Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture ed. Eric Nakamura
Over 13 years since it ceased publication, the magazine Giant Robot stands as an indelible force in the American melting pot of popular culture. Media wasn’t always this diverse. Giant Robot was created during a time in US history when representation of Asian Americans was problematic, if not scant, in American media. When there was representation outside of Bruce Lee and a few others, it was relegated to Asian stereotypes. Giant Robot was created by Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong in Los Angeles in 1994. Driven by a punk ethos and according to Nakamura, the small zine “encapsulated the passion and energy of what excited my small world of friends”.
Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture is a celebration. This volume preserves much of what made it special. It doesn’t include all the magazine’s articles. However, the new material included in this massive book—the interviews, archival photographs, and reflections—combined with its curation of older material makes it a must for fans of Giant Robot and pop culture aficionados. – Luis Aguiasvivas
The Half-Life of Guilt by Lynn Stegner
[High Road]
The Half-Life of Guilt‘s plot is a simple story about a couple on a difficult ten-day road trip from the Bay Area down the length of California and into Baja. It is an engaging tale in and of itself, but it floats above turbulent currents. In a family-owned Napa Valley winery and vineyard, Clair grew up dominated by her twin, Nina, a childhood that informs Clair’s adult relationships. Central to this elaborate flashback is a gruesome childhood event infused with guilt that is a permanent inflection point in their lives.
The Half-Life of Guilt embodies a modern form of the traditional journey motif, in this case, a quest with two goals: protecting nature and definitively determining the contours of the travelers’ relationship. It’s an engrossing story with vivid detail, fully dimensional characters, and the unmediated interiority of the protagonist’s mind. Lynn Stegner’s extraordinary crafting of language throughout makes for a truly outstanding novel. There is no guilty pleasure in reading The Half-Life of Guilt. There is only pleasure.
– R.P. Finch
Hip-Hop Is History by Questlove
Since Questlove has been immersed in music and hip-hop in every way possible, what he conveys in Hip-Hop Is History is inseparable from his personal life and experiences. Questlove is many things, though not your typical historian. In Hip-Hop is History, he uses his knowledge and experience to his advantage in every way, bringing unique and fresh perspectives. His well-honed instincts are spot-on. This makes for an immensely entertaining, if not indispensable, history of the most important musical genre of the last half-century.
Questlove notes that this is not an encyclopedia because it would have to be “fifty years long.” Instead, his way of keeping things focused is “less omission than mission”. He has a knack for navigating seemingly all of the most critical artists’ threads and trends, along with his many asides and excursions, across half a century. Questlove obviously had fun writing this book. With its deft layering of words, its samples, and how it articulates sound, reading Questlove’s Hip-Hop Is History is like listening to De La Soul’s excellent album 3 Feet High and Rising. – James A. Cosby
A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve)
A Hitch in Time is an anthology of the writings of gleefully pugilistic posthumous Christopher Hitchens. A columnist of the old breed, Hitchens didn’t narrow his remit. He darted across culture, politics, and history. He expounded on P.G. Wodehouse with the same authority he used to break down the fascist underpinnings of America’s militia movement, socialist factions in the pre-and postwar years, or the internecine power plays of Kurdistan. There were no dry, serious essays or lighthearted, fun ones. Each piece was just as compelling, pellucid, and witty.
The figures Hitchens focuses his ire on are almost always well-chosen. Yet, the dark is frequently leavened with the light in this fierce yet often wonderfully waggish collection. That spirit of louche sauciness extends through this collection. The closest thing most of us will get to having been in Hitchens’ orbit, A Hitch in Time positively reeks of cigarette smoke, loud schismatic arguments, emptied liters of Johnnie Walker Black, unprintable humor, and dauntingly fierce erudition. – Chris Barsanti
I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am by Zachary Pace (Two Dollar Radio)
Poet Zachary Pace’s debut essay collection, I Sing to Use the Waiting, reflects on some of the female singers that have influenced their queer identity. Pace engages with issues such as Madonna’s spirituality, Cat Power’s bootleg performances, Cher’s movie roles, Rihanna’s relationship to the colonial history of Barbados, and Joanna Newsom’s vocabulary to create a book that is wide in scope yet highly personal and lyrical. They incorporate queer theory and psychoanalytic theory to inform readings of different voices, and some of the most devastating essays focus on Whitney Houston, Pocahontas (the person and the 1995 Disney movie), and Pace’s familial relations. Though less ambitious than the other books on this list, I Sing to Use the Waiting deserves special recognition for the quality of its prose and the sharpness of its ideas. – Joshua Friedberg
James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
Written from the perspective of Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Percival Everett’s novel is as subversive as some of his best work and occasionally as playful, but ultimately far more straightforward and powerful for it. James doesn’t try to “reimagine” or “reclaim” Mark Twain’s classic tale, existing instead in a kind of parallel universe where Everett is filling in the things Twain left out or could not imagine (the inner lives of black people, for one) and creating a complementary story for Jim that expands and enriches his relationship with Huck.
