Olivia Laing and Wayne Koestenbaum

A pair of lively critics who like to swirl their lives into narratives about culture happening around them talk about exceptional creative people. Laing's recent The Trip to Echo Spring examines great writers who were also alcoholics, and Koestenbaum's My 1980s and Other Essays looks at everyone from Debbie Harry to Freud while making sense of the decade in question.