Edited by Silvia Killingsworth and renowned chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton. “A year that stopped our food world in its tracks,” writes Gabrielle Hamilton in her introduction, reflecting on 2020. The stories in this edition of Best American Food Writing create a stunning portrait of a year that shook the food industry, reminding us of how important restaurants, grocery stores, shelters, and those who work in them are in our lives. From the Sikhs who fed thousands during the pandemic, to the writer who was quarantined with her Michelin-starred chef boyfriend, to the restaurants that served $200-per-person tasting menus to the wealthy as the death toll soared, this superb collection captures the underexposed ills of the industry and the unending power of food to unite us, especially when we need it most. THE BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING 2021 INCLUDES • BILL BUFORD • RUBY TANDOH • PRIYA KRISHNA • LIZA MONROY • NAVNEET ALANG • KELSEY MILLER HELEN ROSNER • LIGAYA MISHAN and others

    Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites . A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected—and most popular—of its kind. The Best American Essays 2011 includesHilton Als, Katy Butler, Toi Derricotte, Christopher Hitchens,Pico Iyer, Charlie LeDuff, Chang-Rae Lee, Lia Purpura, Zadie Smith,Reshma Memon Yaqub, and others

    By turns hilarious, cautionary, poignant and powerful, the Stop Me...stories collected here include encounters with some of rock's most iconic stars, including David Bowie, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Smiths, R.E.M. and Pearl Jam. From backstage brawls and drug blow-outs, to riots, superstar punch-ups, hotel room confessionals and tour bus lunacy, these are stories from the madness of a music scene now long gone. Allan Jones is an award-winning British music journalist and editor. In 1974, he applied for a job on the UK's best-selling music paper as a junior reporter, signing off his application with "Melody Maker needs a bullet up the arse. I'm the gun, pull the trigger†?. He was editor of Melody Maker from 1984 to 1997 and until 2014 editor of music and film monthly Uncut.

    Almost simultaneously, many of our finest writers are experimenting with a new nonfiction form: brief pieces that are literary and personal rather than informational, complete in themselves, and short—very short. Although the form has not had a name until now, the writers who are attracted to it include the known—Tim O'Brien, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, Michael Ondaatje—as well as just-discovered voices in the field of creative nonfiction, a genre that is transforming the essay.Delights and surprises await the reader in this rich gathering of Shorts. From Diane Ackerman's fascination with hummingbirds, to Andrei Codrescu's idiosyncratic view of nostalgia, to Albert Goldbarth's free-wheeling riff on the universe, each Short—ranging from several paragraphs to 2,000 words—becomes a sharply focused lens on an outer world or an inner sensibility.In Short, reflecting almost every way in which nonfiction can be written, is for all readers (and writers) who thrive on imaginative play and aesthetic satisfaction. Pick up this book; open it up. See if you can resist it.

    Consisting of more than fifty articles, essays, interviews, record and movie reviews, poems, and book excerpts-many of them rare and hard to find-Read the Beatles is an unprecedented compilation that follows the arc of the Fab Four's iconic and idiosyncratic career, from their early days in Liverpool through their tragic and triumphant histories after the group's split. The book also includes original essays from noted musicians and journalists about the Beatles' lasting influence and why they still matter today.

    This collection provides a complete picture of the man, his influence, and the impact of his life and death on his fans. Color photos. 72 b&w photos.

    In the process, he skillfully coaxes out a profound understanding of the men and women themselves, the context of their work, and how jazz—from horn blare to drum riff—is created conceptually. Expanding on his popular interviews for The New York Times, Ratliff speaks with Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Branford Marsalis, Dianne Reeves, Wayne Shorter, Joshua Redman, and others about the subtle variations in generation, training, and attitude that define their music.Playful and keenly insightful, The Jazz Ear is a revelatory exploration of a unique way of making and hearing music.

    Wolfe's brilliant first book -- a collection of essays that introduced us to the Sixties, to extravagant new styles of life that had nothing to do with the "elite" culture of the past.

    An in-depth study of the visceral slacker classic from 1987, an album that influenced enormously the nascent alternative scene.

