Since emerging some thirty years ago as a protagonist and central thinker of Language poetry, Charles Bernstein has been many poets to many people—or so he would have us believe. As he proclaims in the 1999 poem “Solidarity is the Name We Give to What We Cannot Hold”:

My first visit to New Orleans didn’t happen until 2002, in my early thirties, shamefully late in life for someone who likes to eat as much as I do. What I found when I arrived, at least culinarily speaking, did not disappoint: the roast-beef and gravy po’boys on Magazine Street, the oysters as big as my palm at the Acme Oyster Bar, the crabmeat-covered everything at Galatoire’s. I also discovered something else—New Orleans is in many ways a small town, albeit one that acts like a metropolis during Jazz Fest and Mardi Gras. After a few days there, I began

When David Lipsky meets David Foster Wallace, it’s 1996, Infinite Jest has just been released, and Wallace is the most famous literary writer in America. The author is also using a Barney the Purple Dinosaur towel as a bedroom curtain in his Illinois home. On the wall is a poster of Alanis Morissette. “If by some paradox,” he tells Lipsky, a novelist who’s there to profile him for Rolling Stone, “this whole fuss could get me some kind of even just like a five-minute cup of tea with her, that would be more than reward enough.” Later, Wallace will confess

“Spare me smart Jewish girls with their typewriters,” quipped Clement Greenberg, the legendary critic of modernism, to Rosalind Krauss, his most brilliant disciple. It was 1974: Krauss had made a name for herself writing on Minimalism in the pages of Artforum but would soon leave the magazine to cofound October. As promised by the journal’s name, a revolution in art history was afoot.

Molloy, the hermetic, dyspeptic narrator of Samuel Beckett’s eponymous novel, sits alone in a bare room, apparently imprisoned, filling pages for the “man who comes every week.” The grim scene is as familiar to anyone who knows the Irishman’s world of barren fields and bleak cells as the below photograph of the poet of nothingness, ambling the streets of a beach town wearing short shorts, sandals, and shades, is unsettling. Perhaps photographer François-Marie Banier was also a bit shocked when he recognized and began stalking the vacationing author on the streets of Tangier in 1978. Eventually, the lurking gave way

Many of the pieces in David Grann’s fine collection of articles, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, read like detective stories, and it would be tempting to categorize this book, whose subtitle promises us “tales of murder, madness, and obsession,” as a work of true crime, albeit one without the breathless exaggerations of that genre. In his first book, the best-selling The Lost City of Z, the writer offered up a true tale of deadly obsession for the ages: the attempts to find a legendary city in the Amazon, and the explorers who vanished searching for it. If that earlier book

For a musical style once purported to suck and still decried as mindless, disco has spawned a lot of thoughtful writing, especially in the past decade. In 2004, Tim Lawrence published the lovingly researched Love Saves the Day, a history set primarily in gay 1970s New York clubs such as David Mancuso’s invite-only Loft, generally considered the music’s birthplace. A year later, Peter Shapiro brought out Turn the Beat Around, which was heavier on both social context—the “Rotting Apple” of ’70s New York—and discussion of the songs, some of which you’ve probably never heard of: one passage sifts through dozens

Those most likely to read Stephen Batchelor’s new memoir, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, might find the title redundant. The deity-free character of Buddhism is fairly common knowledge among its enthusiasts in the English-speaking world. The Gautama they have encountered in their various modes of countercultural rebellion comes filtered through the sensibilities of writers such as Hermann Hesse, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Pirsig. To the crowds drawn to “Eastern” philosophies because “Western” traditions are kind of a drag, the Buddha offers religion without the baggage.