Laila Lalami’s ‘The Dream Hotel’ Questions Our Concept of Freedom
Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel asks how much freedom Americans are willing to sacrifice to feel safe. What if that includes losing their right to privacy?
Books
Features, reviews, interviews, and lists about books including cultural commentary and history, non-fiction, literature, and more.
Home and Away with Audio Author Adam Gnade
Across novels and audio recordings of his writing backed by music, penning from home and while away, Adam Gnade has created a singular snapshot of American life.
5 Great Books That Reinvent Music Criticism
This is by no means a comprehensive survey of contemporary music criticism, but these five books all point a way forward for the field.
The Best Books of 2024
PopMatters Best Books of 2024 include a broad range of nonfiction, many books on music, short fiction, a novel that turns a Mark Twain classic inside out, and much more.
The Vices and Virtues of Ignorance in These Times
In Understanding Ignorance, philosopher Daniel DeNicola invites us to explore the meaning and implication of what we don’t know, which may be as complex as knowledge itself.
Jazz’s Historical Agenda as Protest Music in the Stellar ‘Brassroots Democracy’
The excellent Brassroots Democracy details the beautiful and bleak ways that jazz music created the soundtrack of an emancipatory movement that lasts to this day.
Arthur Russell’s Underground Genius
Arthur Russell biography Travels Over Feeling is an elegy for a generation of underground artists that died too soon and a requiem for a vanished New York.
The Defective Premise of Paula Ramos’ ‘Defectors’
Paola Ramos has more than one “massive blind spot”, which makes the ambitious Defectors not scholarly enough and too good to be true.
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Punk Is a Virus That’s Infected Everything
Tracing punk’s mutations, Iain Ellis’ Punk Beyond the Music is a robust and kaleidoscopic survey of this once-outsider subculture’s continuing, pervasive influence.
A Queer Feminist Storytelling of ‘Jurassic Park’
Hannah McGregor’s book about Jurassic Park is a memoir, a love letter to monstrous femininities and queer kinships, and a pocket guide to reading like a feminist.
Fembot Despair in Olivia Gatwood’s ‘Whoever You Are, Honey’
Olivia Gatwood’s women struggle with feeling that their lives are over after a trauma to their bodies. The fembot in Whoever You Are, Honey despairs there are none.
Music in Haruki Murakami’s ‘The City and Its Uncertain Walls’
In Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, music’s presence and absence are central to the concrete and metaphysical spaces the characters migrate between.