You might think William Vollmann’s latest, Riding Toward Everywhere, is about middle-aged hobo manqués hopping trains. As it happens, Riding contains a good deal of mid-life hobo tourism. That in itself is sort of interesting. But, Riding works best when ...

Despite a lumbering opening paragraph that could win first prize in an Edward Bulwer-Lytton competition (“The last drop of daylight was fading from the western sky—a draining that seemed more a suffocation than a sunset, a final gasp as the ...

In his exhaustively researched Hotel: An American History, A.K. Sandoval-Strausz associates the creation of the American hotel with our first president’s tours to the 13 states in 1789-1791. Suffice to say that nothing has changed since the hotel’s inception—the crimes, ...

Peter Carey’s latest novel, His Illegal Self, revisits the literary territory of his greatest triumphs, yet fails to achieve their greatness.

James Still, who died at 95 in 2001, continues to inspire almost mythic respect. The most recent scholarly examination of his work is James Still: Critical Essays on the Dean of Appalachian Literature, edited by Ted Olson and Kathy Olson. ...

Southern literature still has its derelict, demonic, and debilitated characters, but these days the genre is edgier, its variety of themes broader and more sophisticated.

Comprised of interviews with Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, Mike Rutherford, and others who have participated in the world of Genesis, Chapter and Verse traces the story from 1963, when 13-year-olds Banks, Gabriel, and Rutherford enter an ...

When the 20th century began, classical music was popular culture. By century’s end, the two most famous composers still under the marginalized “classical” rubric, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, had spent time driving taxis to make ends meet. Tracking that ...