tunes that made him famous. In two volumes, The Lyrics covers all the songs McCartney has written since 1956. That includes “Blackbird,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Maybe I’m Amazed,” and all the hits. The result is a book that any Beatles fan will want to own.

How to read it: Purchase The Lyrics: 1956 to Present on Amazon

Major labels: a history of popular music in seven genres by kelefa sanneh.

This book looks at the history of popular music through the lens of seven genres: rock, r & b, country, punk, hip-hop, dance, and pop over the past fifty years. You’ll learn all about the tensions within and between these genres. Sanneh’s Major Labels is smart music criticism that’s also accessible for the armchair musicologist, so it’s no surprise that it’s on this list of the best books about music.

How to read it: Purchase Major Labels on Amazon

The motherlode: 100+ women who made hip-hop by clever hope with illustrations by rachelle baker.

In this key contribution to music criticism that’s also one of the best books about music, Clever Hope profiles more than 100 women who have influenced the subgenre of hip-hop. From Missy Elliott to Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, The Motherlode celebrates the powerful contributions of female artists to the foundation, evolution, past, present, and future of hip-hop.

How to read it: Purchase The Motherlode on Amazon

Meet me in the bathroom: rebirth and rock and roll in new york city 2001-2011 by lizzy goodman.

In Meet Me in the Bathroom , Lizzy Goldman puts the spotlight on the alternative rock and roll scene in New York City from 2001 to 2011. Goldman features all the NYC-based major players in shaping the rock industry, including The Strokes, Vampire Weekend, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol. This book was also adapted to a feature picture documentary by the same name , which you might want to check out as a way to enhance your reading of the book. Even though 2011 wasn’t all that long ago, all things considered, Meet Me in the Bathroom belongs on any list of the best books on music history.

How to read it: Purchase Meet Me in the Bathroom on Amazon

Music is history by questlove.

Academy Award-winning documentarian and Grammy-winning musician Questlove is also the author of one of the best books about music. In Music Is History looks at the last fifty years or so of American music, from approximately 1971 to present. In chapters that focus on a variety of music topics and subgenres, such as disco, hip-hop, and more, Questlove seamlessly weaves the history of American music with major changes to American culture, history, and politics.

How to read it: Purchase Music Is History on Amazon

The music lesson: a spiritual search for growth through music by victor l. wooten.

For many people, music is deeply spiritual, and it’s exactly that intersection between music and spirituality that Victor L. Wooten takes as his subject in The Music Lesson , one of the best music books. Even if you aren’t a religious person, you can still appreciate Wooten’s takeaways about how to harness the power of music to help you explore your faith.

How to read it: Purchase The Music Lesson on Amazon

Musicophilia: tales of music and the brain by oliver sacks.

The late Oliver Sacks is perhaps the best known neurologist who wrote many works of pop psychology. In Musicophilia , Sacks takes readers on a wild adventure through the connection between our brains and our music. Sacks has written a fascinating expedition into the human brain and the way that music impacts it, highlighting extraordinary stories of ordinary people who experience music in astonishing ways in one of the best books about music. I featured a book by Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Hat for His Wife , on my list of the 30 best psychology books of all time .

How to read it: Purchase Musicophilia on Amazon

Our band could be your life: scenes from the american indie underground, 1981-1991 by michael azerrad.

This book has already become a classic and among the best music books of all time. In Our Band Could Be Your Life , Michael Azerrad puts the spotlight on the indie music scene in America over the pivotal decade of 1981-1991. The wide array of bands that Azerrad features include Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Black Flag. If you’re a fan of indie American music, you’ll want to pick up this book.

How to read it: Purchase Our Band Could Be Your Life on Amazon

Parental discretion is advised: the rise of nwa and the dawn of gangsta rap by gerrick kennedy.

And now for one of the best books on music history! Gerrick Kennedy zeroes on the moment when NWA began to emerge as one of the foundational artists in the emerging subgenre of gangsta rap. Focusing on ways that NWA shaped gangsta rap, Parental Discretion Is Advised is a vital contribution to music history.

How to read it: Purchase Parental Discretion Is Advised on Amazon

The philosophy of modern song by bob dylan.

As the winner of the 2016 Noble Prize for Literature, Bob Dylan is recognized not just as one of the most acclaimed American musicians of the last sixty years, but also a writer of extraordinary talent. In The Philosophy of Modern Song , Dylan has compiled more than sixty essays about “modern song.” Some of the artist Dylan talks about include Nina Simone, Hank Williams, Elvis, and more, exploring genres that range from heavy metal to bluegrass, making this an indispensable book of music history, criticism, and appreciation and for sure one of the best books about music ever.

How to read it: Purchase The Philosophy of Modern Song on Amazon

Please kill me: the uncensored oral history of punk by legs mcneil and gillian mccain.

In Please Kill Me , you’ll find the definitive oral history of the punk genre. Now after 20 years a classic in its own right, Please Kill Me is the singular book on punk’s origins, reign, and subsequent popularity, with contributions from key players in the game, including Iggy Pop, The Ramones, and Richard Hell. Please Kill Me puts you there on the scene with the major players who influenced punk, such as musicians, music critics, and more. There are few better or more impactful music history books than Please Kill Me . It is quite simply one of the best music books of all time.

How to read it: Purchase Please Kill Me on Amazon

The rap year book: the most important rap song from every year since 1979, discussed, debated, and deconstructed by shea serrano.

In The Rap Year Book , definitely one of the best books about music, Shea Serrano does exactly what he says in the title: discuss, debate, and deconstruct the most important and influential rap song from every year from 1979-2015. Serrano’s eclectic mix of best-of hits span from Notorious B.I.G. to Puff Daddy, Eminem, 50 Cent, and Lil Wayne. Any rap fan should make sure to have The Rap Year Book on their shelves.

How to read it: Purchase The Rap Year Book on Amazon

Smash green day, the offspring, bad religion, nofx, and the ’90s punk explosion by ian winwood.

I grew up in the era when Green Day exploded onto the new wave of ’90s punk music. In Smash! , Ian Winwood takes readers back to that time when American punk was evolving and experiencing a revival. With so many books focusing on punk in the 1970s and 1980s, Winwood puts the focus on the way that American punk bands of the ’90s experienced incredible mainstream success, with Green Day and The Offspring selling millions of records. Anyone interested in learning more about the history of punk and alternative music will enjoy Smash! , definitely one of the top rock music books and one of the best books about the music industry.

How to read it: Purchase Smash! on Amazon

Song machine: inside the hit factory by john seabrook.

In Song Machine , New Yorker journalist John Seabrook takes readers on an inside tour of the industry that is built around the quest to make the most successful songs. When a pop music hit explodes, it’s not always known that the tune was deliberately manufactured to be as catchy as possible. In fact, there’s a whole workshop of songwriting that follow a formula to compose and write music that uses neuroscience to grip your brain, hook you on the tune, and make sure you can’t get it out of your head. Song Machine definitely ranks as one of the best music books and best books about the music industry.

How to read it: Purchase Song Machine on Amazon

This is your brain on music by daniel j. levitin.

Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin breaks open the connections between our brains and music in This Is Your Brain on Music , for sure one of the best music books of all time. You’ll learn about how “earworms”—those catchy songs we can’t get out of our head—happen, the science that says you can pick up and master an instrument at any age, and how composers harness the way our brains react to music to make the most audibly pleasurable songs.

How to read it: Purchase This Is Your Brain on Music on Amazon

This is what it sounds like: what the music you love says about you by susan rogers and ogi ogas.

The best books about music combine neuroscience with the art form. According to cognitive scientist Susan Rogers, each person has an individual “listener profile” that creates a unique way you respond to music. Maybe you’re a melody person. Or maybe you’re a lyrics fan. Either way, you have a way you respond to music that is distinct as your fingerprints. And in This Is What It Sounds Like , you’ll learn all about this side of you and your musical personality. Rogers also discusses some of the most widely acclaimed and popular songs and deconstructs why we like them. This is an interesting book to learn more about yourself through music.

How to read it: Purchase This Is What It Sounds Like on Amazon

Wagnerism: art and politics in the shadow of music by alex ross.

Most lists of the best books about music include New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century . But in this roundup of the best music books, I’m featuring a different Ross book, Wagnerism . This book takes a hard look at one of the most influential composers of all time, Richard Wagner. Ross traces his accomplishments, fame, and complicated legacy; Hitler was a notorious Wagner fan and latched onto Wagner in his campaign for German nationalism. So how do we reconcile the man from the myth and the harm his music has done? Find out in this engrossing book.

How to read it: Purchase Wagnerism on Amazon

Why you like it: the science and culture of musical taste by nolan gasser.

This book tops 700 pages, but thats what Nolan Gasser, the man behind Pandora Radio’s Music Genome Project, needs to write his definitive guide to why we like the music we like. It turns out each person has individual music taste as unique as their DNA. In Why You Like It , Gasser tells the story of the science behind that custom and unique musical taste. It’s a captivating read that will change the way you hear and think about music and for sure one of the best books about music.

How to read it: Purchase Why You Like It on Amazon

Year of wonder: classical music to enjoy every day by clemency burton-hill.

For our final book in this list of the 30 best books about music, we turn to classical music. Are you as intimidated by classical music as I am? Never fear! In Year of Wonder , author Clemency Burton-Hill introduces the world of classical music by selecting one piece to enjoy for each of the 365 days in a year. It’s a crash course that will finally take the fear out of becoming a fan of classical music.

