BIOGRAPHY & HISTORY

One of the season’s most anticipated music books is Keith Richards’s autobiography, written with James Fox, LIFE (suggested subtitle: Or, How to Beat Death). Little, Brown is keeping the book under wraps until its publication in October, but our guess is that the best parts are the ones Keith found the hardest to remember.

Born in 1912, John Cage studied briefly with Arnold Schoenberg and went on to create a musical vocabulary all his own, experimenting with radio static, randomly generated sounds, even silence. Kenneth Silverman’s new biography, BEGIN AGAIN (Knopf,

As a photographer for publications like the Village Voice, Crawdaddy!, and Harper’s Bazaar in late-1960s and ’70s New York, James Hamilton captured one of the most vibrant music eras this country has ever experienced. His vast and spectacular archive from the time—black-and-white portraits, snapshots, and contact sheets—has been assembled for publication for the first time in You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen. There’s an exuberant Chuck Berry in performance, James Brown posing with thick shades, and shots of underground legends like Tom Verlaine and Sun Ra, as well as of the hoard of wild

My friend Tom invited me to visit him in Tbilisi. He’s a fearless, openhearted man, an international aid worker who had put in hard time in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Now, he was the head of child protection for UNICEF in Georgia. “You can stay at my apartment, I’ve plenty of room. It’ll more than cancel out the price of the ticket to get here.” To entice me further he quoted a piece of graffito he had seen scrawled on the side of a building that afternoon: NO GOD, ONLY KINGS. “That’s the kind of place this is. Original. Enigmatic. Unexpected.” He reminded me that Joseph Stalin and George Balanchine

A writer knows he is working well when people start to hate him. V. S. Naipaul has always warmed to this aspect of the enterprise. For more than fifty years, he has, with enviable regularity and evident delight, brought his readers the bad news from four continents. His prophecies never fail to outrage, all the more when they are right: In the 1960s, he pronounced the failure of Black Power politics in the Caribbean before it left the cradle; in the 1980s, he followed the logic of Muslim fundamentalism to its grim conclusions while Mohamed Atta was still in shorts. But perhaps no prediction

On July 24, 1926, Samuel Steward, one day past his seventeenth birthday, got word that Rudolph Valentino had just checked in to the best hotel in Columbus, Ohio. Grabbing his autograph book, he made his way to the hotel and knocked on Valentino’s door. The actor appeared, wearing only a towel, and after signing his autograph asked whether there was anything else the boy wanted. “Yes,” said Steward, “I’d like to have you.”

The Latin lover obliged. Steward performed oral sex on him and at some point procured a lock of Valentino’s pubic hair—a souvenir that Steward kept in a monstrance at his

In an interview posted on her website, the novelist Cathi Unsworth sits in a cloud of cigarette smoke, earnestly leaning forward, unsmiling, answering a question directly, with detail and passion. She looks like Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang's 1953 The Big Heat: the picture where Lee Marvin throws boiling coffee in her face. On camera, Unsworth is almost flinching against herself, as if the trials she inflicts on her characters are swirling around her, along with her own smoke.