It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful
How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic
By Jack Lowery
The story of art collective Gran Fury—which fought back during the AIDS crisis through direct action and community-made propaganda—offers lessons in love and grief.
In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out… Read more >
Corporate Rock Sucks
The Rise and Fall of SST Records
By Jim Ruland
A no-holds-barred narrative history of the iconic label that brought the world Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, and more, by the co-author of Do What You Want and My Damage.
Greg Ginn started SST Records in the sleepy beach town of Hermosa Beach, CA, to supply ham radio enthusiasts with tuners and transmitters. But when Ginn…Read More >
PLUS+
This Woman’s Work: By Kim Gordon & Sinead Gleeson. This book is for and about the women who kicked in doors, as pioneers of their craft or making politics central to their sound: those who offer a new way of thinking about the vast spectrum of women in music.
The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings: by Geoff Dyer. Ranging from Burning Man and the Doors to the nineteenth-century Alps and back, Dyer’s book on last things is also a book about how to go on living with art and beauty—and on the entrancing effect and sudden illumination that an Art Pepper solo or Annie Dillard reflection can engender in even the most jaded and ironic sensibilities. Praised by Steve Martin for his “hilarious tics” and by Tom Bissell as “perhaps the most bafflingly great prose writer at work in the English language today”
Be My Baby: A memoir by the late, great Ronnie Spector. “This heartfelt, brilliantly narrated memoir — with an introduction by Keith Richards — is one of the best I have ever listened to.” -Washington Post
Shine Bright A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop: by Danyel Smith. Smith’s detailed narrative begins with Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who sang her poems, and continues through the stories of Mahalia Jackson, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, and Mariah Carey, as well as the under-considered careers of Marilyn McCoo, Deniece Williams, and Jody Watley. “Sparkling . . . the overdue singing of a Black girl’s song, with perfect pitch . . . delicious to read.”—Oprah Daily
Dilla Time The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm: By Dan Charnas. He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, even though he worked with renowned acts like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu and influenced the music of superstars like Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson. He died at the age of thirty-two, and in his lifetime he never had a pop hit. “This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius.” —QUESTLOVE
This Is What I Know About Art: By Kimberly Drew. “Drew’s experience teaches us to embrace what we are afraid of and be true to ourselves. She uses her passion to change the art world and invites us to join her.”–Janelle Monáe, award-winning singer, actress, and producer
Funny Weather Art in an Emergency: by Olivia Laing. In the age of Trump and Brexit, every crisis is instantly overridden by the next. The turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Olivia Laing makes a brilliant, inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair. Art, she argues, changes how we see the world. It gives us X-ray vision. It reveals inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living. “One of the finest writers of the new non-fiction” (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in the tumultuous twenty-first century.
When Women Invented Television The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today: By Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia Jennifer Keishin Armstrong tells the little-known story of four trailblazing women in the early days of television who laid the foundation of the industry we know today. “Leaps at the throat of television history and takes down the patriarchy with its fervent, inspired prose. When Women Invented Television offers proof that what we watch is a reflection of who we are as a people.” —Nathalia Holt, New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls
1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows A Memoir: By Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp. With candor and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist—and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime. The “intimate and expansive” (Time) memoir of “one of the most important artists working in the world today” (Financial Times), telling a remarkable history of China over the last hundred years while also illuminating his artistic process
Colorization One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World: By Wil Haygood. Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood’s first blockbuster—Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes. A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS’ TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR • BOOKLISTS’ EDITOR’S CHOICE • ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Ninth Street Women Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art: By Mary Gabriel. Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting — not as muses but as artists. Five women revolutionize the modern art world in postwar America in this “gratifying, generous, and lush” true story from a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist (Jennifer Szalai, New York Times).
The Golden Thread How Fabric Changed History: By Kassia St. Clair. Design journalist Kassia St. Clair guides us through the technological advancements and cultural customs that would redefine human civilization—from the fabric that allowed mankind to achieve extraordinary things (traverse the oceans and shatter athletic records) and survive in unlikely places (outer space and the South Pole). She peoples her story with a motley cast of characters, including Xiling, the ancient Chinese empress credited with inventing silk, to Richard the Lionhearted and Bing Crosby. The bestselling author of The Secret Lives of Color returns with this rollicking narrative of the 30,000-year history of fabric, briskly told through thirteen charismatic episodes.
I Like to Watch Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution: By Emily Nussbaum. From her creation of the “Approval Matrix” in New York magazine in 2004 to her Pulitzer Prize–winning columns for The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum has argued for a new way of looking at TV. In this collection, including two never-before-published essays, Nussbaum writes about her passion for television, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show that set her on a fresh intellectual path. From The New Yorker’s fiercely original, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic, a provocative collection of new and previously published essays arguing that we are what we watch.
