Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. An essay collection, Listen to This, appeared in 2010. His third book, Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music, is “astoundingly erudite, scrupulous, generous, profound, objective and engaged, and enormously entertaining,” writes Tony Kushner. Ross has received the George Peabody Medal, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.