Andrew Blackwell talks trash on a global scale, but it’s not his attitude that needs cleanup. It’s the environment. It’s the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an amoeba of debris swathing hundreds of miles of ocean. It’s Alberta’s oil sand mines and the open sewer that was once Delhi’s sacred river Yamuna. Blackwell holidays at each of these befouled sites throughout his new travelogue Visit Sunny Chernobyl. A former Boy Scout raised to savor the wilderness, the journalist now fully embraces his yen for blighted locales. “You know,” Blackwell confides, “I lived in Queens.”

For her début novel Who Town, New York writer Susan Kirschbaum drew on her experience covering art, fashion, and certain social scenes in the city as a journalist for over a decade, lending the social parody an eerie air of realism. In Kirschbaum’s vivid portrayal, the problems and places feel real—it’s easy to envision scenes set not only in New York neighborhoods, but also in particular places, like the venue a young band plays on the Bowery, though she doesn’t name it. And issues of self and celebrity culture remain constant. While Who Town tells a tried tale—a mix of archetypal twenty-somethings struggling to find, define, and lose themselves in city culture—Kirschbaum reinvents the unraveling in a way that feels relevant. Who Town is the story of youth and identity, art and fashion, drugs and rehab, the scene and the sex, but for the next New York generation.

Don’t be deceived by the title of poet Quinn Latimer’s début collection: Rumored Animals does not fixate on chupacabras, Abominable Snowmen, or the Lizard of Loch Ness. In fact, the faunas populating the poems of this superb and striking book include much more fascinating genera and species. In “Slander,” for instance, Latimer lists a few breeds with biological concision: “sister, lover, daughter, scour.” What beasts are more mysterious than these? The poet’s language is their habitat, the shifting imagery their domain.

Rosecrans Baldwin longs to brunch with Young Jeezy. “We could have a lot in common,” avers the author, who studied poetry in college. Who favors Bach’s arias when editing. Who brunches.

That the images in Cass Bird‘s new book Rewilding are gorgeous and evocative will come as no surprise to fans of her luminous fashion photography and portraiture, although the provocative subject matter might come as a suprise. The photographs, taken over the course of two indolent summers in Sassafras, Tennessee, focus on a group of […]

Recent media coverage of military-ruled Myanmar has been optimistic. Though the election process that established new president U Thein Sein last March was widely seen as flawed, the following months brought news of released political prisoners, a liberalizing economy, and promises of a transparent and open election this April. But a still-dark side of today’s […]

What is there left to say about the parking lot? Indelible staples of American culture—mirroring, as they do, our nation’s obsession with automobiles—these asphalt expanses have played an iconic if somewhat invisible role in the development of our built environment over the past century. Long an overlooked appendage to the buildings they so often isolate, […]

Night after night for over a year starting in 2009, the curators Workhorse and PAC literally took street art underground by inviting the world’s leading street artists into an abandoned New York City subway station to create original artwork. The space had been abandoned for eighty years and, as PAC notes, they knew no one […]

Aaron Stern knows his way around a concert venue. A producer of music festivals and shows for over a decade, Stern found his way to photography a few years ago with an eye to capturing the fleeting moments he was in a unique position to enjoy. Now his concert photography has been collected in one […]