Is There God After Prince? Dispatches from an Age of Last Things

Coviello (Make Yourselves Gods), an English professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, serves up an appealing potpourri of musings on Steely Dan’s oeuvre, teen comedy Heathers, and Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, among other cultural touchstones. “Joy Rounds First” takes New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter’s final game in the MLB as an occasion to celebrate how his legend elevated his games, while the title essay mourns the death of Prince, suggesting his music served as a “reminder of the exhilarating limitlessness of the world apart from the knowable.” At their best, the entries explore “what it can mean to love trifling things like books and records... in the midst of worlds so glutted with calamity,” as in “Anthony and Carmela Get Vaccinated,” where Coviello discusses missing his Italian American family while rewatching The Sopranos during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of the selections take the form of fawning odes to art Coviello holds dear and reader mileage will vary depending on one’s investment in the subject at hand, but lyrical prose enlivens the proceedings (lovers “make a language together—with words, theories, your bodies—that you then refine and refashion over many years, until it comes to carry within it much of the whole history of your love”). It’s an exquisitely written romp through Coviello’s pop culture favorites. (Oct.)