IT FEELS RIGHT TO START WITH A THUMBNAIL HISTORY from Valerie Wilmer, the British photographer and writer who published As Serious as Your Life in 1977, one of the first book-length attempts to document a music with as many names as heroes.

It was at the turn of the ’sixties with the appearance of a series of recordings made by Ornette Coleman, an alto saxophonist from Texas, that the music hitherto known as “jazz” began first to be described as “free” music. Coleman, along with the pianist Cecil Taylor and the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and, eventually, the drummer Sunny Murray,

FORMIDABLE HARDWICK! Most writers are soon forgotten after their deaths. Yet Elizabeth Hardwick, since her death in 2007, has achieved a rare transfiguration. Having left behind the indignities of mortal life—hangovers, rashes, insomnia, unwritten lectures, misplaced hearing aids—she has been enshrined as an intellectual totem. Publishers have brought out not just a Collected Essays, as one might expect, but an Uncollected Essays, foraging through back issues of Mademoiselle and House & Garden for every glittering fragment. Other literary productions have whetted, not sated, the readerly appetite

For a writer whose most visible work, Dictée, brims with saints and martyrdom and the possibilities of productive anguish, it’s fitting that Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s disparate uncollected writings—everything from artists’ books to typewritten disjecta membra—should give off the refulgent glow of relics set against plain white cloth. Since there will be no new writing from the late author, every word counts. Indeed, for an artist so committed to permutations of language—to literally mincing words, teasing meanings from amputations, one character at a time—every letter counts. Is a crossed-out

There is a funny paradox in American culture. The nation began in revolt against British sovereignty and defined itself for generations against UK ruling-class values of crown, empire, and tradition. And yet in the Golden Age of Hollywood, on the run-up to American hegemony, the ideology of empire reentered the American bloodstream, adapted for mass society and a technocratic state. The medieval term translatio imperii, which once described the divine succession of emperors, later named the westward drift of power. It mutated into a doctrine of manifest destiny for aspirational American settlers.