What do all these people have in common? Fame, of course, and undeniable talent. But most of all, they were cool. Birth of the Cool is a stunningly illustrated, brilliantly written cultural history of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s -- the decades in which cool was born. From intimate interviews with cool icons like poet Allen Ginsberg, bop saxophonist Jackie McLean, and Living Theatre cofounder Judith Malina, award-winning journalist and poet Lewis MacAdams extracts the essence of cool. Taking us inside the most influential and experimental art movements of the twentieth century -- from the Harlem jazz joints where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker invented bebop to the back room at Max's Kansas City when Andy Warhol was holding court to backstage at the Newport Folk Festival the night Bob Dylan went electric, from Surrealism to the Black Mountain School to Zen -- MacAdams traces the evolution of cool from the very fringes of society to the mainstream. Born of World War II, raised on atomic-age paranoia, cast out of the culture by the realities of racism and the insanity of the Cold War, cool is now, perversely, as conventional as you can get. Allen Ginsberg suited up for Gap ads. Volvo appropriated a phrase from Jack Kerouac's On the Road for its TV commercials. How one became the other is a terrific story, and it is presented here in a gorgeous package, rich with the coolest photographs of the black-and-white era from Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, and many others. Drawing a direct line between Lester Young wearing his pork-pie hat and his crepe-sole shoes staring out his hotel window at Birdland to the author's three-year-old daughter saying "cool" while watching a Scooby-Doo cartoon at the cusp of a new millennium, Birth of the Cool is a cool book about a hot subject...maybe even the coolest book ever.

    The trauma of the attack has haunted her for years, making it hard to live a “normal” life. Her favorite coping mechanism is to escape into research books and romance novels about medieval Scotland, the subject of her graduate studies, but she pours every moment of her free time into running a support group for survivors of sexual assault. The work is rewarding, but it’s made her enemies—predators who don’t want their victims to receive help. Still troubled by the car accident that claimed his mother’s life, Nate Patterson has devoted his life to saving people. He finds his work as a firefighter and EMT rewarding, but he feels emotionally distant from the people he saves…until he pulls Lauren Grant out of a burning building. There’s an instant connection between them—one that only grows—but the fire was no accident. Someone’s out to destroy Lauren, and he may be the only one who can help her unmask them. Lauren can tell Nate’s her modern-day Highlander, noble and protective, but the danger she’s in seems impossible to surmount. Can two wounded people defeat the odds and find a real-life happily ever after? Trigger Warning: Rape in heroine's past

    I was taken.Taken from the world I created for myself.I’m not alone, I’m one of many girls locked in this castle awaiting…something.We’re too be sold, like animals for slaughter to rich men who will do God knows what to us.I won’t let this happen.I will fight and escape this hell hole.I escaped the castle or so I thought.I found myself running straight into the hands of not one, but three of the most gorgeous men I’ve ever seen.Everett, Dean, and Colson.They say I’m there’s now.They say they will protect me.They will save me.Can I trust them from those that continue to seek me out?Do I really have a choice?

    0 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more #x2013; everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Magician's Assistant. This detailed literature summary also contains Topics for Discussion and a Free Quiz on The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett.

    

    Cain's hard-nosed observation that "writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational," to Joan Didion's account of how she composes a book--"I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm"--The Paris Review has elicited some of the most revelatory and revealing thoughts from the literary masters of our age. For more than half a century, the magazine has spoken with most of our leading novelists, poets, and playwrights, and the interviews themselves have come to be recognized as classic works of literature, an essential and definitive record of the writing life. They have won the coveted George Polk Award and have been a contender for the Pulitzer Prize. Now, Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch introduces an entirely original selection of sixteen of the most celebrated interviews. Often startling, always engaging, these encounters contain an immense scope of intelligence, personality, experience, and wit from the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Rebecca West, and Billy Wilder. This is an indispensable book for all writers and readers.

