In this innovative book, Mike Chasar forwards a theory for how we read, hear, and understand popular music lyrics on their own, in relation to each other, and in relation to the poetic tradition that they inherit, revitalize, and push into new expressive quarters.When Guns N’ Roses lead singer Axl Rose belts out the series of “ohs” in the chorus from one of the band’s most famous songs—“Whoa, oh, oh, oh, sweet child o’ mine”—exactly what sort of poetic work is going on? When Freddi...

Through short essays, leading poetry critics and Bob Dylan experts analyze songs from a range of perspectives to illuminate the songs' poetic and literary character.An innovative resource for Bob Dylan fans and scholars alike, these thirty essays by leading scholars of poetry, music, and literature illustrate how and why the work of the 2016 Nobel Literature Laureate is in fact so literary. Examining how Dylan's lyrics shape or get shaped by vocalization, performan...

A diverse collection of essays and interviews on reading, teaching, and writing poetry from a preeminent critic and scholar.Jed Rasula is a distinguished scholar of avant-garde poetics, noted for his erudition, intellectual range, and critical independence. Wreading: A Poetics of Awareness, or How Do We Know What We Know? is a collection of essays and interviews that reflects the breadth and diversity of his curiosity.While this v...

It’s become commonplace in contemporary culture for critics to proclaim the death of poetry. Poetry, they say, is no longer relevant to the modern world, mortally wounded by the emergence of new media technologies. In Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways.Beginning w...

It’s become commonplace in contemporary culture for critics to proclaim the death of poetry. Poetry, they say, is no longer relevant to the modern world, mortally wounded by the emergence of new media technologies. In Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways.Beginning w...

Exploring poetry scrapbooks, old-time radio show recordings, advertising verse, corporate archives, and Hallmark greeting cards, among other unconventional sources, Mike Chasar casts American poetry as an everyday phenomenon consumed and created by a vast range of readers. He shows how American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century and its reception helped set the stage for the dynamics of popular culture and mass media today.Poetry was then part and parcel of American ...

The story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, and melodrama has turned everything—news, politics, religion, high culture—into one vast public entertainment.Neal Gabler calls them "lifies," those blockbusters written in the medium of life that dominate the media and the national conversation for weeks, months, even years: the death of Princess Diana, the trial of O.J. Simpson, Kenneth Starr vs. William Jefferson Clinton. Real Life as Entertainment is hardly a new phe...

A New York Review Books OriginalAn uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only...

"Collectively thought-provoking and provocative . . . Essential insights, masterfully assembled, on the precarious state of American publishing." — Kirkus ReviewsWriters write—but what do they do for money?In a widely read essay entitled "MFA vs NYC," bestselling novelist Chad Harbach ( The Art of Fielding) argued that the American literary scene has split into two cultures: New York publishing versus university MFA programs. This book bring...

Fables of Abundance ranges from the traveling peddlers of early modern Europe to the twentieth-century American corporation, exploring the ways that advertising collaborated with other cultural institutions to produce the dominant aspirations and anxieties in the modern United States.

Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design brings together the best of designer Michael Bierut's critical writing—serious or humorous, flattering or biting, but always on the mark. Bierut is widely considered the finest observer on design writing today. Covering topics as diverse as Twyla Tharp and ITC Garamond, Bierut's intelligent and accessible texts pull design culture into crisp focus. He touches on classics, like Massimo Vignelli and the cover of The Catcher in the Rye, as...

The one guide every creative nonfiction writer needs to turn to when being "creative."Writers of memoir and narrative nonfiction are experiencing difficult days with the discovery that some well-known works in the genre contain exaggerations--or are partially fabricated. But what are the parameters of creative nonfiction? Keep It Real begins by defining creative nonfiction. Then it explores the flexibility of the form--the liberties and the boundaries that allow writers to...