Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces, 1990-2005 Book

"Whatever the topic and mood, these essays are a pleasure . . . deserves the broadest possible readership."—Kirkus Reviews In his books (Low Life, The Factory of Facts) and in a string of wide-ranging and inventive essays, Luc Sante has shown himself to be not only one of our pre-eminent stylists, but also a critic of uncommon power and range. Kill All Your Darlings is the first collection of his articles—many of which first appeared in the New York Review of Books and the Village Voice—and offers ample justification for this high praise. Alongside meditations on cigarettes, factory work, and hipness, and the critical tour de force, "The Invention of the Blues," Sante offers his incomparable take on icons from Arthur Rimbaud to Bob Dylan, René Magritte to Tintin, Buddy Bolden to Walker Evans, Allen Ginsberg to Robert Mapplethorpe, demonstrating the gifts that have made him "one of the handful of living masters of the American language, as well as a singular historian and philosopher of American experience" (Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker).