In the form of a prominent tattoo on Kurt Cobain’s arm, the logo of K Records — a hand-inked logo around a capital K — has entered musical and cultural history, though largely as a footnote to grunge. There have been previous attempts to tell the story of the Olympia, Washington–based independent label in its own right: Heather Rose Dominic’s documentary feature The Shield Around the K appeared in 2000, and Michael Azzerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, which concluded with a chapter on K’s flagship band Beat Happening, followed in 2002. Despite such efforts, both the label and

“For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write — like myself — college is useless beyond the sophomore year,” William Styron wrote to his father in 1946, after returning from Platoon Commander School in Quantico, Va., to resume his studies at Duke. Styron would go on to graduate — he was a nice boy, and eager to please his doting father — but he wasn’t kidding about his monomaniacal focus on writing, and in many ways the early pages of this splendid book are the hardest.

One of the drawbacks of working in a bookstore, something I did for many years, is that it can be like working in a small-town pharmacy: You learn things about people you might rather not know.

For E.M. Forster the diary was of spasmodic usefulness, and for long stretches of his long and oddly shaped life might well not be a writer’s diary at all. As he acknowledged, ‘unfortunately I only open this book when my heart aches’; and even then there can be passages as stoically minimal as the diary of A.E. Housman (‘I spoke,’ and ‘Non respondit’ are disproportionately momentous remarks). In all the most intimate matters the entries are mere cryptic memoranda, and on a few occasions happiness writes white: ‘After which Bob and I .’ The type for these provoking blanks may

For Rainer Maria Rilke the year 1903 did not begin auspiciously. He and his wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, were living in Paris, where the poet had come in order to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin. The Rilkes were not exactly dazzled by the City of Light. In a letter to his friend the artist Otto Modersohn, dated New Year’s Eve 1902, the poet spoke of Paris as a “difficult, difficult, anxious city” whose beauty could not compensate “for what one must suffer from the cruelty and confusion of the streets and the monstrosity of the gardens, people and

It is almost 40 years since the publication of Fred Halliday’s landmark book Arabia without Sultans. Now, in the wake of the Arab spring, another young British academic has written an important account of prospects for the Gulf region, calling his study After the Sheikhs. Both titles contain a strong element of wishful thinking.

‘Sometimes,’ Philip Larkin wrote in a letter, ‘I think I’m preparing for a huge splenetic autobiography, denigrating everyone I’ve ever known: it would have to be left to the nation in large brass-bound boxes, to be printed when all of us are dead.’ In the event he arranged to have his diaries shredded a few days before his death in 1985. But there was enough spleen and denigration to go round in the stuff preserved by ambiguous clauses in his will

One Friday evening at BAM this past summer, roughly twelve minutes into Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s four-and-a-half-hour-long avant-garde Gesamtkunstwerk, “Einstein on the Beach,” a man sitting a row ahead of me stole a glance at his watch. It seemed an eloquent gesture. Not as a verdict on the show—which has been rightly hailed and heralded across the world—but as a vignette of our contemporary busyness. Nowadays, encounters of the spirit must be scheduled long in advance, and even then the endless tide of deferred chores and anticipated engagements never ceases to break on our attention. There is always something

In the afterword to his translation of Jakob Wassermann’s My First Wife, a scrupulous account of his divorce from his wife of 20 years, Michael Hofmann quotes Rilke: “In the depths, everything becomes law.” The divorce of man and woman is one such depth, an anti-tale of many inversions: Love becomes hate, unanimity becomes animosity, shared interests become competing claims, alliance becomes war; and everything that seemed fleshly and human and natural, everything for which it might appear impossible to legislate—trust, generosity, self-sacrifice, nurture, belief itself—everything does indeed become law.

“How do you feel about representing New York at our literary festival here in Frankfurt?” asked the voice on the phone in halting, German-inflected English. The voice belonged to Wolfram, the organizer of the festival. “Writers from other cities are also invited,” he said, ticking off the names of authors who would be embodying the […]

BETWEEN 1958 AND 1966, Ernest Cole made photographs from inside the belly of the beast that imprisoned him and his fellow black South Africans. When his first and only photo book, House of Bondage, was published in 1967, Cole knew that if he stayed in his own country, he’d be arrested. He escaped, traveling through […]