About halfway into his memoir, André Schiffrin notes that after his father died in 1950, André and his mother lived on New York ‘s Upper East Side on only a few hundred dollars per year, well below the city’s poverty line. Yet as the distinguished French-born editor of the New Press explains, he never felt lower-class: Back when his family lived in Paris, his mother had detailed the different layers of the French bourgeoisie, concluding that “[o]n top of them all were the intellectuals. That was us, and therefore there was never any question of our feeling underprivileged.” Though Schiffrin

Aline Kominsky Crumb was born Aline Ricky Goldsmith in Long Beach, New York, in 1948 and grew up in a chaotic household behind a tidy suburban facade. Her mother came from a well-to-do family and found success as an ad agent; her father was a small-time businessman and possible small-time crook, who died of cancer when his daughter was nineteen. Her escape into the counterculture of the 1960s led her to New York City, Tucson (with her first husband, Carl Kominsky), and, finally, San Francisco, where she became prominent in the underground comix scene of the late part of the

“You know, all my life, my favorite kind of story is one that starts early in the 20th century, and then works its way on down toward modern times.” Kim Deitch, both the author of and a protagonist in Alias the Cat, explains exactly where he intends to take us in his latest book—and more than delivers. A revered underground cartoonist whose work is steeped in the lore and traditions of early animation, Deitch draws loopy, crowded, psychedelic stories that start where the Fleischer brothers’ Betty Boop and Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat left off and add in sex, money,

In the small Pennsylvania town where I grew up, the windows of the Gap, the national purveyor of affordable and non-threatening attire, are papered over and a to lease sign has been posted. But across from this empty storefront, Hot Topic is booming. Discordant music pours from an arched entrance meant to resemble a dungeon, and the red-and-purple-striped tights and silver-studded jewelry here sell for double the price of khakis and blue button-downs. That goth attire flourishes while more mainstream options languish is a cultural phenomenon on which academics have finally set their sights—with sometimes illuminating and sometimes predictable results.

There’s an exquisite serendipity to reading Carolyn Brown’s soulful new memoir recounting twenty years as a dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company––from its inception in 1953––on Cunningham’s birthday (April 16, to be exact). At eighty-eight, Cunningham continues to make remarkable dances and to collaborate with composers and artists in a variety of media, all the while wondrously experimenting with new technologies and processes. It feels especially meaningful, even poignant, to look back fifty-four years to the beginning.

America has had its famous lawmen and its hero detectives, real and somewhat less so: Wyatt Earp, Dick Tracy, Allan Pinkerton, Hawkshaw, and, above all, J. Edgar Hoover. From 1924 to his death in 1972, Hoover ran the FBI and its predecessor, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation. When he died, his name was as well known as that of any movie star, sports hero, or president.

Adding to his mind-altering oeuvre, which already includes poems, a novel, and works of criticism on subjects like Andy Warhol, Jackie O, and gay men’s penchant for opera, Wayne Koestenbaum delivers a coup d’état with Hotel Theory, a palimpsest of postmodern detritus presented in two parallel texts. On the left side of the page, “Hotel Theory,” Koestenbaum’s phenomenological study of hotels, provides the mental framework for the reader to act as a Bachelardian cosmonaut in the Lana Turner and Liberace dime novel “Hotel Women” on the right. Hotel Theory showcases Koestenbaum’s inflections via innumerable analogies to literature and art, and

Almost twenty-five years ago, Jean-Luc Nancy published The Inoperative Community, a work that tries to avoid the mystical authoritarianism of communitarianism without falling into the lonely oppressiveness of individualism. The book confirmed Nancy’s place as a philosopher who would continue a productive deconstruction without ever pretending to resolve a philosophical problem, establish an identity, or build a foundation. Nancy’s version of deconstruction has been more tactile, engaged with flesh and material, than that of many other of its followers. But like his more abstract colleagues, he has never wanted to reduce the ambiguities that he seems to think are faithful