How to read it: Purchase Year of Wonder on Amazon

And there you have it a list of the 30 best books about music. which one will you read first, share this:.

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Sarah S. Davis is the founder of Broke by Books, a blog about her journey as a schizoaffective disorder bipolar type writer and reader. Sarah's writing about books has appeared on Book Riot, Electric Literature, Kirkus Reviews, BookRags, PsychCentral, and more. She has a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Library and Information Science from Clarion University, and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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WINNER OF the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author's entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik , writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

Interview by Benedict King

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick

Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé

Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

1 Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

2 unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader by vivian gornick, 3 nature matrix: new and selected essays by robert michael pyle, 4 terroir: love, out of place by natasha sajé, 5 maybe the people would be the times by luc sante.

W e’re talking about the books shortlisted for the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay . As an essayist yourself, or as a reader of essays, what are you looking for? What’s the key to a good essay ?

Let’s turn to the books that made the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. The winning book was Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich , whose books have been recommended a number of times on Five Books. Tell me more. 

One of the criteria for this particular prize is that it should be not just for a single book, but for a body of work. One of the things we wanted to honour about Barbara Ehrenreich is that she has produced a remarkable body of work. Although it’s offered in a more specifically political register than some essayists, or that a great many past prize winners have practised, the quiddity of her work is that it remains rooted in personal experience, in the act of bearing witness. She has a passionate political point to make, certainly, a series of them, many seeming all the more relevant now than when she began writing. Nonetheless, her writing still always depends on the intimacy of first-hand knowledge, what people in post-incarceration work call ‘lived experience’ (a term with a distinguished philosophical history). Her book Nickel and Dimed is the classic example of that. She never writes from a distance about working-class life in America. She bears witness to the nature and real texture of working-class life in America.

“One point of giving awards…is to keep passing the small torches of literary tradition”

Next up of the books on the 2021 PEN essay prize shortlist is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick.

Vivian Gornick is a writer who’s been around for a very long time. Although longevity is not in itself a criterion for excellence—or for this prize, or in the writing life generally—persistence and perseverance are. Writers who keep coming back at us, again and again, with a consistent vision, are surely to be saluted. For her admirers, her appetite to re-read things already read is one of the most attractive parts of her oeuvre , if I can call it that; her appetite not just to read but to read deeply and personally. One of the things that people who love her work love about it is that her readings are never academic, or touched by scholarly hobbyhorsing. They’re readings that involve the fullness of her experience, then applied to literature. Although she reads as a critic, she reads as an essayist reads, rather than as a reviewer reads. And I think that was one of the things that was there to honour in her body of work, as well.

Is she a novelist or journalist, as well?

Let’s move on to the next book which made the 2021 PEN essay shortlist. This is Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle.

I have a special reason for liking this book in particular, and that is that it corresponds to one of the richest and oldest of American genres, now often overlooked, and that’s the naturalist essay. You can track it back to Henry David Thoreau , if not to Ralph Waldo Emerson , this American engagement with nature , the wilderness, not from a narrowly scientific point of view, nor from a purely ecological or environmental point of view—though those things are part of it—but again, from the point of view of lived experience, of personal testimony.

Let’s look at the next book on the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Awards, which is Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé. Why did these essays appeal?

One of the things that was appealing about this book is that’s it very much about, in every sense, the issues of the day: the idea of place, of where we are, how we are located on any map as individuals by ethnic identity, class, gender—all of those things. But rather than being carried forward in a narrowly argumentative way, again, in the classic manner of the essay, Sajé’s work is ruminative. It walks around these issues from the point of view of someone who’s an expatriate, someone who’s an émigré, someone who’s a world citizen, but who’s also concerned with the idea of ‘terroir’, the one place in the world where we belong. And I think the dialogue in her work between a kind of cosmopolitanism that she has along with her self-critical examination of the problem of localism and where we sit on the world, was inspiring to us.

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Last of the books on the shortlist for the 2021 Pen essay award is Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Luc Sante.

Again, here’s a writer who’s had a distinguished generalised career, writing about lots of places and about lots of subjects. In the past, he’s made his special preoccupation what he calls ‘low life’, but I think more broadly can be called the marginalized or the repressed and abject. He’s also written acute introductions to the literature of ‘low life’, the works of Asbury and David Maurer, for instance.

But I think one of the things that was appealing about what he’s done is the sheer range of his enterprise. He writes about countless subjects. He can write about A-sides and B-sides of popular records—singles—then go on to write about Jacques Rivette’s cinema. He writes from a kind of private inspection of public experience. He has a lovely piece about tabloid headlines and their evolution. And I think that omnivorous range of enthusiasms and passions is a stirring reminder in a time of specialization and compartmentalization of the essayist’s freedom to roam. If Pyle is in the tradition of Thoreau, I suspect Luc Sante would be proud to be put in the tradition of Baudelaire—the flaneur who walks the streets, sees everything, broods on it all and writes about it well.

One point of giving awards, with all their built-in absurdity and inevitable injustice, is to keep alive, or at least to keep passing, the small torches of literary tradition. And just as much as we’re honoring the great tradition of the naturalist essay in the one case, I think we’re honoring the tradition of the Baudelairean flaneur in this one.

April 18, 2021

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Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1986. His many books include A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism . He is a three time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays & Criticism, and in 2021 was made a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French Republic.

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Table of Contents

Mood Music with English Lyrics

Music in a foreign language, music without lyrics.

• Game & Movie Scores without Lyrics

Electronic Music

Ambient noise, the best music for writing: 32 playlists for inspiration & focus.

Music can set the tone when you’re writing a book . Or, it can help you avoid writer’s block by motivating you through the hard, boring work of sitting in your chair.

But it has to be the right music for you (and your book).

Some people can write to anything. Heavy metal, construction noises, or catchy pop tunes, nothing derails their focus.

I am not one of those. I need the music to match my mood or the mood I’m writing in. How am I supposed to write about the most challenging moments in my life while upbeat kids’ music is pounding in my headphones?

Some people can only write to music if there are no lyrics or if it’s in a foreign language they can’t understand. There’s no right answer for the “best” or “perfect” playlist. It’s just whatever works best for you.

You need something that will motivate you to write quickly and write well so you can get your published book into the world.

It may take some trial-and-error to figure it out. But here’s a list of options that have worked for me and other members of the Scribe Crew . I’ve broken our top recommendations down into categories, so you can try them out yourself.

32 Best Music Playlists & Songs to Listen to While You Write

Whether you need to psych yourself up to write or just want to match the tone of your book, here are some of our favorite options for a range of moods.

1. Morning Rhythm

This is upbeat but gentle music to ease you into the writing groove. There’s a little bit of everything here, from funk to soul to jazz.

Every song has a beat, so this list will motivate you without fading into the background.

2. Shoegaze Classics

Shoegaze was initially called “dream pop” when it emerged in the UK in the 1980s. It features ethereal, shimmery vocals, distorted guitars, and a lot of distortion.

Shoegaze is brooding music that somehow manages to be upbeat and depressing at the same time.

3. Have a Great Day!

You can probably guess from the name—this list is full of happy songs to brighten your day.

You’ll find tracks from Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Steely Dan, Blondie, and Stevie Wonder.

If you’re stuck, it might help to get a dose of energy with familiar, fun music.

4. Chill + Atmospheric

Do you prefer melancholy music?

Do you like songs with haunting melodies?

Do you like the idea of writing on a rainy day?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, give this playlist a shot.

5. Melantronic

Spotify describes this playlist as “beautiful electronic music for melancholy moments.”

There’s definitely some sadness here. But don’t expect a playlist that’s going to kill your spirit. These songs have solid beats.

Think Thom Yorke, Caribou, and Aphex Twin.

I’ve found that sometimes I like to write to music in a foreign language. The music is interesting enough to keep me motivated, but I don’t get distracted by the lyrics.

Here are some playlists we liked from around the world.

6. French Indie Pop

This playlist is full of dreamy, mellow French indie pop.

It’s heavy on electronic music and sparkly beats. Think more “low-key Paris” vibe than club-hopping.

7. Japanese City Pop

In the late 1970s and 1980s, the term “City Pop” described a type of music popular in Japan.

City pop borrowed heavily from Western music and had elements of jazz, soft rock, and funk.

If you like yacht rock or need some peppy music, give city pop a try.

8. Soweto Beat/Township Jive

Soweto is a township in South Africa that’s well known for music.

This playlist features mbaqanga music, a style of South African music with Zulu roots that originated in the early 1960s.

It’s upbeat and rhythmic, so it’s great for energetic bursts of writing.

9. Bhangra Bangers

If you like upbeat music that makes you nod your head, this is it.

Bhangra originated in the British Punjabi community during the late 20th century.

It’s got a little bit of traditional Indian folk music, a little bit of hip hop, and a lot of percussion.

10. Spanish Tapas Bar

Only listen to this if you’re looking for a jolt of energy.

This playlist features traditional flamenco and Spanish folk tunes with a quick tempo.

11. Korean Indie/Chill/R&B

This is the longest mix of Korean RnB, pop, ballads, and lo-fi songs on Spotify.

Clocking in at 54 hours, there’s a little bit of everything, from uplifting to downtempo.

If you get easily distracted by lyrics, you still have plenty of musical options.

Classical music, hip hop beats, instrumental versions of your favorite songs, and modern composers can help you find your focus.

12. Japanese Lofi HipHop

This is one of my favorite writing playlists. It’s a collection of lyric-less, Asian-inspired hip hop beats. It’s chill, but upbeat enough that it won’t put you to sleep. I write to this about 50% of the time.