    But hip-hop deejays and producers have collectively developed an artistic system that features a complex aesthetic, a detailed array of social protocols, a rigorous set of ethical expectations and a rich historical consciousness. Based on ten years of research among hip-hop producers, Making Beats is the first work of scholarship to explore the goals, methods and values of this surprisingly insular community. Focusing on a variety of subjects--from hip-hop artists' pedagogical methods to the Afro-diasporic roots of the sampling process to the social significance of "digging" for rare records--Joseph G. Schloss examines the way hip-hop artists have managed to create a form of expression that reflects their creative aspirations, moral beliefs, political values and cultural realities.

    But in a place where time lies thicker than the mangrove swamps that surround it, Jack and Vera discover an emotional frontier more fearsome, untamed, and dangerous than any wilderness. Told through the voice of Jack's adoring sister, Gin, Port Mungo is the riveting story of this ill-fated couple, one that begins as a bohemian flight-of-fancy before unraveling into a dark, debauched and sinister tale. With Port Mungo, the incomparable Patrick McGrath, author of the acclaimed novels Spider and Asylum, delivers a spellbinding narrative to explore the obsessive pursuit of art and love.

    An examination of Le Guin's career, from her obscure beginnings in the science fiction magazines to her rapid rise to the top in the 1970's.

     A one-night-stand was supposed to be just that...one night. I'm the one that made sure this Chase guy would agree to my rule.One hot night with no strings attached.So why am I wanting to break all the rules and find this guy that turned my world upside down with just that one crazy night?Why couldn't I let it go? Why couldn't I let images of the best time I'd ever had with a guy go?Because he was every girls fantasy in bed. He took me to levels I never knew existed and now I'm pissed I didn't demand a friends with benefits relationship.I thought I'd gotten over him, until a year later when I saw him again. He had that greedy smile I remembered, that daring look, and it was all I could do to keep it together.When he tells me that I'm all he's thought about since our night together and wants to hook up again? I know I'd be an idiot to turn him down.One small problem though. Being strongly blinded by lust has me ignoring the fact that I come from a wealthy family and he doesn't. If I fall for this guy that is everything my family warned me about, this can turn into a disaster.But I'm not falling for his charms, body, soft side, or his damn eyes that speak to my soul.At least that's what I tell myself, even though I internally should know this poor little rich girl is getting charmed by a very dangerous snake.Or am I?A one-night-stand never ends in love.So what in the hell am I getting myself into now?I'm playing with fire and I know I'm about to get burned. The perfect man doesn't exist, or did I seriously just land the best man any girl could ask for?

    Uneventful until the day he gets a phone call from a man who calls himself Timur. The man who has been dead for 20 years.Once upon a time Arkady and Timur were best friends and co-workers at a top-secret place called Lab 52, where they designed and tested psychotropic drugs. But soon Arkady and Timur’s camaraderie ran into something greater than all the LSD in their lab. Her name was Lisa. Such triangles don’t end well. Arkady keeps replaying in his mind bittersweet scenes of love, sex, and tenderness, and gradually comes to realize that their torrid romance was not what it seemed. As Lisa broke out of the romantic mold the two friends have tried hard to keep her in, she showed her true colors, and they learned what happens when poetry mixes with political dissent in a Russian girl’s heart.With his old life trying to catch up with him, Arkady goes on a lam, running from one hideout to another — from the Dominican barrio to a Moldavian bordello in Riverdale and finally to a top-security Mafia “sanctuary” in Brooklyn. As he runs, he keeps searching for the clues to his caller’s true identity, forced to dig into his long-dead past where he suddenly discovers a slim possibility of a future.

