Architecture Criticism

A fascinating history that examines how real estate, gentrification, community and the highs and lows of New York City itself shaped the city’s music scenes from folk to house music. Take a walk through almost any neighborhood in Manhattan and you’ll likely pass some of the most significant...

Broadway's 2024-25 season generated $1.89 billion in gross receipts, 14.7 million admissions, and a 91.2 percent occupancy rate across forty-one theatres. It was the highest-grossing season in recorded history. In the same season, zero of eighteen commercially produced musicals recouped their investment. Since the pandemic, forty-six new musicals have opened on Broadway at a combined capitalization cost approaching $800 million. All but four failed. The Broadway Machine examines how this paradox is produced. Ten chapters isolate ten structural components of the system: the real estate ...

From the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they've been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems. “Anyone wanting to learn how to remodel, restore, or build a poem from the...

The Matrix conveys the horror of a false world made of nothing but perceptions. Based on the premise that reality is a dream controlled by malevolent forces, it is one of the most overtly philosophical movies ever to come out of Hollywood. These thought-provoking essays by the same team of young...

Over the course of Kurt Vonnegut's career as a writer, he sat down many times with radio host and interviewer Walter James Miller to conduct in-depth discussions of his work and the world. Now Caedmon has collected the best of these interviews on CD for the first time. This is the perfect audio...

The first biography of the epic life of one of the most important, enigmatic and private artists of the 20th century. Drawn from almost 40 years of conversations with the artist, letters and papers, it is a major work written by a well-known British art critic. Lucian Freud (1922-2011) is one of...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning architectural critic explores how modern cities thrive when urban planning leaves room for happy accidents and innovations. “A city is not a symphony, composed as a single work,” Paul Goldberger writes. “It is more like jazz, with its mix of order and...

The visionary poet and painter William Blake is a constant presence throughout contemporary culture - from video games to novels, from sporting events to political rallies and from horror films to designer fashion. Although he died nearly 200 years ago, something about his work continues to haunt the 21st century. What is it about Blake that has so endured? In this illuminating essay, John Higgs takes us on a whirlwind tour to prove that far from being the mere New Age counterculture figure that many assume him to be, Blake is now more relevant than ever.