    Lee Gutkind collects twenty-five essays that flourished in this new turf, all originally published in the groundbreaking journal he founded, Creative Nonfiction, now in its tenth anniversary year.Many of the writers here are crossing genres—from poetry to fiction to nonfiction. Annie Dillard provides the introduction, while Gutkind discusses the creative and ethical parameters of this new genre. The selections themselves are broad and fascinating. Lauren Slater is a therapist in the institution where she was once a patient. John Edgar Wideman reacts passionately to the unjust murder of Emmett Till. Charles Simic contemplates raucous gatherings at his Uncle Boris's apartment, while John McPhee creates a rare, personal, album quilt of his own life. Terry Tempest Williams speaks on the decline of the prairie dog, and Madison Smartt Bell invades Haiti.

    In 1965, John McPhee published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are; a decade later, he had published eleven others. His fertility, his precision and grace as a stylist, his wit and uncanny brilliance in choosing subject matter, his crack storytelling skills have made him into one of our best writers: a journalist whom L.E. Sissman ranked with Liebling and Mencken, who Geoffrey Wolff said "is bringing his work to levels that have no measurable limit," who has been called "a master craftsman" so many times that it is pointless to number them.

    "Wired" magazine sent him to Singapore to report on one of the world's most buttoned-up states. "The New York Times Magazine" asked him to describe what was wrong with the Internet. Rolling Stone published his essay on the ways our lives are all "soundtracked" by the music and the culture around us. And in a speech at the 2010 Book Expo, he memorably described the interactive relationship between writer and reader.These essays and articles have never been collected-until now. Some have never appeared in print at all. In addition, "Distrust That Particular Flavor" includes journalism from small publishers, online sources, and magazines no longer in existence. This volume will be essential reading for any lover of William Gibson's novels. "Distrust That Particular Flavor" offers readers a privileged view into the mind of a writer whose thinking has shaped not only a generation of writers but our entire culture.

    30,000 first printing."

    The western world was turned upside down by the rock ‘n' roll revolution and here's the real lowdown on the rock stars who made it happen — and what it did to their lives.

    They reflect upon happy childhoods, successful community ventures, warm refuges for outsiders, and hidden oases of natural beauty. But mainly they are stories drawn from uniquely personal experiences: A girl has her bike stolen. A social worker in Pittsburgh makes calls on clients. A journalist from Buffalo moves away and misses home.... A father gives his daughter a bath in the lead-contaminated water of Flint, Michigan" (from the introduction).Where is America's Rust Belt? It's not quite a geographic region but a linguistic one, first introduced as a concept in 1984 by Walter Mondale. In the modern vernacular, it's closely associated with the "Post-Industrial Midwest," and includes Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, as well as parts of Illinois, Wisconsin, and New York. The region reflects the country's manufacturing center, which, over the past forty years, has been in decline. In the 2016 election, the Rust Belt's economic woes became a political talking point and helped pave the way for a Donald Trump victory.But the region is neither monolithic nor easily understood. The truth is much more nuanced. Voices from the Rust Belt pulls together a distinct variety of voices from people who call the region home. Voices that emerge from familiar Rust Belt cities―Detroit, Cleveland, Flint, and Buffalo, among other places―and observe, with grace and sensitivity, the changing economic and cultural realities for generations of Americans.Introduction: why the Rust Belt matters (and what it is) / Anne Trubek --A girl's Youngstown / Jacqueline Marino --The kidnapped children of Detroit / Marsha Music --Busing, a white girl's tale / Amanda Shaffer --Moundsville / David Faulk --North Park, with and without hate / Jeff Z. Klein --Love and survival: a Flint romance / Layla Meillier --A middle-aged student's guide to social work / Dave Newman --Fresh to death / Eric Woodyard --Rust belt heroin chic / Ben Gwin --Will blacks rise or be forgotten in the new Buffalo? / Henry Louis Taylor Jr --Can Detroit save white people? / Aaron Foley --Cleveland's little Iraq / Huda al-Marashi --A night at the Golden Lion Lounge / John Lloyd Clayton --Family bones / Ryan Schnurr --The fauxtopias of Detroit's suburbs / James D. Griffioen --Pretty things to hang on the wall / Eric Anderson --King Coal and the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum / Carolyne Whelan --Seed or weed: on the evolution of Chicago's Bloomingdale trail / Martha Bayne --This is a place / Kathryn M. Flinn --That better place; or, the problem with mobility / G. M. Donley --Losing Lakewood / Sally Errico --Notes from the expatriate underground / Margaret Sullivan --Confessions of a Rust Belt orphan; or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Akron / Jason Segedy --Bathtime / Connor Coyne