Newly translated by John K. Cox, The Attic was the first novel by Danilo Kiš, the Serbian writer whom Susan Sontag called ‘one of the handful of incontestably major writers of the second half of the century’. To call it a confident debut would be an understatement of sizeable proportions. Composed variously of prose, letters, […]
Sometime around 2011, Keith Richards was ready to retire from his life in rock ’n’ roll. Approaching half a century with the Rolling Stones, he had done it all. “I know what luck is. I’ve had a lot,” he reflected in an interview this month. He’s the archetypal rock guitarist: the genius wastrel, the unimpeachable […]
As an album, it was not a revelation. Unlike its predecessor, it did not herald an unprecedented songwriting style that music fans found to be unbelievably ambitious, audacious, mad, rad. Gone were the lyrics that sounded like Chuck Berry had been secretly collaborating with Jack Kerouac. And jeez, you could scour the whole record and […]
He worked out all the time, loved sex (contrary to popular belief), was a father figure to rejects – and would chat on the phone for hours. The people closest to Andy Warhol uncover his hidden side. We all know Andy, the alien in the fright wig with his Marilyns and Elvises, who died at the […]
The author and the illusionist might seem an odd couple, but a shared interest in the afterlife made for an unlikely bond and a bitter rift. In 1920, two of the biggest celebrities of the age met for the first time. One was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the famed creator of the great detective Sherlock […]
Yesterday we ran a list of 93 films beloved by Stanley Kubrick, which includes two by Andrei Tarkovsky: 1972’s Solaris and 1986’s The Sacrifice. You expect one auteur to appreciate the work of another — “game recognize game,” to use the modern parlance — but the selection of Solaris makes special sense. Just four years before it, Kubrick had, […]
By the time it reached Osaka, Japan, in late April, Paul McCartney’s “Out There” tour had been on the road for nearly two years. It had played to close to two million people, from Montevideo to Winnipeg, Nashville to Warsaw, with crowds in Seoul and Marseille and Stockholm still awaiting its arrival. “Out There” succeeded […]