Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces, 1990-2005

Acclaimed essay collection from a ‘living master of the American language’

In his books and in a string of wide-ranging and inventive essays, Luc Sante has shown himself to be not only one of our preeminent stylists, but also a critic of uncommon power and range. Kill All Your Darlings is the first collection of Sante’s 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. Sante is best known for his ground-breaking work in urban history (Low Life), and for a particularly penetrating form of autobiography (The Factory of Facts). These subjects are also reflected in several essays here, but it is the author’s intense and scrupulous writing about music, painting, photography, and poetry that takes centre stage.

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, Rene Magritte to Tintin, Buddy Bolden to Walker Evans, Allen Ginsberg to Robert Mapplethorpe.