J.D. Daniels’ writing has provoked a response that only a unique talent could. In both praise and criticism of Daniels’ recently published first collection, The Correspondence, there exists a common tone: a sort of what the hell is this? It’s a confusion that fresh style demands – a confrontation with the sheen of the new. Daniels manages to marry registers that might sound contradictory, but, in his hands, appear natural: bravura and vulnerability, academic erudition and folk wisdom, humor and frankness. And this wealth of material somehow finds the space to rattle around in a tightly bound, rhythmic prose. His essays take the liberty to chase ideas and often become something that they once weren’t in the span of just a sentence. It’s a thrilling agility. To read him can be like watching a brain at work.

The Chainsmokers, those guys are legends. The DJ duo of Drew Taggart and Alex Pall has taken the pop charts by storm over the last year, particularly with their smash hit “Closer” which reigned number one on the Billboard charts for a full 12 weeks, making it, for all intents and purposes, the song of 2016. They’re hot, young, totally chill, and on top of the world. Perhaps we’re left to wonder how history will remember The Chainsmokers and Closer because we’re left to wonder how history will remember 2016 – the year when everyone we loved passed away and Donald Trump was elected president. I can only imagine the memories we’ll have of Closer flooding from Uber radios, dining hall serveries, and party rooms (somehow always playing but never at your own volition) will intertwine in the soup of our subconscious with our memories of the election (it was rocking out at number 1 on November 7th).

Bret Easton Ellis’ characters are sexy, but they also wear cool stuff. Here are 37 (perhaps every; it’s a non-exhaustive study) instances of sentences in which character(s) are introduced into a scene along with a description of their outfit(s) in his debut novel, Less Than Zero. This is like one of those great street style articles on Refinery29 that can yield 40 unique page lands in the course of one article with word count ~ 500. Or an exposé of the stupidity of some sort of sartorial physiognomy. Nevertheless, feast your eyes on some sweet word threads. Emphasis on any mention of rock-T’s. They’re hot again.[Page citations from “First Vintage Contemporaries Edition," June 1998]Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which had looked fresh and clean this morning.

Summer spreads us denizens of 21 South Street far and wide. The "Summer Reads" series features just a few of the very best things we read during our time apart.Twelve is the book I’ve read most recently, which I heard about from a profile of its author in NY Mag. Twelve’s contents and the circumstances surrounding its publishing were perfectly engineered Literary Event fodder. The author was only 17, born and raised in New York, attendant of New York private schools, the son of a figure in the New York publishing industry. The book itself is a fast-paced, violent, druggy story that skewers the same set of rich kids that the author likely ran with.I can’t recommend reading Twelve on its literary merit, or even on the fact that it’s that good – in fact it’s often flinchingly bad. Yet, in both the circumstances of the book’s publishing and its execution, there is an unintentional narrative about the mythos that bombards a certain type of New York adolescent and how they turn around and refract that mythos.