Listen to This

Alex Ross’s award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Rossas one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essayin which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music,showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popularartists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublishedessay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of musichistory—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a fewiconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketchescanonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; givesus in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björkand Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newarkhigh school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing.

Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.