Michael Lindgren

In the beginning, there was Chuck. Forget Elvis Presley; everyone knew who the real king was.

Longtime New Yorkers and curious younger baseball fans alike will be happy to celebrate Opening Day with biographies of emblematic New York baseball men.

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize, it produced a bonanza of debate over questions that had long dominated late-night dorm-room and barstool conversations.

Paul Simon was never very happy about his appearance, according to Peter Ames Carlin's biography "Homeward Bound."

This hybrid meditation from Kansas City poet and philosopher Anne Boyer is a frankly astonishing expression of great beauty, pain, and force.

I moved to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in the summer of 2000, where I found myself living among men who were not much like me.

This spring's double-barreled canonization at last allows us finally to pose the question: Was Cheever great?

Not for Abigail Welhouse mopey displays of emotional distress.

In a famous episode of "The Sopranos," Tony takes his teenage daughter on a college trip to an idyllic New England hamlet...

Michael Lindgren is a veteran book reviewer with The L Magazine and has long been a dissenting editorial voice on the subject of the nascent Brooklyn literary scene.

Near the end of Emily Gould's engaging debut novel Friendship, a jaded older woman gives protagonist Amy Schein some advice.

"A rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks," Hunter S. Thompson wrote of sportswriters.

My relationship with John Berryman's Dream Songs, like the songs themselves, is murky, complicated, obscure in origin, and not easy to explain-not even to myself.

Some adults may find it mysterious, but abstract art is often enchanting, even coherent, to kids.

The poems in Kay Ryan's astonishing collection "The Best of It" are so crisp and immediate that they seem effortless.

Against the Grain is a podcast about culture, books, music, and art. Hosted by Mike LIndgren. Based in Jersey City.