13. Classical Music for Reading

If it’s good for reading, chances are it’s good for writing.

This 2.5-hour playlist features a sampling of pieces from Mozart, Chopin, Debussy, and other famous classical composers.

14. Minimalism

Minimalist compositions are perfect for writing.

They usually have repetitive patterns or pulses or steady drones. They’re easy to get sucked into (without giving them too much attention).

This mix features some of the most iconic minimalist composers: Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, and John Adams.

15. Instrumental Pop Covers

Try this if you like top-40 radio and pop classics but don’t want to lose your focus.

It’s got everything from basic guitar covers to full orchestral versions of songs you probably already know.

16. Composer Weekly: Ryuichi Sakamoto

Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto has played many different styles of music over the course of his career.

Lately, he’s been recognized for his movie soundtracks and piano compositions.

This playlist is a 30-track introduction to his instrumental music. It’s sparse, dark, and contemplative.

17. Relaxing Spanish Guitar

Don’t underestimate the power of Spanish guitar.

It’s full of emotion, quick riffs, and rhythm. It may put some zest in your typing.

18. Ludovico Einaudi Complete Playlist

Ludovico Einaudi is an Italian pianist and composer.

He’s well known for his film and television scores, but this playlist features his solo releases, including a seven-part series called Seven Days Walking , which he released last year.

Game & Movie Scores without Lyrics

Some of the best composers in the world write for movies and video games.

Unless you’re using a specific movie or game to purposely set a mood, I recommend choosing one you’re not very familiar with. That way, the music won’t distract you.

19. DirecTV’s Movie Score Channel (Channel 822)

If you have DirectTV, make the most of your TV’s speakers and tune into the DirectTV Movie Score Channel.

Their non-stop instrumental music is the perfect soundtrack for writing your book.

20. Soundtracks for Studying

This playlist covers everything from Downton Abbey and Braveheart to Ratatouille and Sherlock .

Movie-wise, that’s a big range. But musically, all these songs strike the perfect balance between epic and lowkey so you can focus.

21. Minecraft Soundtrack

Minecraft is the bestselling video game of all time.

There are many reasons people love it, but 1 big reason is the music. It’s the kind of music that makes you feel happy without even realizing it.

It’s “barely there” but still optimistic and motivational.

22. Studio Ghibli Summer Night Piano Collection with Nature Sounds

Studio Ghibli is a famous Japanese animation studio. This 7-hour Youtube collection features piano performances of some of their gentlest music, overlaid with cricket noises.

If you’re looking for something soft and soothing, this is it.

There are many styles of electronic music: electronica, house, techno, drum and bass, jungle, garage, trance, IDM, etc.

If you’re already a fan of electronic music, you might have a favorite type.

While some people can write to rave tunes, most can’t. So, I’ve added some energetic playlists that aren’t too dancy or aggressive.

23. Brain Food

This is subtle, hypnotic electronic music that promotes focus or relaxation.

There aren’t any lyrics, which makes this a good option for people who are easily distracted.

24. Yoga Electronica

This playlist features downtempo deep house. That means it’s a perfect dose of energy without making you want to get up and dance.

You can latch onto the beats, but it’s repetitive enough to help you stay in the writing zone.

25. Mother Earth’s Plantasia

This is a cult classic electronic album by Mort Garson. It was first released to a limited audience in 1976, but it gained wider circulation when it was re-released in 2019.

The album features “warm Earth music” designed to help plants grow. It’s sweet, hopeful, and spacey.

If you like Moog synthesizers and fantasy, you’ll love Plantasia .

26. Women of Electronic

This list features women who make innovative electronic music. Most of the tracks have lyrics.

This playlist offers a wide range of styles. For example, Yaeji is a Korean-American artist who sings over house beats in a quiet, mellow voice.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith uses synthesizers to create layered, elaborate songs.

And Charlotte De Witte is a Belgian DJ known for her “dark and stripped-back” techno.

When we asked the Scribe Crew for playlist recommendations, this was by far the category that got the most responses.

Ambient noise is a great option if you hate working in total quiet but also get easily distracted by music.

It’s also a helpful workaround if you like working in coffee shops or coworking spaces but can’t right now because of the pandemic.

Ambient sounds can give you the impression that you’re out of the house even if you’re still sitting at your desk.

27. My Noise

This is, hands down, the coolest ambient noise and white noise generator.

It’s run by an engineer and sound designer who collects recordings from around the world.

It has everything from Tibetan bells and waterfalls to street recordings and gardens.

28. Coffitivity

Many writers love to write in coffee shops, but you may not have that option if you have a l imited time frame (or if you’re still under COVID lockdown).

Streaming background noise on Coffitivity can give you the feeling that you’re in a coffee shop even when you aren’t.

You can also choose between different levels of activity. For example, “Morning Murmur” is less hectic than “Lunchtime Lounge.”

29. Rain Sounds

I LOVE the Spotify playlist that features rain sounds. I like to curl up on a rainy day and just chill, and the rain sounds create that mood. It’s a gentle and soothing way I use to get into writing, and it helps keep me in my flow state once I get there.

30. 8 Hours of Ocean Sounds

These calming wave sounds were recorded at Playa de Piticabo in the Dominican Republic.

With 8 hours of recordings, you could literally listen to them all day if you want some soothing background noise while you write.

31. OM Chanting @ 417 Hz

These Om chants are repetitive and positive. They can help you tune out the outside world and get into a meditative pattern.

32. Binaural Beats: Focus

When you hear a slightly different tone in each ear, it creates a binaural beat. Your brain falls into sync with the difference between the tones’ frequencies and creates an auditory illusion.

Binaural beats can lower stress, promote creativity, and encourage relaxation. This playlist is designed to enhance your focus.

The Scribe Crew

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Antiquarian Book Fair: From Sylvia Plath’s Papers to Vintage Matchbooks

This year’s New York International Antiquarian Book Fair features plenty of quirky items amid the high-ticket treasures. (Poison books, anyone?)

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By Jennifer Schuessler

For those who love a chance to inspect stunning decorative bindings and rare volumes (or just ogle the people who can afford them), the annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is an unmissable date on the spring calendar.

This year’s edition, through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, will bring nearly 200 dealers from 15 countries. And there will be no shortage of high-ticket treasures, like Sydney Parkinson’s richly illustrated “Account of a Voyage to the South Seas” from 1773 ($57,000) and the first complete, large-scale photographic atlas of the moon, published between 1896 and 1910 ($68,000).

The fair is also the place to get an up-close look at all manner of pulp novels, letters, posters, pamphlets, menus, fliers and other items (mostly) on paper, many of them affordable to browsers on a budget.

Here’s a sampling of some of the more intriguing items on offer, from 19th-century “poison books” to early-20th-century Chinese restaurant matchbooks to a choice relic of 1990s MTV.

Handle With Care

Ready for some bibliotoxicology? Honey & Wax Booksellers , based in Brooklyn, is offering a collection of “poison books” — volumes bound in cloth and paper containing arsenic, which was widely used in the mid-19th-centuryas a decorative bright-green tint. To date, the Poison Books Project has identified nearly 300 surviving examples. The volumes at the fair, priced between $150 and $450, include titles ranging from the innocuous (“Emily and Clara’s Trip to Niagara Falls,” circa 1861) to the vaguely sinister (“The Amulet,” circa 1854). Each comes with nitrile gloves and polyethylene bags, the listing says, “for safe handling of these beautiful but dangerous books.”

‘By Sylvia’

Type Punch Matrix , a dealer in Washington, D.C., is offering what it calls a mini-exhibition of two dozen items relating to the poet Sylvia Plath, much of which, it says, has never been seen by the public. The collection, most of which came from a Plath family friend, includes a signed contract from her first publication, a 1950 story in Seventeen magazine ($10,000), and a handwritten unpublished juvenile poem, “The Snowflake Star” ($45,000), signed “By Sylvia.” There’s also an annotated course reading list from Smith College (including a note about an upcoming blind date) and a copy of Karl Jaspers’s book “Tragedy Is Not Enough,” with the marginal note “cf. August 1953” — an apparent reference to the mental breakdown that inspired Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar.”

Faux Fairies

Between 1917 and 1920, two young cousins in the small Yorkshire village of Cottingley played around with a family camera, creating whimsical fairy scenes using hatpins and paper cutouts. But after their mother brought them to the Theosophical Society in the nearby city of Bradford, members already immersed in theories about the unseen world began earnestly debating the scenes’ authenticity, thus starting one of the more bizarre hoaxes in 20th-century British history.

Even Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes (and an ardent spiritualist ), was taken in, writing in the magazine The Strand that the photos, if proven real, would “jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud” and “make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life.” Some believers remained into the 1980s, when one of the surviving cousins finally revealed how they had created the images. Burnside Rare Books from Portland, Ore., is offering a complete set of the five photographs for (no fooling) $28,000.

A scrapbook on offer from the Vermont bookseller Marc Selvaggio gives a glimpse inside the social whirl of Gilded Age New York as enjoyed by Leonard Chenery, a retired naval captain who seemingly never encountered an invitation he didn’t just accept but also lovingly preserve.

Created between 1881 and 1900, the book ($4,500) contains more than 373 menus, programs, invitations, dance cards and other ephemera from some of the city’s most prestigious clubs and grandest commemorative occasions. There are items from enduring stalwarts like the Lotos Club and the Metropolitan Club, as well as vanished outfits like the Thirteen Club , which sought to dispel superstitions by requiring guests to walk under ladders, partake of 13-course dinners, spill salt and otherwise taunt fate. Many items are annotated with lists of guests, speakers, conversation topics and other historical breadcrumbs.

