Pierre Bernard was many things: a yoga enthusiast who introduced the practice to the Western world, an entrepreneur extraordinaire, a healer, a liar, and an avid animal trainer.

As a music critic, I don’t find Jason Hartley’s Advanced Genius Theory intimidating or insulting. I need to get that out of the way, because that seems to be one of the primary defenses of the theory.

Depending on how quickly neurons begin firing when one hears the term “Krautrock,” the genre of experimental music that germinated and gestated in Germany from the late ‘60s through the ‘70s may mean little other than a reference to Kraftwerk and Can.

Though he’s widely known for The Ten Cent Plague, his 2008 book on the U.S. government’s 1950s war on comics, David Hajdu has long been a music critic for The New Republic. Heroes and Villains is primarily focused on the musical end of things, but as its full title notes, contains explorations into music, movies, comics, and the broader cultural landscape as well.

While the glam rock era of the early 1970s could arguably be one of the most scrutinized, mimicked, analyzed and ultimately eviscerated scenes in books, media, and copycat bands in recent years, Dave Thompson manages to put a new spin on his examination of glam by primarily focusing on that essential period from 1970-1973 when the lives of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed—arguably the triptych of vitality in glam rock—neatly dovetailed to create a monumental shift in the face of rock music.

For the past 50 years, Jim Marshall has devoted himself to photographing musicians. But more than just taking pictures, Marshall had a knack for capturing moments, snapshots of when the music and the individual collided, which, in turn, revealed something special or private about the artist. His pictures were often windows into the souls of those who were so revered but not always understood.

By now The Simpsons is among the most predictable institutions in America. Not in the sense that the show is boring or unsurprising—though many will argue that it is—but predictable in that, after two decades, it’s still on the air every with new episodes Sunday night at eight o’clock. Like baseball or The Ramones, The Simpsons has come to be synonymous with America.

After a collection of previously-published essays and taking an ill-advised stab at fiction, Chuck Klosterman’s latest offering gets back to what he does best, but it all feels a little too familiar. In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman once again takes the position of all-encompassing cultural commentator, riffing on Abba, Garth Brooks, Kurt Cobain and David Koresh, time travel and more. Composed of a collection of unrelated essays, Dinosaur ostensibly replicates 2002’s Sex Drugs & Cocoa Puffs, inexplicably Kosterman’s best-selling title to date

A decade and a half after making a name for himself with High Fidelity, Nick Hornby has at last written a novel that, while not topping his debut, comes closer to the mark than any of his more recent output. Julet, Naked centers once again on the nature of male musical obsession.