Howard Hampton’s psychocalifragilistic Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses will be published in the fall by Harvard University Press.

• June/July 2006: The Vanishing Afro-American
• FULL TEXT
  August 2004: Jeeves in Exile
  P. G. Wodehouse’s gentleman’s gentleman is rescued from his golden-years retirement in Jonathan Ames’s new quasi-sort-of-metafiction.
• June 2004: Build Me an L.A. Woman
  Aesthetically rehabilitating Dory Previn, the quaintly quintessential skeleton in the closet of L.A. pop.
• FULL TEXT
  September 2003: Let Us Now Kill White Elephants
  In the salad days of rock criticism, Lester Bangs perceived the music’s self-fulfilling end: excruciating, artificial, and beautiful.
• FULL TEXT
  August 2003: The Flannel-Swaddled Insomniac
  Cat Power, Lora Logic, and Enid Coleslaw give voice to the unsung weirdo republic.