Chop Suey History

The humble matchbook was patented in 1892, and within a few years it became a ubiquitous form of marketing for all kinds of businesses. A collection of more than 3,000 from Chinese restaurants across the United States and Canada ($16,000), offered by Daniel/Oliver in Brooklyn, delivers a pocket-size history lesson in both cultural history and graphic design. By 1929, according to the listing, there were Chinese restaurants in nearly all of the 50 most populous cities in the United States, most of them low-cost venues serving Americanized dishes like chop suey and chow mein. Many of the matchbooks, dating from the 1920s to the 1970s, use a now-familiar stereotypical typeface meant to evoke Chinese calligraphy, which is in fact traceable to a font created in 1883 in Cleveland.

Yo! MTV Writes

In 1981, MTV aired its first video, for “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. But long after starting the revolution, the channel still clung to some analog traditions. B&B Rare Books in Manhattan is offering a guest book from MTV’s television studio in London in the late 1990s ($12,500), signed by acts both famous (Foo Fighters, ‘N Sync, Marilyn Manson) and forgotten (like Ultimate Kaos, a boy band created by Simon Cowell). It was a time, the listing notes, when all genres of music were jumbled together, and when MTV still broadcast videos. On one page, Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty writes: “There is a dead man in my bathroom.” On another, a doodle by the band Hanson comes with the commandment sacred to every headbanger (and rare book lover?): “Rock on!”

An earlier version of a caption with this article misstated the title of Sydney Parkinson’s richly illustrated book from 1773. It is “Account of a Voyage to the South Seas,” not “A Journal of the Voyage to the South Seas.”

How we handle corrections

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. More about Jennifer Schuessler

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The best new science fiction books of April 2024

There’s an abundance of exciting new science fiction out in April, by writers including The Three-Body Problem author Cixin Liu, Douglas Preston and Lionel Shriver

By Alison Flood

1 April 2024

The last remaining free city of the Forever Desert has been besieged for centuries in The Truth of the Aleke

Shutterstock / Liu zishan

There are some huge names with new works out this month: Cixin Liu and Ann Leckie both have collections of shorter writing to peruse, plus there’s a dystopic future from the award-winning Téa Obreht and a world where woolly mammoths have been brought back from the bestselling Douglas Preston. I also love the sound of Scott Alexander Howard’s debut The Other Valley , set in a town where its past and future versions exist in the next valleys over, and of Sofia Samatar’s space adventure The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain . So much to read, so little time…

A View from the Stars by Cixin Liu

This is a collection of short works from Liu, the sci-fi author of the moment thanks to Netflix’s new adaptation of The Three-Body Problem , ranging from essays and interviews to short fiction. I love this snippet from an essay about sci-fi fans, in which he calls us “mysterious aliens in the crowd”, who “jump like fleas from future to past and back again, and float like clouds of gas between nebulae; in a flash, we can reach the edge of the universe, or tunnel into a quark, or swim within a star-core”. Aren’t we lucky to have such worlds available to us on our shelves?

3 Body Problem review: Cixin Liu's masterpiece arrives on Netflix

Cixin Liu's novel The Three-Body Problem has been turned into an eight-part series for Netflix by the Game of Thrones team. There is much to admire so far, but will the adaptation stay on track, wonders Bethan Ackerley

Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie

Leckie is a must-read writer for me, and this is the first complete collection of her short fiction, ranging across science fiction and fantasy. On the sci-fi side, we will be able to dip back into the Imperial Radch universe, and we are also promised that we’ll “learn the secrets of the mysterious Lake of Souls” in a brand-new novelette.

The Morningside by Téa Obreht

In a catastrophic version of the future, an 11-year-old girl arrives with her mother at The Morningside, once a luxury high-rise, now another crumbling part of Island City, which is half-underwater. Obreht won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2011 for her debut, The Tiger’s Wife .

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

Samatar won all sorts of prizes for her first novel, A Stranger in Olondria . Her latest sounds really intriguing, following the story of a boy who has grown up condemned to work in the bowels of a mining ship among the stars, whose life changes when he is given the chance to be educated at the ship’s university.

A boy grows up working in a mining ship among the stars in The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

D-Keine/Getty Images

Extinction by Douglas Preston

This is set in a valley in the Rockies, where guests at a luxury resort can see woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths and Irish elk brought back from extinction by genetic manipulation. But then a string of killings kicks off, and a pair of investigators must find out what’s really going on. This looks Jurassic Park -esque and seems like lots of fun. And if you want more mammoth-related reading, try my colleague Michael Le Page’s excellent explainer about why they won’t be back any time soon.

Mania by Lionel Shriver

The award-winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin brings her thoughts about so-called “culture wars” to bear on her fiction, imagining a world where a “Mental Parity Movement” is in the ascendent, and “the worst thing you can call someone is ‘stupid’”.

The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard

This speculative novel is set in a town where, to the east, lies the same town but 20 years ahead in time and, to the west, the same town but 20 years behind, repeating endlessly across the wilderness. The only border crossings allowed are for “mourning tours”, in which the dead can be seen in towns where they are still alive. Odile, who is 16, is set for a seat on the Conseil, where she will be able to decree who gets to travel across borders. I love the sound of this.

The best new science fiction books of March 2024

With a new Adrian Tchaikovsky, Mars-set romance from Natasha Pulley and a high-concept thriller from Stuart Turton due to hit shelves, there is plenty of great new science fiction to be reading in March

What If… Loki was Worthy? by Madeleine Roux

Many will question whether the Marvel superhero stories are really science fiction, but I’m leaning into the multiversal aspect here to include this, as it sounds like it could be a bit of fun. It’s the first in a new series that reimagines the origins of some of the biggest heroes: here, Thor died protecting Earth from one of Loki’s pranks and, exiled on our planet, the Norse trickster god is now dealing with the consequences.

The Truth of the Aleke by Moses Ose Utomi

The second book in the Forever Desert series is set 500 years after The Lies of the Ajungo , following a junior peacekeeper in the last remaining free city of the Forever Desert, which has been besieged for centuries. It was actually out in March, but I missed it then, so I’m bringing it to you now as it was tipped as a title to watch this year by our science fiction contributor Sally Adee.

Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis, translated by Will Firth

It is New Year’s Eve on the last day of the last year of human existence and various stories are unfolding, from a high-ranking minister with blood on his hands to a nurse keeping a secret. Later, in a cabin in the Alps, a musicologist and her daughter – the last people left on Earth – are trying to understand the catastrophe. According to The Independent , Nikolaidis “makes Samuel Beckett look positively cheery”, but I’m definitely in the mood for that kind of story now and then.

Martin MacInnes: 'Science fiction can be many different things'

The author of In Ascension, the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club, on why he wrote his novel, cultivating a sense of wonder and the role of fiction in the world today

Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton

In this techno-thriller, Mal is a free AI who is uninterested in the conflict going on between the humans, until he finds himself trapped in the body of a cyborg mercenary and becomes responsible for the safety of the girl she died protecting.

• science fiction /

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The Best Music Books of 2018

By Pitchfork

Though the music journalism landscape seems to shrink a little with each passing year, there’s no shortage of great music books still being written. From blunt memoirs by loveable rock stars to historical snapshots of hip-hop heydays, a dystopian novel on dying scenesters to a radical blog turned inspiring anthology, these are 16 of our favorite releases from 2018. And for even more highlights from this year, check out Pitchfork’s Summer Reading List .

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

Non-Fiction Capturing a Moment in Time

The favorite-album-as-book is a writer’s dream prompt. With this one, we get the Platonic ideal of subject and approach, rendered with love-letter sincerity and a healthy dose of accountability. Joan Morgan is a renowned scholar, critic, reporter, and pop-conscious black feminist whose own rise as a moral force in hip-hop coincided with Hill’s. She uses her unique vantage to grapple with the burden of expectation placed on black women’s shoulders when they share their creative genius with the public. As a cultural history, She Begat This beautifully conjures the 1990s moment that made the album revolutionary, looks at the politics of Hill’s subsequent “icon” status, and—as a loving call-in—takes Hill to task for the post-album problems within her control. As the title suggests, this history traces the connections between Miseducation , contemporary movements like #blackgirlmagic, and the rich archive of black excellence that Hill (and Morgan) drew from to make their own great works. –Daphne Carr, author of the 33 ⅓ on Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine

There have been more than enough takes on how radical, debaucherous, and hubristic the 1960s were, but Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 is a powerful reminder of the decade’s essential weirdness. Beginning with a quest to discover how Van Morrison reinvented himself as a folkie and wrote his ethereal masterpiece Astral Weeks in Boston, Ryan H. Walsh’s book draws out the technicolor mycelium of the New England counterculture. He not only connects local cults, avant-garde public television producers, hip entrepreneurs, and underground heroes to each other but uncovers how they continue to cast shadows in the present. Eight months after the book was published, Morrison’s label performed a copyright dump on a key recording from the period that Walsh spends the book hunting, releasing the luminous Live in Boston 1968 into the UK iTunes Store and deleting it within hours. It’s worth waiting until after reading to seek it out yourself. From haunting recordings by the Mel Lyman Family to Velvet Underground bootlegs, Walsh’s thrilling adventure already has one the year’s best readymade soundtracks. –Jesse Jarnow, author of Wasn’t That a Time

