Brilliant... accessible, pithy, lurid, entertaining, even laugh-out-loud funny... we can only hope that Cocker has enough tat for a second volume.

Poignant in a subtle, understated way; Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time for the age of the Ford Cortina... This book is about a very normal childhood and the everyday detritus it left behind. Common people indeed.

Incredibly entertaining...a trip through the things that have made him who he is.

Rummage through its pages - through the plastic and nylon, the tin and vinyl - and it's real gold, its shirts second-hand, of course, but its storytelling first class.

Brilliant... Good Pop, Bad Pop is more than anyone dared hope for

Absolutely fabulous: at once very witty, self-depreciating and moving.

Thoughtful and very funny... terrific

Engaging and evocative. He [Cocker] paints a vividly drab picture of the north of England under Thatcherism. And his book is beautiful to look at, too, set out like pop art.

Like a pop culture Proust... a testament to just how rich this junk is that Cocker can weave such a compelling take.

Insightful and delightful.

Good Pop, Bad Pop... pulses with the thrilling energy of adolescence and early adulthood... Cocker uses his objects to tell real stories about the past, leaving in the dirt and disappointment around the moments of excitement.

With laugh-out-loud passages of comedy and stylish illustrations... [this] is the story of how he [Cocker] made himself into who he is, his acquisition of a personal style and outlook... Hopefully we will not have to hang around long before his next trip to the loft.

Like little madeleines, each relic is offered up to the reader in the intimate, confiding voice familiar from Cocker's lyrics.

Good Pop, Bad Pop is a joy.

Good Pop, Bad Pop shows how he mapped out Pulp's path to glory at jumble sales and sparsely attended 1980s gigs... A winning formula on the page.

Extremely funny and almost over-stuffed with insights about the state of pop and the nature of creativity.

An entertaining quasi-memoir based on decluttering his loft.

[A] nostalgic, playful, and beautifully designed book.

A vibrant showcase of sharp writing, Abdurraqib's A Little Devil in America attests that Black performance at its root is not simply an outward show of talent but also a means of survival. Read carefully. Abdurraqib's book is a challenge not to accept the usual explanations for the performances we witness.

Abdurraqib's great strength is his ability to present broad, canny observations through the lens of his personal experience, and his intimate exploration of what these specific moments meant to him as a Black Muslim coming of age in the US is what lingers long after you've finished the book

Abdurraqib has written a profound reflection on how Black performance is woven into the fabric of American culture... A Little Devil in America is a joyous ode to Black performance throughout history.

Throughout, Abdurraqib writes with urgency as he highlights what these performances mean, how they connect to his own feelings on grief, love and life,
and where they fit into American history.

From Josephine Baker to Soul Train to 'Sixteen Ways of Looking at Blackface,' Abdurraqib takes us on a wild ride through the history of Black performances, artists who crushed boundaries and carved out spaces for vigorous forms of African American expression. His is an intimate, conspiratorial voice, musically inflected, blending scholarship with anecdote, a 'waltz in a circular chamber of your homies and not-homies, shouting chants of excitement.'

Abdurraqib breathes new life into performers of significance in his life, both legendary and unsung

Abdurraqib is one of our finest writers period. A brilliant poet, essayist and cultural critic, he handles nostalgia, pop culture, Blackness and friendship in ways few writers can. Here, he examines Black America's changing views of Whitney Houston, the death of Michael Jackson, the spiritual properties of dancing, Afrofuturism and more. The early chapter "Sixteen Ways of Looking at Blackface" is a deeply humane piece of virtuoso writing. Longer dispatches are broken up by lyric, stream-of-consciousness pieces that refresh the soul and remind readers that there's little Abdurraqib can't do

In his new collection of essays, A Little Devil in America, the poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib surveys this sprawl of expression. Here he charges himself with quite an ambitious task, pinning down and contextualizing the historic scale of such a globally significant cultural output, and it is one that would appear to call for an equally ambitious scope... Contemplations of legendary voices, sleights of hand, and charismatic choreographies are in dialogue with his own stories of grief, love, faith, and the search for freedom within the confinements of borders and a body...Abdurraqib expands the conception of "performance" to include the whole realm of behavior and culture...Playfulness, seduction, artistry, and reinvention: Abdurraqib wants us to know that these devilish gestures have their place, too, among the saints that line the corridors in this tiresome, captivating, and essential struggle

In A Little Devil in America, Abdurraqib walks readers through Black archives of dance, film, social struggle, and song as though these "intimate histories" of performance (as Saidiya Hartman calls them) could free us from anything that misses the beat. For this collection of essays, he does the work of a DJ: he digs through the crates, selects the most appropriately unexpected songs/topics/subjects, builds a collage between cuts and scratches, and presents his set. His books are soundscapes in print, and I was somehow listening to each sentence as if it were a breakbeat of personal narrative and socio-historical commentary...Hanif is one of the most exciting writers of his generation

Abdurraqib, known for his playful, intelligent sense of humor on Twitter, highlights amazing performances that shed light on societal constructions and moments of sheer joy his book about Black culture in America. Writing about joy is challenging; falling back on cliche is a constant temptation that Abdurraqib avoids in this insightful tome

That sense of limitlessness wraps itself around every essay in Abdurraqib's newest book, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance. In it, he writes about Black performance in America-from Great Depression-era dance marathons to the enduring cool of Don Cornelius to the art of Mike Tyson entering a boxing ring-with both great reverence and rigorous analysis. The book, in the way Abdurraqib's work so often does, erects monuments to our should-be legends and our unignorable icons alike, and paints an expansive, deeply felt portrait of the history of Black artistry

This deft consideration of seemingly irreconcilable values, between the personal and private dimensions of performance, can be found throughout the essays in A Little Devil in America...Abdurraqib sees performance as a site of radical questioning, experimentation, and dream-making. This book is not a work of theory. It is sensual. We watch him watching his idols and we watch him dancing along with them, sometimes clumsily. If Brooks's goal is to make a case for performers' intellectualism, Abdurraqib's is to help us understand how they teach us to live richer, more embodied lives

Engrossing and moving ... A new, poetic take on essays that, I think, changes the game in many ways.

Astonishing, impressive ... the connections he makes point to the enduring influence of Black art ... a book as bold as it is essential

I absolutely love this book. It's incredible and so well written. I keep trying to find fault but so far no joy - It's so good

[John Yorke's] writing book is arguably possibly almost as good as mine, all right it's loads better shut up

Probably, in the hackneyed phrase, "the last book on screenwriting you'll ever need." He is very good at debunking the claims of some screenwriting gurus, all of whom are busy trying to sell you their own particular brand of snake oil. It's truly excellent

Of all the books I've read about story construction and the art of fiction, this one is the most comprehensive and concise