Richard Skinner’s Undercurrents is a hybrid essay collection that brings together literary criticism, memoir, cultural commentary, and music writing in a loose, associative structure. Moving from Proust’s memory theory to Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, from Renaissance nuns to Eisenstein’s montage, Skinner’s prose is expansive yet precise, attuned to the connective tissue between art forms, ideas, and personal experience. The voice is intimate but critically rigorous, allowing space for reverie, close reading, and autobiographical fragments. The result is a rich, idiosyncratic meditation on narrative, perception, and the patterns that shape a creative life.