For the first time, she releases a book of poetry and paintings capturing her essential artistry that has helped define and invigorate a new generation.Ani DiFranco: Verses rages, eulogizes, menaces, revels, and envisions. With a poet’s precision and a citizen’s stake, DiFranco finds the meeting places of intimacy and politics, of self and country, of resolve and compromise, and of the fickle and magnificent capacities of love and solitude.In 1990 at the age of eighteen, Ani DiFranco rewrote the rules of the record industry when she created her own label, Righteous Babe Records, as an alternative to beckoning corporate offices. Since then, RBR has released nineteen full-length DiFranco albums to critical acclaim, and is now home to over a dozen cutting-edge new artists. DiFranco was named one of the top twenty-five most influential artists of the past twenty-five years by CMJ New Music (alongside Nirvana and U2) and one of 21 Feminists for the 21st Century by Ms. Magazine. Together with Ani DiFranco: Verses, she released her first retrospective album, Canon, in September 2007, and proceeded on a twenty-city tour in the United States.

    She sheds light on the years after the Beatles, with Yoko Ono, as he struggled to make sense of his own artistic life—one that had turned from youthful angst to suffocating fame in almost a split second.Partridge chronicles the emotional highs and paralyzing lows Lennon transformed into brilliant, evocative songs. With striking black-andwhite photographs spanning his entire life, John Lennon: All I Want Is the Truth is the unforgettable story of one of rock’s biggest legends.

    A regular columnist for MTV.com, Willis-Abdurraqib brings his interest in pop culture to these poems, analyzing race, gender, family, and the love that finally holds us together even as it threatens to break us. Terrance Hayes writes that Willis-Abdurraqib "bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy." The poems in this collection are challenging and accessible at once, as they seek to render real human voices in moments of tragedy and celebration.

    On arrival he finds the climate delicious, the food even better, and two of the locals ravishing. Unfortunately, the wine produced on his new property is swill. Why then are so many people interested in it? Enter a beguiling Californian who knows more about wine than Max does – and may have a better claim to the estate. Fizzy with intrigue, bursting with local color and savor, A Good Year is Mayle at his most entertaining.

    The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America turned away from its midcentury idealism and became a more polarized society.The story Franzen tells here draws on elements as varied as the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka's fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds.These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction, but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, The Discomfort Zone narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.

    “The writers in this volume invite us into hidden places: a surgical pathologist’s laboratory, the boxing gym where a college professor and his student learn unexpected lessons about discipline, pain, and growing to adulthood. There are many discoveries to be made here, and I gladly invite the reader to an uncommonly rich and rewarding book.” — Kathleen Norris

    Simultaneously, this compilation unpacks the contentious relationship that exists between Róisín and her mother, her platonic and romantic heartbreaks, and the cognitive dissonance felt as a result of being so divided among her broad spectrum of identities.

    His power and poisoned purity of vision are reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud, and, like the strongest poets of the New York School, Carroll transforms the everyday details of city life into poetry. In language at once delicate, hallucinatory, and menacing, his major themes—love, friendship, the exquisite pains and pleasures of drugs, and, above all, the ever-present city—emerge in an atmosphere where dream and reality mingle on equal terms. It is an astonishing debut by an important American writer and artist.

    in fact most of these words i wish i didn’t write. just to the small fact of, i wish i didn’t care… but sadly i do. but if i said the words i wish i did, then they wouldn’t be my little secret, they would be words on paper in a book. they would be words taken out of context, because the world loves to take things out of context. the words i wish i said are between me and my party of a brain. because if you knew the words, then you would have such an advantage over me, and my quiet showers where i ramble on to myself about my words wouldn’t be my secret anymore. you may be able to take most of me but you’ll never be able to take all of me.

    Sound Pictures offers a powerful and intimate account of how he did so. The second and final volume of the definitive biography of the man, Sound Pictures traces the story of the Beatles' breathtaking artistic trajectory after reaching the creative heights of Rubber Soul. As the bandmates engage in brash experimentation both inside and outside the studio, Martin toils along with manager Brian Epstein to consolidate the Beatles' fame in the face of growing sociocultural pressures, including the crisis associated with the "Beatles are more popular than Jesus" scandal. Meanwhile, he also struggles to make his way as an independent producer in the highly competitive world of mid-1960s rock 'n' roll. As Martin and the Beatles create one landmark album after another, including such masterworks as Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles (The White Album), and Abbey Road, the internal stakes and interpersonal challenges become ever greater. During his post-Beatles years, Martin attempts to discover new vistas of sound recording with a host of acts, including Jeff Beck, America, Cheap Trick, Paul McCartney, and Elton John, his creative breakthroughs followed by unprecedented commercial success. Eventually, though, all roads bring Martin back to the Beatles, as the group seeks out new ways to memorialize their achievement under the supervision of the man who has come to be known as Sir George. Now, more than fifty years after the Beatles' revolutionary triumphs, Martin's singular stamp on popular music has become more vital than ever, as successive generations discover the magic of the Beatles and their groundbreaking sound.

    This edition contains important lessons on the nature of friendship and love, the importance of belief in the future, and the value of respect for oneself and others, and much more.

    That night, Sater came home and began writing the first lyric of Spring Awakening: "Mama Who Bore Me" - a lyric which still stands, verbatim, just as he first wrote it. Ten years later, in the wake of the enormous international success of this groundbreaking, multiaward-winning show, its original director, Michael Mayer, urged Sater to write notes explicating its famously evocative, poetic lyrics. In rich detail, Sater's notes address the literary sources and allusions of each lyric. He also writes feelingly of what prompted the songs over the course of the show's eight years of development. In so doing, Sater expands on his partnership with Sheik and his experiences with original cast members, Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff, now also known from Glee. These notes will prove invaluable for fans of the show, for all those interested in theater, and most especially for all the young performers who will play the roles and sing these songs.

    May they find every word they were looking for.***I know you don’t want to talk sometimes. Sometimes because it hurts and sometimes because you’re just not supposed to talk about what you want to talk about. Sometimes it can be hard to say, “this is beautiful,” when no one else can see what you see. Or, “Here, this is where the pain is.” But some part of you knows, the truth about the words you cannot say is that they only hurt until you say them. They only hurt until the person who needs to hear them, hears them.  Because we are human, and the closest we’ve ever come to showing each other who we really are, and how we love, is with words.So I’m going to try to say to you here, what I wish you’d say to me too. Please.Listen. We can change things. Here.