
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.
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.
In What Nails It Greil Marcus delivers a philosophical treatise wherein fact and fiction merge into poetic indeterminacy, like a nebulous 1960s garage rock tune.
You can smell the cigarette ash and Johnnie Walker Black Label on the pages of A Hitch in Time, a gleefully pugilistic posthumous Christopher Hitchens anthology.
Blending personal experience with popular culture, Peter Coviello seeks to democratize how criticism is understood and practiced in Is There God after Prince?
Wolfish: Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear engagingly weaves ecology, sociology, and history into a rich tapestry to warily gaze into the unblinking eye of fear.
The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation offers a means to fight back against shaming but little advice for addressing shameless behavior.
How did Calvin Klein’s gender-neutral CK One, with its scent like “a vodka tonic with lemon twist”, help inspire gender revolution?Perfume follows the fragrant path into queer culture.
Fintan O’Toole’s lucid history of Ireland, We Don’t Know Ourselves, is a vivid telling of how his country’s culture of silence and repression was broken open.
John McWhorter’s pushback against the antiracist orthodoxy of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi lands palpable hits but is too scattered to win the match.
Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen Martin’s words snake their way into one’s consciousness and viciously bite at the tragic absurdity of American racism.
Considering Susan Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster” and modern apocalyptic narratives, are sci-fi and horror still “inadequate responses” to our world?
For intellectual historian Louis Menand, the Cold War gave rise to prospects and paradoxes in America, and Art was given status through essential criticism.