A national journal of literature & discussion

Fall 2024 Cover. Cover art by Johanna Goodman.

Mere Virtuosity

By Ben Ratliff, Illustrations by Matthieu Bourel

Variations on a Slippery Idea

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Issue: Spring 2018 / Volume 94/1

Published: March 1, 2018

Ben Ratliff

Ben Ratliff is the author of Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen In An Age of Musical Plenty (FSG, 2016) and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (FSG, 2007). He was a pop and jazz critic at the New York Times and teaches at New York University’s Gallatin School...

Matthieu Bourel

Matthieu Bourel’s work has been published in the New Yorker, ZEIT magazine, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

Mere Virtuosity

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