    

    

    After his death, the contents of his studio, including thousands of glass negatives, were sold off for five dollars. For years the fragile negatives sat forgotten and deteriorating in cardboard boxes in an open carport. How did it happen, then, that the most implausible of events took place? That Disfarmer’s haunting portraits were retrieved from oblivion, that today they sell for upwards of $12,000 each at posh New York art galleries; his photographs proclaimed works of art by prestigious critics and journals and exhibited around the world? The story of Disfarmer’s rise to fame is a colorful, improbable, and ultimately fascinating one that involves an unlikely assortment of individuals. Would any of this have happened if a young New York photographer hadn't been so in love with a pretty model that he was willing to give up his career for her; if a preacher’s son from Arkansas hadn't spent 30 years in the Army Corps of Engineers mapping the U.S. from an airplane; if a magazine editor hadn't felt a strange and powerful connection to the work? The cast of characters includes these, plus a restless and wealthy young Chicago aristocrat and even a grandson of FDR. It’s a compelling story which reveals how these diverse people were part of a chain of events whose far-reaching consequences none of them could have foreseen, least of all the strange and reclusive genius of Heber Springs. Until now, the whole story has not been told.

    Her debut work of fiction, what purpose did i serve in your life, examines the nature of sex and the possibility of real connection in the face of degradation and blankness. Its interlocking stories follow a chronological arc from innocence to sexual experience, taking in the humiliations of one night stands with male strangers, the perils of sex work, and the caustic reception that greets a woman working and writing in public. It is a brave and pitiless examination of yearning in an era of hyper-exposure and a riveting account of the moments of transcendence seized from an otherwise blank world."Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure." -Edmund WhiteI have never read a book like this before. It’s painful, shocking, and compellingly written, composed with great sensitivity to which details should be revealed and which must stay concealed. Its genre-muddle and formal complexity make for a completely unforgettable, profoundly contemporary, and plainly great work of courage and art. Here’s a terrifying proposal: could this be The Great American Novel for the twilight of �'Great' America?" - Sheila Heti (author of "How Should a Person Be?")"'�This society hates feelings,' Kathy Acker said about a million times. A chain of regulation controls us by making us fear that we will be expelled from the human club for being the wrong kind of person. Marie Calloway breaks that chain of regulation by displaying her body like a beggar displays her wounds, by asserting awkwardness and shame (for the body, for ambition). Her book should be called, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman Who Can’t Be Controlled. Or is she the fiction, Holden Caulfield, Lolita, or Mme. Merteuil? How does a questing intelligence live inside the commodity?—searching for identity or personal branding? And if she is an attention whore, am I the attention john? Yes--but Calloway wonders as strongly as I do about what she might be, and she invites misunderstanding into her work. One thing is certain, though—She can really write about sex!" - Robert Glück"what purpose did i serve in your life is moving, unprecedented, threatening, and surreal—the exciting, rare work of someone with nothing to lose. It's intuitive and overpowering, concise and extreme. And, like a plant or a comet, it doesn't pause to explain what it's doing, defend or rationalize its existence, or attempt to obscure or distort its intentions. If you're attentive toward it—and earnest and open-minded and non-malicious in your attention—you will likely question and examine what you yourself are doing and why, and how to change." — Tao Lin"'Adrien Brody' is riveting, fresh, and written with a distinctive new voice." — Stephen Elliott"That's the most incredible thing I've ever seen.""What is?" I asked, though I knew."Your face right now."I was vaguely aware my eyes were open very wide.Marie Calloway's fiction debut, what purpose did i serve in your life, is both a portrait of American youth and a gamble, a chance taken, in answer to the following: for a young woman, is there such a thing as the soul, a life more than the organs, or is she forever recalled to her body? Marie does not answer this question but instead acts it out through a series of intertwined stories. The result is a fusillade of brutally self-aware and insightful pieces that take on the meaning of sex, art, and, most of all, survival in the age of Internet-based sex work and love that can flame and turn to ash in the space of a tweet.Marie Calloway (b. 1990) is interested in sexuality and gender. She rose to prominence in 2011 with her controversial story, "Adrien Brody," which was published by Muumuu House.