Dan Hancox’s book on grime is an object lesson in, to quote cultural studies scion Stuart Hall, “race as the modality in which class is lived.” As the opening pages make clear, grime was built in and around very specific neighborhoods—deprived communities in London that sit right next to shimmering wealth—and became the voice of the inner city, and arguably the most important genre to emerge in the UK this century. The music’s frenetic verses set to jerky rhythms—what Hancox aptly calls a “thrilling, exhausting, ADHD onslaught”—now soundtrack protests and influence politics. As such, Inner City Pressure offers as much to rap trainspotters as it does to those who recognize that talking about pop music often leads to messier conversations—about the racist policing of nightlife, the trickle-down of austerity measures, and the claustrophobic realities that led to grime’s remarkable founding. –Erin MacLeod, author of Visions of Zion

There have been many books about the music of New York in the 1970s, but few have made deep connections to the preceding decades—and likely none have done so as entertainingly as Downtown Pop Underground . Covering the years of 1958 to 1976, the book traces the cross-sections between music, literature, theater, and hybrid forms of creativity that eventually led to the birth of punk. Back then, pretty much everyone making art in New York crossed paths, from Andy Warhol on down; writer Kembrew McLeod chronicles the interconnected worlds of vital figures like documentarian Shirley Clarke, theater director Ellen Stewart, and actress Jackie Curtis. He makes a convincing case that all this underground activity later made its way to the mainstream, one way or another (take Debbie Harry, who journeyed from small communal art scenes into the Top 10 with Blondie). Somehow, Downtown Pop Underground will leave you thinking 20th-century New York is even more crucial to American culture than already believed. –Marc Masters, author of No Wave

Memoir and Biography

Roughly 99 percent of this book’s audience will be brought to it via Wilco and/or Uncle Tupelo, but the surprise awaiting any reader is that Jeff Tweedy’s memoir is so multifaceted. Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) is a mercilessly self-deprecating rundown through the trials and tribulations of two great American bands, an unglamorous look at addiction, a portrait of a musical family, and a window into the creative process behind an ever-growing catalog of classics. When Tweedy gets into the nuts and bolts of his songwriting, his words light up the page. “You allow [your subconscious] to come up with ideas and phrases that don’t need to make sense to your rational mind right away,” he writes. Later, Tweedy suggests that his main “superpower” is his comfort with vulnerability. “If you feel exposed when you’re singing to someone,” he says of trying out early compositions on his mother, “That means you’re doing something right.” The same notion could apply to this book. –Ryan H. Walsh, author of Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968

Adam Yauch’s absence looms over Beastie Boys Book , a hefty autobiography penned by his surviving bandmates Mike Diamond and Adam Horovitz. The pair’s memories are expanded and countered by essays from a host of guest authors, ranging from their first drummer Kate Schellenbach to chef Roy Choi, who contribute a mini-cookbook based on Beasties songs. It’s a riotous read, as expected from a band that could never resist a joke. What’s surprising is the bittersweet undercurrent that flows through the book. Time and time again, Diamond and Horovitz make fleeting references to how different things were in the beginning, as New York punk kids at the dawn of the 1980s. That wistfulness turns  Beastie Boys Book into something much more than a good time or an ode to a lost loved one: It’s an elegy for an era that, in retrospect, seems impossibly free and generous. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

As the hardest fought struggles of the 1960s resurface, what better power source than a singer who helped stoke the fires of resistance in that era? Born in Saskatchewan and raised in Massachusetts by adopted parents, the Cree artist Buffy Sainte-Marie rose to fame in the nascent Greenwich Village folk scene. Her songs of empowerment educated audiences about indigenous rights, environmentalism, the antiwar movement, and the perils of colonialism. It speaks to Sainte-Marie’s range that she’s been covered by Elvis, Barbra Streisand, Leonard Cohen, and Françoise Hardy, yet it’s also true, as her friend Joni Mitchell writes in the book’s foreword, that the prolific Sainte-Marie remains “one of folk music’s unsung heroes.” Forged over extensive interviews (including at least one at a cat café), Canadian music journalist Andrea Warner’s biography is both a faithful chronicle of a fearless life and a poetic celebration of a lightning, large-hearted spirit. As Sainte-Marie said at a recent talk in New York, “I had my boat sank several times, I had to swim to the shore. But you know? You got to run your own life.” –Rebecca Bengal

The mid-2000s diary entries that comprise Night Moves resemble tributary prose poems about the music that inspired their author, longtime critic (and former Pitchfork editor) Jessica Hopper. Her reverence for Chicago parallels Eve Babitz’s for Hollywood: Even in stories about companionship, both writers keenly document beloved neighborhoods and lament gentrification. ( Night Moves opens with a map of the stories’ locales; most have shuttered.) And like Babitz, Hopper can be hysterically funny, especially when talking about music with her friends. They road trip in a ridiculous rental fueled by Exile in Guyville and raid festival catering after a Ghostface set. “You walk home with your best friend, each carrying an end of your bent-up bike, trying to remember the chronology of the Hüsker Dü discography and it’s all the lame fun you need right there,” she writes. “Aging loners waxing nerdy in the night light.” These universal stories could be about your city’s rock clubs and bookstores. But it’s Hopper’s scene, and she shares it with sweetness and immediacy, like a long letter from that pal who always helps you schlep your bike home. –Sadie Dupuis, author of Mouthguard and frontperson of Speedy Ortiz

An essential voice in the English folk revival of the 1960s, Shirley Collins has made a comeback of late with an excellent album and a documentary about her life . Her second memoir, All in the Downs , is the crown jewel of her return, mixing personal stories and regional context for the traditional music she performed. The book also reveals the more insidious aspects of the post-war folk movement, including the trauma that caused Collins to disappear from the field. In the spirit of the working class who pioneered these songs, her prose is earnest and unpretentious. In these pages, as in her career, she regards folk music as something for everyone—not a niche relic fit for academia. Through an affection for pure and simple music, Shirley Collins has lived a truly remarkable life. –Erin Osmon, author of Jason Molina: Riding with the Ghost

Fiction With a Music Connection

It’s the textures of Paradise Rot , Jenny Hval’s debut novel, that stick with you. When Norwegian student Johanna arrives to study in a British seaside town, she’s struck by how foamy the food is compared to the wholegrain heft of Nordic cuisine—the only crunch is the sugar. She moves into a fetid converted warehouse with graduate Carral, where the damp partition walls and a glut of festering apples break down all physical and psychological boundaries. They consummate their strange attraction with Carral pissing on Johanna in bed and awaken with their “bodies dried up like a crystal fist.” Paradise Rot was originally published in 2009 and is newly translated into English, yet it feels ahead of its time. The themes of alienation, queerness, and the unsettling nature of desire align Hval with modern mainstays like Chris Kraus, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Maggie Nelson. Hopefully its critical acclaim will lead to the translation of Hval’s subsequent novels, Inn i ansiktet and this year’s Å hate Gud (I Hate God) . –Laura Snapes

Jeff Jackson’s Destroy All Monsters: The Last Rock Novel is the equivalent of an LP and its companion EP. In both My Dark Ages and the shorter Kill City , the two narratives that comprise Destroy All Monsters , the setup is the same: a group of musicians in the fictional town of Arcadia grapple with a nationwide epidemic of gun violence against band members. There’s a deftness to how these narratives echo one another, playing out like a musician fragmenting the same standard into something familiar yet decidedly not: some big things remain consistent, while details of character differ wildly. Jackson captures the dynamics of a small-town rock scene and channels the sense of danger that threatens live music, at a time when tragedy strikes those who seek out the sounds they love. This surreal novel summons feelings both hopeful and terrifying, which seems about right for 2018. –Tobias Carroll, author of Reel

Essay Collections

K-punk was a blog like no other. Born in 2003, the site was the invention of British cultural critic and academic Mark Fisher, whose essential writing on politics, music, and art influenced a generation. K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher is a compilation of his posts, as well as a treasure trove of unreleased writing and interviews he conducted before his death in 2017. For Fisher, a song was never just a song, whether it was a track from William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops or a ballad by the Temptations; music was always an avenue for understanding the absurdity of capitalism and imagining a better world. This book also includes his most famous essay, which is not about music: “ Exiting the Vampire Castle ,” a prescient analysis of social media’s destructive power on political organizing. Fisher’s work was a call to critics to write ambitiously about the art they loved and loathed. At last, it’s on glorious display. –Kevin Lozano

Michelle Tea’s essays about music are often about a desperate love of sound, that feeling when you can’t wait to start an album all over again while you’re still in the middle of loving it. In the veteran author’s latest essay collection, she outlines a youth spent marauding around a Gene Loves Jezebel show, cautiously eyeing Minor Threat, and ogling Prince—all deeply ’80s activities. Tea’s signature sensitive bravado also works gorgeously in the journalistic pieces in Against Memoir . Originally printed in The Believer , “ HAGS in Your Face ” is a brilliant, essential piece of queer history about San Francisco’s fierce dyke crew, who, as Tea notes, once tagged a van that turned out to belong to the Breeders, thus inspiring Last Splash ’s “Hag.” Tea’s sense for the social history of music feels as accurate as it does intimate. Remembering the cigarette fog surrounding those far cooler and more nonchalant, she finds the outsiders artfully intimidating: “Sonic Youth wasn’t so much a band to pine after, they were like a philosophy .” She feels deeply and tells it funny. –Maggie Lange

