AUTHOR, SPEAKER and NPR CRITIC Tim Riley reviews all stripes for NPR's HERE AND NOW, and has written for the WASHINGTON POST, NEWSWEEK, BOSTON MAGAZINE, the BOSTON PHOENIX, MONITOR RADIO, THE WORLD, and STUDIO 360 (PRI).

Riley is the author of: Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary (Knopf/Vintage 1988), which was hailed by the New York Times as bringing "new insight to the act we've known for all these years..." He has also written Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary (Knopf/Vintage 1992), Madonna: Illustrated (Hyperion 1992), and Fever: How Rock'n'Roll Transformed Gender in America (Picador 2005).

Riley's books are assigned in college courses on rock culture, and he gave a keynote address at BEATLES 2000, the first international academic conference on the band in Jyväskylä, Finland. He is also well known as a campus speaker on "Censorship in the Arts," giving more than 500 speeches since he wrote a Boston PHOENIX story on Public Enemy's anti-semitism back in 1990. 

He is currently working on a major new biography of John Lennon for W.W. Norton.