Like in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the action in James is largely river-bound, as Jim and Huck steal down the Mississippi, the former escaping an attempt to sell him off and the latter wanting an adventure and to escape his drunken father. Everett’s language games are threaded throughout, especially in the book’s conceit that when no white people are around, enslaved people speak without the minstrel-type dialect that Twain used. However, unlike in a novel like 2001’s Erasure, where the protagonist’s intellectualism gets the better of him, Jim’s secret bookishness is a point of pride and a root of his strength.
Written in a clean, propulsive style, James is an adventure story told with a tart satirical voice Twain would have appreciated, and a raw emotional pull Twain never could deliver. – Chris Barsanti
Lazarus Man, by Richard Price (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Though it starts with an explosion—or an implosion, really, when a five-story tenement building in East Harlem suddenly collapses – as poorly-maintained century-ish-old buildings in New York do at times—the latest novel from Richard Price is not in much of a hurry to thrill readers. It’s all the better for it. Setting Lazarus Man in 2008, Price uses the building collapse as an X-ray to examine the lives of neighbors and others (a crusty funeral-home director, a naïve new-to-the-city photographer, a burned-out NYPD detective) around the incident, none less than the man who somehow survives the collapse.
The joys of this spectacular fiction come in the hinges between the action, such as it is, with Price using his gimlet eye for detail and psychological clarity to bring each character to life with an intoxicating richness. Lazarus Man doesn’t have the masterfully racing plot of his last crime novel, 2015’s The Whites, but is somehow no less a page-turner. – Chris Barsanti
The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason by Don Armstrong (Bloomsbury Academic)
Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph J. Gleason predates that golden era of music journalism when Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau thrived. Gleason and businessman Jann Wenner began working together in 1966 when Wenner was hired as a staff writer for the leftist magazine Ramparts, a publication that also featured Gleason’s work. The two launched Rolling Stone the following year, covering the current music scene, counterculture, and politics. Gleason went from discovering Duke Ellington as a teenager on his bedroom radio to writing scathing indictments of President Nixon during the Watergate scandal.
What set Ralph J. Gleason apart from other music journalists was his indifference to genre labels and generation gaps and his genuine love of the music. “Gleason’s writings model the type of criticism [Ted] Gioia yearns for,” Don Armstrong writes in The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason. “Gleason eschewed lifestyle reporting and celebrityism and raised his children to see great musicians as everyday people.
Armstrong’s incisive writing chronicles the life of this legend, who passed away in 1975 at 58. Gleason’s legacy as Rolling Stone’s cofounder is secure, as his name remains on the masthead to this day. – Chris Ingalls
Muzzle for Witches by Dubravka Ugrešić (Open Letter)
Sit down and pour yourself a glass, stein, or cup of whatever you like to drink from. Before you sip, chug, or quaff, raise the vessel to Dubravka Ugrešić and thank her for being among our time’s best independent, iconoclastic, and undersung authors.
Ugrešić is no longer with us, but she left many valuable guideposts to help us negotiate the darkness, including the defiant Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2011), the tragic tales in 2007’s The Ministry of Pain and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender from 1977 (RIP Roland the walrus), and the justly celebrated Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1988). Ugrešić also wrote many essays taking on the increasing nationalism, violent rhetoric, and intolerance in what used to be Yugoslavia; the new Croatian government and its literary establishment branded her as a traitor and a witch. Still, she continued to fight the good fight against fascism and sexism even after her self-exile to Amsterdam and working teaching gigs around the world. Dubravka Ugrešić was a real one, and she deserves all the praise we can sing to her.
If you have read any of her works, you will salivate over Muzzle for Witches. It is a collection of her conversations with literary critic Merima Omeragić, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać. If you don’t know Dubravka Ugrešić’s works, this current volume will serve as a worthy introduction to “Ugresiciana”. In this grimly funny collection of conversations, Dubravka Ugrešić bites the hand that muzzles women. – Matt Cibula
My Black Country: A Journey through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future by Alice Randall (Atria/Black Privilege Publishing)
Alice Randall, the first Black woman to co-write a #1 country hit, Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl),” has written a fantastic, moving memoir with a strong integration of music history and personal narrative. Her prose in My Black Country is elegant and evocative, rich in place and atmosphere, with exceptional insight into the history of country music and Black participation therein.
Randall writes passionately about her First Family of Black Country, including early figures like Lil Hardin and later superstars like Charley Pride. She recounts her journey in the country music industry, facing racism and sexism. Her recuperative work, discovering and highlighting erased Black country figures, makes clear the indisputable significance of Black people in country music. – Joshua Friedberg