Lucy Sante is "one of the handful of living masters of the American language, as well as a singular historian and philosopher of American experience," writes the New Yorker¿'s Peter Schjeldahl. 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 it offers ample justification for this high praise.

Sante is best known for her ground-breaking work in urban history-her book Low Life brilliantly refocused and expanded our understanding of New York in the late 19th/early 20th century-as well as for a particularly penetrating form of autobiography (The Factory of Facts). These themes are also reflected in several essays included here, but it is the author's intense and scrupulous writing about music, painting, photography, and poetry that takes center stage. Alongside meditations on cigarettes, factory work, and hipness, and her critical tour de force, "The Invention of the Blues," Sante offers her incomparable take on icons from Arthur Rimbaud to Bob Dylan, René Magritte to Tintin, Buddy Bolden to Walker Evans, Allen Ginsberg to Robert Mapplethorpe.