Edward Said talks with writer Phillip Lopate about his book, Out of Place, a memoir of his childhood and formation into the itinerate conscience of the intelligentsia and figurehead of postcolonial politics that we know him as today.

Jamaica, a truly post-lapsarian paradise, is the subject of Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise. Fellow writer Randall Kenan dives into the scenery, the intent and the influences that gave birth to this epic first novel.

In 1999, Laurie Anderson mounted her operatic take, Stories and Songs from Moby-Dick, on Melville’s classic at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Clifford Ross joined her for tea and conversation over Melville’s very own bible—marginalia included.

Legendary cross-dresser and co-founder of the theater troupe Split Britches joins playwright Craig Lucas for non-stop laughter and revelations about alternative theater, life, drugs, and the busting of conventions in general.

In a time when science and art refuse to behave categorically, Judy Pfaff’s work moves even farther beyond, bending the rows that keep things in line.

Renowned for his work on the witchcraft trials of the Inquisition, Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg shifted centuries to document a trajectory of crime, repentance and conspiracy that extends back 30 years.

Raymond Pettibon found his calling as an artist at about the same time punk hit Los Angeles in 1978.

Sometime in the mid-1970s Errol Morris read a headline in the San Fransisco Chronicle—“450 Dead Pets To Go To Napa”— and decided to make a film about pet cemeteries. 

Erwin Pfrang must have an itch that he can only reach by drawing. He fiddles around in some toxic waste site of the mind, pulling pictures out of cavities where anything could lurk. 

The quality of Mala Iqbal’s action figures and the fluid relationship to their environment was what sucked me into her animated world.

Melissa Marks’s character Volitia cavorts through her drawings with the impudence of Nabokov’s Lolita and the sly pleasure of a cherub. 

I’m not sure when I first met David, at some point when we were both new to New York, I think.

We took two field trips in grade school. The first was a tour of the Bridewell House of Corrections and the Cook County Jail.

The first obstacle to excellence in women’s pantomime is the surplus of small bones in the face, feet, hands, and body. 

The new millennium is already upon us, though the matter shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Hell has become, over the years, a wearisome speculatio

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Singer Macy Gray’s smoky, scratchy, full-bodied voice is paradoxical. Let it be said that she can belt it like Aretha, growl it like Tina, and is as unmistakable as Dinah, Eartha, or Nina in her range, tone, and delivery.

The live double album: an icon, a period piece. Its bombast is still with us, but not its excess (double CDs crimp sales), certainly not its raw aesthetics.

The man the world knows as Champion came into being on February 26, 1964. Cassius Clay had just defeated Sonny Liston and taken the heavyweight title and he announced his involvement with the Nation of Islam to the press. 

My mother got to it before I did. An insatiable reader of anything remotely constituting serious literature, she rescued it from my tirelessly proliferating pile of “I’ve been meaning to…”

These stories, unlike typical, neatly plotted and contained narratives, are overflowing with crass and sometimes crude encounters, initially shocking, refreshing, and also incredibly funny. 

Melissa Monroe’s extraordinary first book of poems captures not only the pleasures but the revelations of language.

Mark Jude Poirier arrives, kicking up the desert dirt like a pickup spinning donuts on a dehydrated lawn. 

In June 1920 a bomb exploded at the Teatro Naçional in Havana. 

Fantasies of escape—from the doldrums, inadequacies, disappointments, alarm clocks, from the inevitability of the daily—take myriad form, most frequently geographical. To the seaside, to the mountains, to the suburbs, to Paris!

The aptly named Happy, Texas makes a case for rehabilitation when two escaped prisoners steal an RV and gain humanity by taking on the personae of a gay couple on their way to direct a “little miss” beauty pageant. 

Part sexual farce, part gender revenge fantasy, Romance is the first of Catherine Breillat’s six resolutely irreverent films, made over a 20 year period, to get a US theatrical release.

The first step into a gallery is often the most telling and for some artists a blessing—this is true for Lyle Starr. 

Though anecdotal in form, the book’s message is that the conceptual schema dominating our perception of modernism is not the whole story. The past represented is interesting not only for its historical value, but also for the alternative models and traditions.