In the past few years, big strides have been made to reshape the rock and pop canon ; slowly but surely it is becoming more feminist. One notable effort from this year can be found in Women Who Rock , an anthology of crucial musicians who identify as female, spanning from the 1930s to current day. Edited by veteran music journalist and scholar Evelyn McDonnell, this stylishly illustrated coffee-table book is one you can drop into on any page and start reading. Dozens of writers including Peaches, Alice Bag, Vivien Goldman, Ann Powers, and Jenn and Liz Pelly offer up insightful essays on artists ranging from Bessie Smith to Poly Styrene to TLC. If you’re a member of team “girls invented punk rock, not England” (or are looking to join), this book is for you. –Sophie Kemp

Photo Books

In Contact High , hip-hop history is rendered in moments unseen. A collection of contact sheets from 40 years of iconic rap photoshoots, this gorgeous compendium highlights the outtakes over the final product. Journalist and curator Vikki Tobak gathers behind-the-scenes stories from the photographers responsible for indelible imagery, from Fab 5 Freddy walking around a derelict Bronx to Queen Latifah mugging on the set of her “Fly Girl” video to an upstart Nicki Minaj polishing off a plate of pancakes in a Queens diner. Far more than a simple photo book, Contact High is an irresistible showcase for rap’s brightest stars, and a deeply considered meditation on the power of media in hip-hop culture. –Eric Torres

With 200 pages of beautifully printed shots, Minneapolis photographer Allen Beaulieu’s Prince coffee-table book is A-U-T-O-matically definitive. Many iconic images are present and accounted for, including the covers of Dirty Mind and Controversy and their accompanying singles, plus press shots and inner-sleeve images from 1999 . But what really elevates Before the Rain is an intimacy you simply can’t find anywhere else. Beaulieu, Prince’s main photographer from 1979 to 1983, catches the maestro not only hard at work and relaxing backstage but full-on goofing off; no other Prince tome has pink-hued color test shots of the Purple One with a red bandanna on his face, pretending to suck his thumb. The multi-page spread of Prince and his band before and after their notorious 1981 opening set for the Rolling Stones—during which the audience pelted them with garbage—is nearly a documentary in itself. –Michaelangelo Matos, author of The Underground Is Massive

By Madison Bloom

By Matthew Strauss

By Jazz Monroe

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Donald Trump and Megan Mullally performing the Green Acres theme song at the Emmy Awards, Los Angeles, September 2005

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In the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1941 Mary Berg, then a teenager, wrote in her diary about the improbable persistence of laughter in that hellish place:

Every day at the Art Café on Leszno Street one can hear songs and satires on the police, the ambulance service, the rickshaws, and even the Gestapo, in a veiled fashion. The typhus epidemic itself is the subject of jokes. It is laughter through tears, but it is laughter. This is our only weapon in the ghetto—our people laugh at death and at the Nazi decrees. Humor is the only thing the Nazis cannot understand.

Berg here movingly expresses a common and comforting idea. Laughter is one of the few weapons that the weak have against the strong. Gallows humor is the one thing that cannot be taken away from those who are about to be hanged, the final death-defying assertion of human dignity and freedom. And the hangmen don’t get the jokes. Fascists don’t understand humor.

There is great consolation in these thoughts. Yet is it really true that fascists don’t get humor? Racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, xenophobic, antidisabled, and antiqueer jokes have always been used to dehumanize those who are being victimized. The ghetto humor that Berg recorded was a way of keeping self-pity at bay. But as Sigmund Freud pointed out, jokes can also be a way of shutting down pity itself by identifying those who are being laughed at as the ones not worthy of it: “A saving in pity is one of the most frequent sources of humorous pleasure.” Humor, as in Berg’s description, may be a way of telling us not to feel sorry for ourselves. But it is more often a way of telling us not to feel sorry for others. It creates an economy of compassion, limiting it to those who are laughing and excluding those who are being laughed at. It makes the polarization of humanity fun.

Around the time that Berg was writing her diary, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were pointing to the relationship between Nazi rallies and this kind of comedy. The rally, they suggested, was an arena in which a release that was otherwise forbidden was officially permitted:

The anti-Semites gather to celebrate the moment when authority lifts the ban; that moment alone makes them a collective, constituting the community of kindred spirits. Their ranting is organized laughter. The more dreadful the accusations and threats, the greater the fury, the more withering is the scorn. Rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation are fundamentally the same thing.

Donald Trump is not a Nazi, and his followers are (mostly) not fascists. But it is not hard to see how this description resonates with his campaign appearances. Trump is America’s biggest comedian. His badinage is hardly Wildean, but his put-downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people’s idea of fun. For them, he makes anger, fear, and resentment entertaining.

For anyone who questions how much talent and charisma this requires, there is a simple answer: Ron DeSantis. Why did DeSantis’s attempt to appeal to Republican voters as a straitlaced version of Trump fall so flat? Because Trumpism without the cruel laughter is nothing. It needs its creator’s fusion of rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation, whether of a reporter with a disability or (in a dumb show that Trump has been playing out in his speeches in recent months) of Joe Biden apparently unable to find his way off a stage. It demands the withering scorn for Sleepy Joe and Crooked Hillary, Crazy Liz and Ron DeSanctimonious, Cryin’ Chuck and Phoney Fani. It requires the lifting of taboos to create a community of kindred spirits. It depends on Trump’s ability to be pitiless in his ridicule of the targets of his contempt while allowing his audience to feel deeply sorry for itself. (If tragedy, as Aristotle claimed, involves terror and pity, Trump’s tragicomedy deals in terror and self-pity.)

Hard as it is to understand, especially for those of us who are too terrified to be amused, Trump’s ranting is organized laughter. To understand his continuing hold over his fans, we have to ask: Why is he funny?

This is not the 1930s or the 1940s, and we should not expect this toxic laughter to be organized quite as it was then. Trump functions in a culture supersaturated with knowingness and irony. In twentieth-century European fascism, the relationship between words and actions was clear: the end point of mockery was annihilation. Now, the joke is “only a joke.” Populist politics exploits the doubleness of comedy—the way that “only a joke” can so easily become “no joke”—to create a relationship of active connivance between the leader and his followers in which everything is permissible because nothing is serious.

This shift has happened in Europe, too. Think of Boris Johnson’s clown act, his deliberately ruffled hair, rumpled clothes, and ludicrous language. Or think of Giorgia Meloni, the first Italian prime minister from the far right since Benito Mussolini, posting on election day in September 2022 a TikTok video of herself holding two large melons ( meloni in Italian) in front of her breasts: fascism as adolescent snigger. It is impossible to think of previous far-right leaders engaging in such public self-mockery. Only in our time is it possible for a politician to create a sense of cultlike authority by using the collusiveness of comedy, the idea that the leader and his followers are united by being in on the joke.

Trump may be a narcissist, but he has a long history of this kind of self-caricature. When he did the Top Ten List on the David Letterman show in 2009, he seemed entirely comfortable delivering with a knowing smirk the top ten “financial tips” written for him, including “When nobody’s watching I go into a 7/11 and stick my head under a soda nozzle”; “Save money by styling your own hair” (pointing to his own improbable coiffure); “Sell North Dakota to the Chinese”; “If all else fails, steal someone’s identity”; and “The fastest way to get rich: marry and divorce me.” This performance, moreover, was the occasion for Trump’s entry into the world of social media. His first ever tweet was: “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!”

At the 2005 Emmy Awards, Trump dressed in blue overalls and a straw hat and, brandishing a pitchfork, sang the theme song from the 1960s TV comedy Green Acres . Trump is a terrible singer and a worse actor, but he seemed completely unembarrassed on stage. He understood the joke: that Oliver, the fictional character he was impersonating, is a wealthy Manhattanite who moves to rustic Hooterville to run a farm, following his dream of the simple life—an alternative self that was amusing because it was, for Trump, unimaginable. But he may have sensed that there was also a deep cultural resonance. The Apprentice was “reality TV ,” a form in which the actual and the fictional are completely fused.

Green Acres , scenes from which played on a screen behind Trump as he was singing, pioneered this kind of metatelevision. Its debut episode set it up as a supposed documentary presented by a well-known former newscaster. Its characters regularly broke the fourth wall. When Oliver launched into rhapsodic speeches about American rural values, a fife rendition of “Yankee Doodle” would play on the soundtrack, and the other characters would move around in puzzlement trying to figure out where the musician was. Eva Gabor, playing Oliver’s pampered wife, admits on the show that her only real talent is doing impressions of Zsa Zsa Gabor, the actor’s more famous real-life sister.

The critic Armond White wrote in 1985 that “ Green Acres ’ surreal rationale is to capture the moment American gothic turns American comic.” Trump playing Oliver in 2005 may be the moment American comedy turned gothic again. Whoever had the idea of connecting Trump back to Green Acres clearly understood that “Donald Trump” had by then also become a metatelevision character, a real-life failed businessman who impersonated an ultrasuccessful mogul on The Apprentice . And Trump went along with the conceit because he instinctively understood that self-parody was not a threat to his image—it was his image. This connection to Green Acres was reestablished by Trump himself as president of the United States. In December 2018, as he was about to sign the Farm Bill into law, Trump tweeted, “Farm Bill signing in 15 minutes! #Emmys #TBT,” with a clip of himself in the Green Acres spoof. Hooterville and the White House were as one.

What is new in the development of antidemocratic politics is that Trump brings all this comic doubleness—the confusion of the real and the performative, of character and caricature—to bear on the authoritarian persona of the caudillo, the duce, the strongman savior. The prototype dictators of the far right may have looked absurd to their critics (“Hitler,” wrote Adorno and Horkheimer, “can gesticulate like a clown, Mussolini risk false notes like a provincial tenor”), but within the community of their followers and the shadow community of their intended victims, their histrionics had to be taken entirely seriously. Trump, on the other hand, retains all his self-aware absurdity even while creating a political persona of immense consequence.

This comic-authoritarian politics has some advantages over the older dictatorial style. It allows a threat to democracy to appear as at worst a tasteless prank: in the 2016 presidential campaign even liberal outlets like The New York Times took Hillary Clinton’s e-mails far more seriously than Trump’s open stirring of hatred against Mexicans and Muslims. Funny-autocratic functions better in a society like that of the US, where the boundaries of acceptable insult are still shifting and mainstream hate-mongering still has to be light on its feet. It allows racial insults and brazen lies to be issued, as it were, in inverted commas. If you don’t see those invisible quotation marks, you are not smart enough—or you are too deeply infected by the woke mind virus—to be in on the joke. You are not part of the laughing community. The importance of not being earnest is that it defines the boundaries of the tribe. The earnest are the enemy.

The extreme right in America was very quick to understand the potency of “only a joke” in the Internet age. In a 2001 study of three hate speech websites sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan, Michael Billig noted that each of them described itself on its home page as a humorous exercise. The largest, called “N…..jokes KKK ” (the ellipsis is mine) carried the disclaimers: “You agree by entering this site, that this type of joke is legal where you live, and you agree that you recognize this site is meant as a joke not to be taken seriously”; “And you agree that this site is a comedy site, not a real racist site”; “We ARE NOT real life racists.”

What does “real life” even mean when Klansmen are not really racist? The power of this “humorous” mode of discourse lies at least partly in the way it blurs the distinctions between the real and the symbolic, and between words and actions. Consider the example of some of the men tried for their alleged parts in a 2020 plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan. One of them, Barry Croft, insisted at his trial in 2022 that he was joking most of the time when he posted on Facebook questions like “Which governor is going to end up being dragged off and hung for treason first?” Another, Brandon Caserta, was acquitted in 2022 in part because he successfully pleaded that violent statements he made on Facebook and in secretly recorded meetings of the group were not serious. These included claims that the Second Amendment sanctions the killing of “agents of the government when they become tyrannical.” “I may kill dozens of agents but eventually die in the process,” Caserta wrote on Facebook in May 2020. He later posted that he would beat government agents so hard they would “beg til they couldn’t beg any more because their mouth is so full of blood.”

At Croft’s trial, his defense attorney put it to an FBI witness that a meme Croft posted showing thirty bullets as “30 votes that count” was “A little tongue-in-cheek? A little bit funny?” On the second season of Jon Ronson’s superb podcast series for the BBC , Things Fell Apart , Caserta acknowledges that, on the secret recordings, he is heard to urge his fellow militia members that any lawyers advocating for the Covid vaccine be decapitated in their own homes, speaks of “wanting Zionist banker blood,” and advocates blowing up buildings where the vaccine is manufactured. He nonetheless insists to Ronson:

This isn’t something I’m dead serious about. This is nothing I ever planned. It’s funny, dude! It’s funny! It’s fun to blow stuff up. It’s fun to shoot guns. It’s fun to say ridiculous offensive shit. And if it offends you, so what? I don’t care about your feelings and how you feel about words. Sorry!

The twist of logic here is striking: Caserta equates blowing stuff up and shooting people with saying ridiculous offensive shit. Violent words and violent actions are all covered by the same disclaimer—one that Trump’s apologists use to blur the relationship between his words and his followers’ actions in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the Trumpian twilight zone where democracy is dying but not yet dead, the connection between words (“fight like hell”) and deeds (the armed invasion of the Capitol) must be both strong and weak, sufficiently “no joke” to be understood by the faithful yet sufficiently “only a joke” to be deniable to the infidels. The comic mode is what creates the plausible deniability that in turn allows what used to be mainstream Republicans (and some Democrats) to remain in denial about what Trumpism really means.

For those who love Trump, there is something carnivalesque in all of this. In his discussion of “mediaeval laughter” in Rabelais and His World , Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that “one might say that it builds its own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state.” Bakhtin suggested that the

festive liberation of laughter…was a temporary suspension of the entire official system with all its prohibitions and hierarchic barriers. For a short time life came out of its usual, legalized and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom.

Trump and many of his followers have made this quite literal. They create their own America, their own republic, their own notions of legality, their own church of the leader’s cult, their own state versus what they see as the official state. In this way, extreme polarization becomes a sphere of utopian freedom.

This is the capacious zone in which Trump’s comedy operates, an arena that admits everyone who gets the joke, from those who fantasize about killing tyrants, decapitating lawyers, and torturing government agents to those who just like to blow off steam by listening to their hero saying stuff that riles the woke enemy. It is crucial that in Trump’s delivery there is no shift from mockery to seriousness, no line between entertainment and violence. His singsong tone is generous and flexible, serving equally well for vaudeville and vituperation. In his streams of consciousness, they flow together as complementary currents.

In the recent speeches in which he has upped the ante on openly fascist rhetoric by characterizing his opponents as “vermin” and accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” it is notable that his cadence is soft, almost lilting. There is no warning to his audience that these comments are of a different order. They are not even applause lines. By underplaying them, Trump leaves open the fundamental question: Is his mimicking of Hitler’s imagery just another impersonation, all of a piece with the way he does Biden and Haley in funny voices or even with the way he sings the theme song from Green Acres ?

Even when Trump actually goes the whole way and acknowledges that his rhetoric is indeed Hitlerian, as he did in a speech in Iowa after the alarmed reaction of liberals to his previous “poisoning the blood” speech, it is in a passage that jumbles together murderous intent, complaint about the media, and comic acting: “They are destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing…. They don’t like it when I said that. And I never read Mein Kampf .” But he makes the “Kampf” funny, puckering his lips and elongating the “pf” so it sounds like a rude noise. He continues: “They said ‘Oh, Hitler said that.’” Then he adds his defense: “in a much different way.” It is the stand-up comedian’s credo: it’s not the jokes, it’s the way you tell ’em. And this is, indeed, true—the difference is in the way he tells it, in a voice whose ambiguous pitch has been perfected over many years of performance.

The knowingness is all. In the speech in Conway, South Carolina, on February 10, in which he openly encouraged Russia to attack “delinquent” members of NATO , this startling statement, with potential world-historical consequences, was preceded by Trump’s metatheatrical riff on the idea of “fun.” What was fun, he told his followers, was the reaction he could provoke just by saying “Barack Hussein Obama”:

Every time I say it, anytime I want to have a little fun…even though the country is going to hell, we have to have a little bit of fun…. Remember Rush Limbaugh, he’d go “Barack Hooosaynn Obama”—I wonder what he was getting at.

He then segued into another commentary on his own well-honed send-up of Joe Biden: “I do the imitation where Biden can’t find his way off the stage…. So I do the imitation—is this fun?—I say this guy can’t put two sentences together…and then I go ‘Watch!’” (He said the word with a comic pout.) “I’ll imitate him. I go like this: ‘Haw!’” Trump hunches his shoulders and extends his arm, in a parody of Biden’s gestures. In this burlesque, Trump is not just mimicking his opponent; he is explicitly reenacting his own previous mocking impersonation, complete with commentary. He is simultaneously speaking, acting, and speaking about his acting.

It is within this “fun” frame that Trump proceeded to insinuate that there is something awry with Nikki Haley’s marriage: “Where’s her husband? Oh he’s away…. What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband! Where is he? He’s gone. He knew, he knew.” He and presumably many members of the audience were aware that Michael Haley is currently serving in Djibouti with the South Carolina National Guard. But as part of the show, with the funny voices and the exaggerated gestures, that lurid hint at some mysteriously unmentionable scandal (“He knew, he knew”) is somehow amusing. And then so is Trump’s story about telling an unnamed head of a “big” NATO country that the US would not defend it from invasion and—the punch line—that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want.” Here Trump is acting in both senses, both ostentatiously performing and exerting a real influence on global politics—but which is which? How can we tell the dancer from the dance?

This shuffling in a typical Trump speech of different levels of seriousness—personal grudges beside grave geopolitics, savage venom mixed with knockabout farce, possible truths rubbing up against outrageous lies—creates a force field of incongruities. Between the looming solidity of Trump’s body and the airy, distracted quality of his words, in which weightless notions fly off before they are fully expressed, he seems at once immovable and in manic flux.

Incongruity has long been seen as one of the conditions of comedy. Francis Hutcheson in Reflections Upon Laughter (1725) noted that it is “this contrast or opposition of ideas of dignity and meanness which is the occasion of laughter.” The supposedly dignified idea of “greatness” is vital to Trump’s presence and rhetoric. But it is inextricably intertwined with the mean, the inconsequential, even the infantile. He is at one moment the grandiose man of destiny and the next a naughty child—an incongruity that can be contained only within an organized laughter in which the juxtaposition of incompatibilities is the essence of fun. This is why Trump’s lapses into pure gibberish—like telling a National Rifle Association gathering in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on February 9 that the Democrats are planning to “change the name of Pennsylvania” and that, in relation to the marble columns in the hall, it was “incredible how they could [have been built] years ago without the powerful tractors that you have today”—do not make his fans alarmed about his mental acuity. Cognitive dysfunction is not a worry with a man whose métier is cognitive dissonance.

