James Wolcott has had a career as a freelance critic and a literary intellectual nearly unique in our time. Crtical Mass features the very best of Wolcott's writing, from his early 70s dispatches on rock and roll (like his review of Patti Smith's legendary first gig at CBGB), to movies and literature (there are warm tributes to Larkin, Cheever, and Mailer), to his must-read cultural reports for Vanity Fair. Critical Mass is a treasure trove of sparkling, spiky prose and fascinating portrait of our cultural times over the past decades. 

JAMES WOLCOTT is the cultural critic for Vanity Fair and contributes to The New Yorker.

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