Luc Sante

A Publicist in the Old Sense

My Quarantine: The Calm of Collaging

Collage is a scavenger’s art: it forms the dead matter of the past into combinations that could only occur in the present; it builds a future from ruins.

The Sweet Smell of Hipness

Glenn O’Brien was the leading boulevardier of my particular subgenerational pocket

Early Developments

Mann’s River

John Ashbery (1927–2017)

He was lionized, imitated, studied, analyzed, enshrined, revered.

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

Virtuoso of the Tiny

Richard McGuire’s Sequential Drawings: The New Yorker Series is a tribute to the spot illustration, the unsung toiler of the magazine page.

The Greatest Enigma of French Film

Remembering Basquiat

The first time I met Jean-Michel Basquiat was in the spring of 1979, at the Mudd Club.

On ‘Paris Vagabond’

The Birth of Bohemia in Paris

The NYPD's Lost Archive

The room at One Police Plaza, jammed to the ceiling with filing cabinets and boxes, and reeking of vinegar, held about 180,000 images ranging from 1914 to 1972.

Arleen

Let me play you “Arleen,” by General Echo, a seven-inch 45 on the Techniques label, produced by Winston Riley, a number one hit in Jamaica in the autumn of 1979.

Thirteen Most

One night in the 1980s, a low period for me, as I slumped on my regular stool at Farrell’s, in Brooklyn, staring into my fourth or fifth of their enormous beers, the gentleman to my left struck up a conversation.

Brassaï’s Cloak of Night

Brassaï: Paris Nocturne is the first major book on the photographer since the 1970s.

On 'Inside Llewyn Davis'

Llewyn Davis, the folksinger protagonist of the Coen brothers’ new period film, is a creature of the here and now, not of 1961.

An Epiphany in Portobello

Vanished Paris

Charles Marville’s documentation of old Paris secures his place in the highest rank of photographic achievement.

A Job of Work

Any sufficiently small office worth its salt is a situation comedy, and the Review office was no exception. In such an environment everyone’s personality is distilled down to one or two signal traits that reassure as they entertain.