Part of the dissonance is that Trump’s stand-up routine is completely dependent on the idea that he and his audience most despise: political correctness. Like much of the worst of contemporary comedy, Trump both amuses and thrills his audience by telling them that he is saying what he is not allowed to say. “Beautiful women,” he said at the rally in South Carolina after pointing to a group of female superfans in the audience. “You’re not allowed to say that anymore, but I’ll say it…. That usually is the end of a career, but I’ll say it.” There are so many layers to a moment like this: the idea that the woke mob is stopping manly men from complimenting attractive women, a sideways nod toward the “pussygate” tapes that should have ended Trump’s political career but didn’t, a dig at the Me Too movement, a reiteration of Trump’s right to categorize women as “my type” or “not my type,” the power of the leader to lift prohibitions—not just for himself but, in this carnivalesque arena of utopian freedom, for everyone in the audience.

Flirting with the unsayable has long been part of his shtick. If we go all the way back to May 1992 to watch Trump on Letterman’s show, there is a moment when Trump silently mouths the word “shit.” He does this in a way that must have been practiced rather than spontaneous—it takes some skill to form an unspoken word so clearly for a TV audience that everyone immediately understands it. Letterman plays his straight man: “You ain’t that rich, Don, you can’t come on here and say that.” But of course Trump did not “say” it. A sympathetic audience loves a moment like this because it is invited to do the transgressive part in its head. It gets the pleasure of filling in the blank.

Trump’s audiences, in other words, are not passive. This comedy is a joint enterprise of performer and listener. It gives those listeners the opportunity for consent and collusion. Consider a televised speech Trump gave at the Al Smith Dinner, hosted by the Catholic archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in October 2016, near the end of the presidential campaign. The dinner, held to raise money for Catholic charities, is traditionally the last occasion on which the two main presidential candidates share a stage—Hillary Clinton was also present. Trump deadpanned that he knew he would have a receptive audience because “so many of you in the archdiocese already have a place in your heart for a guy who started out as a carpenter working for his father. I was a carpenter working for my father. True.”

What is the joke here? That Trump is like Jesus Christ. Imagine if Clinton had attempted an equivalent gag. There would have been outrage and uproar: Clinton has insulted all Christians by making a blasphemous comparison between herself and the divine Savior. But the cameras cut to Dolan, a sycophantic supporter of Trump, and showed him laughing heartily. And if the cardinal found it funny, it was funny. It was thus an in-joke. If Clinton had made it, it would be the ultimate out-joke, proof of the Democrats’ contempt for people of faith.

But what is allowed as funny will sooner or later be proposed seriously. Many of those attending Trump rallies now wear T-shirts that proclaim “Jesus Is My Savior. Trump Is My President.” Some of them illustrate the slogan with a picture of an ethereal Christ laying both his hands on Trump’s shoulders. What begins as a risqué quip ends up as a religious icon. There is no line here between sacrilege and devotion, transgressive humor and religious veneration.

Just as Trump’s jokes can become literal, his ugly realities can be bathed in the soothing balm of laughter. Long before he ran for president, he was indulged on the late-night talk shows as the hilarious huckster. In 1986 Letterman tried repeatedly to get Trump to tell him how much money he had, and when he continually evaded the question, Letterman broke the tension with the laugh-line, “You act like you’re running for something.” In December 2005 Conan O’Brien asked him, “You also have an online school? Is that correct?” Trump replied, “Trump University—if you want to learn how to get rich.” The audience howled with laughter, presumably not because they thought he was kidding but because the very words “Trump University” are innately absurd. When he did that Top Ten List on Letterman in 2009, Trump’s comic financial advice included “For tip number four, simply send me $29.95.”

But these jokes came true. Trump wouldn’t say how much he was worth because his net worth was partly fictional. Trump did run for something. Trump University was an innately funny idea that people took seriously enough to enable Trump to rip them off. And Trump does want you to send him $29.95—the first thing you get on Trump’s official website is an insistent demand: “Donate Today.” This is the thing about Trump’s form of organized laughter, in which the idea of humor obscures the distinction between outlandish words and real-life actions. Sooner or later, the first becomes the second. The in-joke becomes the killer line.

March 21, 2024

Who Should Regulate Online Speech?

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Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times. His most recent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland , was published in the US last year. (March 2024)

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10 books to add to your reading list in April

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Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your April reading list.

April’s book releases cover some difficult topics, including Salman Rushdie discussing his 2022 maiming, Leigh Bardugo’s fiction about the dark arts and Ada Limón’s poetry anthology about our fragile world. However, like April, there is also sunshine: Leif Enger’s wild Great Lakes love story, Helen Tworkov’s beautiful memoir of Buddhism and a collection of the inimitable Maggie Nelson’s essays. Happy reading, happy spring!

I Cheerfully Refuse: A Novel By Leif Enger Grove Press: 336 pages, $28 (April 2)

An unusual and meaningful surprise awaits readers of Enger’s latest, which takes place largely on Lake Superior, as a man named Rainy tries to reunite with his beloved wife, Lark. While the world around this couple, a dystopian near-future American where billionaires control everything, could not be bleaker, the author’s retelling of the myth of Orpheus (who went to the underworld to rescue his wife) contains the authentic hope of a born optimist.

The Familiar: A Novel By Leigh Bardugo Flatiron Books: 400 pages, $30 (April 9)

Bardugo departs from novels of dark academia in a standalone to make the hairs on your neck stand up, set in 16th century Spain. A hidden Sephardic Jew and scullery maid named Luzia Cotado matches wits with fellow servant Guillén Santángel. Luzia discovers a secret of Guillén’s, but she’s already fallen in love with him. And because he knows hers, too, they might both avoid the Spanish Inquisition. It’s a gorgeous tale of enchantments both supernatural and earthly.

The Sleepwalkers: A Novel By Scarlett Thomas Simon & Schuster: 304 pages, $28 (April 9)

A couple honeymoons at a Greek resort. What could go wrong? In Thomas’ hands, plenty – especially as the author has never written a comfortable story; her books, from “PopCo ” to “Oligarchy,” crackle with unreliable characters, as well as big philosophical ideas. In this case, the new marriage’s breakdown is chronicled through letters between the spouses, and sometimes bits of ephemera, that ultimately untangle a dark mystery relating to the title.

The Garden: A Novel By Clare Beams Doubleday: 304 pages, $28 (April 10)

Few novels of literary fiction are written as well as “The Garden,” let alone given its sadly relevant retro setting, a 1940s country-estate obstetrical program. Irene Willard walks through its gates having endured five miscarriages; pregnant again, she and her war-veteran husband George desperately hope for a live birth. But as Irene discovers more about the woman who controls all here, Dr. Bishop, she fears carrying to term as much as she once feared pregnancy loss.

Reboot: A Novel By Justin Taylor Pantheon: 304 pages, $28 (April 23)

David Crader, former teen TV heartthrob, just wants to reboot his career when his old show “Rev Beach” has a moment. His life has devolved through substance abuse, divorce and underemployment. But when he and colleagues launch a remake, devolution continues: The protagonist’s struggles are mirrored by climate-change issues, from flooding to wildfires. Despite that darkness, Taylor’s gift for satire might make this a must-read for 2024 beach bags.

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World By Ada Limón (Editor) Milkweed Editions: 176 pages, $25 (April 2)

A wondrous artist herself, Limón is currently poet laureate of the United States, and this anthology is part of her signature project, “You Are Here,” which will also feature poetry as public art in seven national parks. Released in conjunction with the Library of Congress, the collection features 50 previously unpublished poems by luminaries including Jericho Brown, Joy Harjo, Carl Phillips and Diane Seuss, each focusing on a piece of regional landscape.

Like Love: Essays and Conversations By Maggie Nelson Graywolf Press: 336 pages, $32 (April 2)

While all of the pieces in Nelson’s new book have previously been published elsewhere, they’re made fresh here both through being collected and through their chronological placement. Readers can practically watch Nelson’s incisive mind growing and changing as she speaks with colleagues such as Hilton Als and Judith Butler, or as she writes about queerness, motherhood, violence, the lyrics of Prince and the devastating loss of a friend.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder By Salman Rushdie Random House: 204 pages, $28 (April 16)

On Aug. 12, 2022, the author Salman Rushdie was speaking at upstate New York’s Chautauqua festival when a man rushed the stage and attempted to murder him. Rushdie, a target of Iranian religious leaders since 1989, was permanently injured. In this book, he shares his experience for the first time, having said that this was essential for him to write. In this way, he answers violence with art, once again reminding us all that freedom of expression must be protected.

Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America By Helen Tworkov St. Martin’s Essentials: 336 pages, $29 (April 16)

Tworkov, founder of the magazine Tricycle, chronicles her move from a 1960s young-adult interest in Buddhism to travels through Asia and deep study in the United States of the different strands that follow the Buddha’s teachings. Tworkov mentions luminaries such as the artist Richard Serra, the composer Charles Mingus and the Dalai Lama, but she’s not name-dropping. Instead, she’s strewing fragrant petals from her singular path to mindfulness that may help us find ours.

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War By Erik Larson Crown: 592 pages, $35 (April 30)

Even diehard Civil War aficionados will learn from Larson’s look at the six months between Lincoln’s 1860 election and the surrender of Union troops under Maj. Robert Anderson at Charleston’s Ft. Sumter. Larson details Anderson’s secret Christmas redeployment and explores this individual’s contradictions as a former slave owner who loyally follows Lincoln’s orders. The author also shares first-person perspective from the famous diaries of the upper-class Southerner Mary Chesnut. All together, the book provides a riveting reexamination of a nation in tumult.

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