Roy Christopher says "I like to think of research and writing in the collage style of hip-hop. In many ways, hip-hop culture is about taking what you have and making something more from it, something uniquely your own...Viewed in that frame, this book is a mix-tape that I remixed with cuts from all my favorite artists." He has a fascinating vision of how parts of our culture co-evolve and interact -- science, technology, media, and culture. He is especially in tune with the ways that music culture and literary culture riff off each other, and his style is just the right balance between "street" and intellectual. These interviews -- with Erik Davis, Philip K. Dick, DJ Spooky, and Shepard Fairey to name a few -- are cultural morsels of the best kind, the kind where you think "I'll just have one more," and before you know it, you've consumed every single one and are itching for more.

Emily writes: "This book has been haunting me in the best way -- its rhythms get stuck in my head like a song. It's lyrical. It's broad like a myth, but visceral. And cyclical and repetitious, like a sestina, like a villanelle. Imagine Faulkner's Vardaman, now a teen with a twin, still beating away at that old fish."