What this page is: our shelf card for one new book. Read our take below, then tap Pre-order Now.
The Night Before
A big, generous collection of David Hajdu's criticism, much of it first published in The New Republic and The Nation. It moves through musicians, books about music, the Beatles, comics and short takes, from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish, then turns personal in a section called "Me" and closes with a few other things, including a new profile of the choreographer Hermes Pan and the life story of one building in the East Village, 64 East Seventh Street.
Our read: we came for the voice and the candor. Hajdu isn't afraid to turn on his subjects. On Artie Shaw: "Nearly all of Shaw's published writing—and I can report without pride that I've read most of it—is amateurish, blabby, and shallow" (p. 91). He's at his best when detail meets argument. Our standouts: the Beatles piece on "You Know My Name"; the Tomine and Roz Chast essays in the comics section; Julia Wolfe's Fire in My Mouth; the Mary Halvorson piece, which opens with "Great music sometimes sounds bad at first" (p. 255); "Who Owned That Book Before Me?", about a marked-up copy of Invisible Man; and "My Favorite Bar," a comic about Bradley's drawn by John Carey. The Hermes Pan and 64 East Seventh Street pieces close the book strongly.
Good to know: a collection this size is uneven. Some pieces feel dated, and many of the short book reviews say more about the musician than about the book under review.
In short: best read the way it was written, a few pieces at a time. It's a critic's scrapbook, not one argument, and the highs make it well worth having.
It is 344 pages. Columbia University Press kindly gave us an advance copy, and we read it in full. Our page numbers come from that uncorrected proof and may change in the finished book.
What to do: if you love jazz, the Great American Songbook, the Beatles or comics, and like a critic with a real voice, tap Pre-order Now.
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