The first critical biography of iconic musician Alanis Morissette, creator of Jagged Little Pill.

The 1990s hardly saw a bigger hit than Jagged Little Pill. Alanis Morissette's defining album won Grammys, dominated the Billboard charts, and sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. It left a deep mark on the psyches of countless listeners. Three decades later, Megan Volpert checks in with Morissette, probing her rich and varied post-JLP career and bearing feminist witness to the existential anger that ties her recent work to enduring classics like You Oughta Know, One Hand in My Pocket, and Ironic.

Why Alanis Morissette Matters builds a bridge from Jagged Little Pill to the fascinating life and subtle intellect of its creator, exploring how the artist's philosophical interests and personal journey are reflected in each track. Morissette's struggles with censorship, mental health challenges, and Catholicism; her queer allyship, spiritual skepticism, zealous fandom, and philanthropic passions--all are carefully observed by a critic whose own life was touched by Jagged Little Pill. In the album's wake, Morissette has evolved as an artist and global citizen. With sensitivity and a profound love for the music, Volpert guides readers through the case for Morissette's enduring cultural relevance and creative impact.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Our sense of smell is crucial to our survival. We can smell fear, disease, food. Fragrance is also entertainment. We can smell an expensive bottle of perfume at a high-end department store. Perhaps it reminds us of our favorite aunt. A memory in a bottle is a powerful thing.

Megan Volpert's Perfume carefully balances the artistry with the science of perfume. The science takes us into the neurology of scent receptors, how taste is mostly smell, the biology of illnesses that impact scent sense, and the chemistry of making and copying perfume. The artistry of perfume involves the five scent families and symbolism, subjectivity in perfume preference, perfume marketing strategies, iconic scents and perfumers, why the industry is so secretive, and Volpert's own experiments with making perfume.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Speaking directly to the pop icon's ghost, Megan Volpert dives into a completely charted yet utterly unknown ocean that is Andy Warhol. The resulting collection of love letters and hate mail audaciously perforates the scene of the usual cultural suspects with icy shrapnel in a terrifying mirror game. This is not a biography, but a book that reflects Andy--detects him, the Andy who deflects. Working into territory that channels the essay as its more radical practitioners imagine, Megan revives the prose poem and rethinks herself. As the idea of a real Andy begins to decay, the author learns to invent him and discovers herself everywhere. Remaking this mythic man in the image of her own baggage, Megan gives us her most personal writing to date and a striking truth: everybody becomes Andy.

If Denis Johnson had written Tuesdays with Morrie, it'd feel like Megan Volpert's book of prose poems. Clawing its way out through this minimalist checklist of suburban malaise is an emphatically optimistic approach to growing up. These tiny essays carefully detail how to avoid becoming one's parents, how to manage a body addled by disease, and how to keep having the best possible time in life. After all: this is the only ride there is, and we can only ride it. Volpert's is a story of Springsteenian proportions, a gentleman's guide to rebellion complete with iron horses and the church of rock & roll.

Boss Broad contains forty poems and dozens of essays that explore what it takes to be a middle-aged hero. The poems are English-to-English translations of Bruce Springsteen songs--popular ones where he directly addresses a female listener, which Volpert audaciously rewrites to answer the Boss back using his own rhyme and meter. In these pages Volpert wears Springsteen's own lyrical swagger so that Rosalita becomes a drag queen, Wendy captains her own ship, and Bobby Jean finally comes out of the closet. The essays examine injections of spirituality in progressive politics, with topics including Stephen Colbert, Patti Smith, the author's career as a punk high school English teacher, what she learned surviving hurricanes in Louisiana, and meditations on what it means to be a cool liberal. As usual, Volpert trespasses on hallowed ground, doing battle with her white lady demons in the name of rock 'n' roll.

As Megan Volpert stood over train tracks preparing to surrender to the psychedelic blindness of simple human misery, of all the Heartbreakers tracks available to come through her headphones, Straight Into Darkness is the one that did. In this highly philosophical and deeply personal exploration of one obscure Tom Petty song, Volpert's essays comb through the musical, historical, rhetorical, and sociological implications of a forgotten gem in a legendary catalog with satisfying results.

Through this epic celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Long After Dark album, Petty and Volpert each emerge as modern mystics who argue that in the face of powerlessness, we rebel anyway. Volpert judges the forty years of Petty's career with one finger on the pulse of Bob Dylan and an occasional whiff of Bruce Springsteen, looking at the sometimes-violent mob scene of concerts as a type of transcendent communion. Straight Into Darkness offers a compelling vision of rock and roll fandom where the songwriter's hardworking sense of humor is enough to save us from absurdity. All you need is Albert Camus and a couple of chords.