We love rock & roll, but learning how it’s produced, marketed and compromised for mass consumption is a bit like learning how sausage is made or cloth diape...
Financial journalist Lindsay Goldwert saw parallels between the work of dominatrixes and how all the rest of us live our lives. So, she went straight into the c...
As co-editor (with Aline Kominsky-Crumb) of the all-female Twisted Sisters Comics in the 1970s and 1980s, Diane Noomin is one of the pioneering women cartoonist...
On Tuesday, Thomas Dunne Books, a St. Martin’s imprint, releases 1973: Rock at the Crossroads, a deep 347-page dive into that year’s music biz and music scene b...
Elizabeth Hand, a much-acclaimed novelist and essayist, offers an appraisal of Debbie Harry’s new memoir and discovers that the Blondie icon is really ’the girl...
Beautiful but uncategorizable music flowed through Lhasa de Sela (1972-2010), whose itinerant, off-the-grid childhood with spiritually-inclined parents allowed ...
The hardnosed, hard-living Southern writer once dubbed himself ‘Freak City’ and, despite a lifestyle (booze, drugs, fistfights, etc.) that would have floored mo...
Spiraling down a silo of despair and drunkenness in the wake of his On The Road/Dharma Bums celebrity as ‘king of the Beats’, Jack Kerouac longed for a safe hav...
Ken Kesey assembled his Merry Pranksters and other kindred spirits for one more, and final, prank—a semi-regular book series that contained pieces of his unfini...
Rod McKuen was labeled ‘The King of Kitsch’ by critics and “McGoon” by academics (a label that included Bob Dylan too) and hated by the hipsters. And yet, Richa...
When the young Beat novelist (Kerouac) met the old bohemian poet (Bodenheim) in 1951, they were headed in opposite directions. Jack Kerouac was just lighting hi...
A visually stunning new book details the history, rise and fall of “social athletic clubs” in Chicago, before the gang bangers made a mockery of the concept. Mo...
There were once two men named Jerry: Salinger and Lewis. And one of them wrote a famous novel, Catcher In the Rye, which the other wanted to turn into a movie, ...
The novelist J.G. Ballard created language so unique that, according to renowned poet and novelist Jeremy Reed, he was like “a tourist from the future whose the...
