Criticism category: 58377 books

Blurbs forthcoming from Kiese Laymon, and more TK Essays have appeared in different forms at the New York Times, MTV, The Fader, and Pitchfork Author is a columnist at MTV News

The ten letters collected here are arguably the most famous and beloved letters of our century. Written when Rainer Maria Rilke was himself still a young man with most of his greatest work before him, they are addressed to a student who had sent Rilke some of his work, asking for advice about becoming...

During his nearly forty years as a music journalist, Ralph J. Gleason recorded many in-depth interviews with some of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. These informal sessions, conducted mostly in Gleason’s Berkeley, California, home, have never been transcribed and published in full until now....

"[These essays] reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite, and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life, literature, and a great deal in between." —Los Angeles Times Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds...

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Alice Sheldon’s birth, and in recognition of the enormous influence of James Tiptree Jr (Sheldon's pen-name) and Sheldon on the field, Twelfth Planet Press has published a selection of thoughtful letters written by science fiction and fantasy’s writers,...

The writing career of Booker Prize winner John Berger–poet, storyteller, playwright, and essayist–has yielded some of the most original and compelling examinations of art and life of the past half century. In this essential volume, Geoff Dyer has brought together a rich selection of many of Berger’s...

Gore Vidal—novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist—is America's premier man of letters. No other living writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an...

“Reading How Literature Saved My Life is like getting to listen in on a really great, smart, provocative conversation. The book is not straightforward, it resists any single interpretation, and it seems to me to constitute nothing less than a new form.” ––Whitney Otto   In this wonderfully...

The author of Solaris critiques science fiction in a collection of provocative essays. Celebrated science fiction master Stanislaw Lem turns his always sharp and insightful pen to criticism in this bold and controversial analysis of the genre for which he is most known. In this collection of...

A dazzling collection of essays on how the best poems work, from the master poet and essayist “Poetry,” Jane Hirshfield has said, “is language that foments revolutions of being.” In ten eloquent and highly original explorations, she unfolds and explores some of the ways this is done—by...

“A stimulating combination of literary criticism, essay, and fiction” (The New Yorker) from the incomparable Ali Smith Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world—it is about the things art can do, the things art is made of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness....

From Booker Prize-winning author John Berger, a collection of essays that explores the relationship of art and artists and includes examinations of the work of Brancusi, Degas, Michelangelo, and Frida Kahlo, among others. The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed...

From the beloved host and creator of NPR’s All Songs Considered and* Tiny Desk Concerts *comes an essential oral history of modern music, told in the voices of iconic and up-and-coming musicians, including Dave Grohl, Jimmy Page, Michael Stipe, Carrie Brownstein, Smokey Robinson, and Jeff Tweedy,...

Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard’s latest play is an uproarious, brilliantly provocative farce that brings the gifts of a quintessentially American playwright to bear on the current American dilemma. Frank and Emma are a quiet, respectable couple who raise cows on their Wisconsin farm. Soon...