Washington DC underground music icon Ian Svenonius (and one time “Sassiest Boy in America”) has written his second book, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group (Akashic Books), in which he holds seances to cull advice from dead superstars about how to navigate rock’s crooked path. Of course, it’s half a spoof, and allows Svenonius to sound off in his signature style about street gangs, drugs, nostalgia, and many other pressing issues for the aspiring musician—as well as preach his revolutionary anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian ideas. It’s agitprop with a sense of humor. In support of his latest book, Svenonius is currently holding seances around the country, so if you have a pressing inquiry for Jimi Hendrix, or wondering what Jim Morrison thinks of surf music, now’s your chance.
Introducing the Organist, the Believer’s new podcast, featuring Greil Marcus’s riff on Bikini Kill and Percival Everett, Brandon Stosuy’s five-word rock reviews, and Nick Offerman’s history of the word podcast.
Archaeologists have announced that they’ve discovered the missing bones of Richard III, the eponymous subject of Shakespeare’s play.
Should why-I-quit-Wall-Street memoirs be retired as a genre? Michael Lewis considers this question in light of Greg Smith’s recent tell-all Why I Left Goldman Sachs. “In a funny way," Lewis writes, Smith "has written exactly the sort of book you might expect from an employee of Goldman Sachs: narrowly self-interested, curiously myopic.” (For a somewhat offputting encounter with that review, try listening to it read aloud on the New Republic's recently revamped website.)
Legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell returns to the magazine this week for the first time since 1964 via an excerpt that his biographer, Thomas Kunkel, found among the late staffer’s papers. The piece, titled “Street Life,” was taken from Mitchell’s unpublished memoir, and is the first of three pieces that will run in the magazine.
P.G. Wodehouse's A Life in Letters is now available. Read Ed Park's essay on the comic novelist's correspondence here.
