Books like The Philosophy of Modern Song
Sixty-six short essays on songs by other people, from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, each with a riff on what the song is really about.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Philosophy of Modern Song
Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
A pop-culture essayist drives across America visiting sites where rock stars died, using their deaths to examine what music means to the living.
A Visit from the Goon Squad
A novel in linked chapters that leaps through decades and forms, one of them a PowerPoint presentation, following a record executive, his kleptomaniac assistant and the people around them as time changes everything.
Chronicles: Volume One
Dylan's memoir, which skips from his arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961 to the making of New Morning and Oh Mercy, and back to his Minnesota boyhood.
Trick Mirror
Nine essays on how late-2010s America scams itself, the internet as self, the wedding industry, athleisure and optimisation, written from inside the trap by someone who does not pretend to be above it.
White
Bret Easton Ellis's essays on post-Empire America: celebrity, social media and the fate of the transgressive artist in a culture that demands likability.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Essays on state fairs, cruise ships, tennis, and television that reveal the absurdity and melancholy hiding in American entertainment culture.
The Labyrinth of Solitude
Paz's essays on the Mexican character, on the pachuco, the fiesta, death, and the masks Mexicans wear.
Absolutely on Music
Murakami and the conductor Seiji Ozawa listen to recordings together and talk about Mahler, Beethoven and Ozawa's apprenticeships with Bernstein and Karajan.
The Writing Life
Dillard's short book on the daily work of writing, the cabins and studies where she has done it, and what it costs, with a detour to a stunt pilot who wrote in the sky.
The Empathy Exams
Essays that start from Jamison's work as a medical actor, paid to perform symptoms for students, and move through Morgellons, ultramarathons and her own body to ask what empathy is for.
Life
Keith Richards tells the story of the Rolling Stones with the same raw energy he brought to the guitar.
Less Than One
Brodsky's essays on growing up in postwar Leningrad, on his parents, and on the poets he loved, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Auden and Cavafy among them.