For non-aficionados, jazz can be slippery and difficult to grasp. Jazz can leave a novice baffled, unsure how to listen, and with the question “How is it that they know what to play?”

Know-It-All Jazz takes readers from the African-American roots and all the way to the global mix of styles and performers in today’s jazz scene. Along the way, it looks at the...

From the churches and street corners of Harlem and The Bronx to the underground clubs of the East Village, New York City has been a musical mecca for generations, and Rock & Roll Explorer Guide to New York City is the definitive story of its development throughout the five boroughs.

Plug in and walk the same streets a young Bob Dylan walked. See...

Leonard Maltin is America’s best-known film historian, film reviewer, and author of books that have sold more than 7 million copies. He remains a thought leader on past and present Hollywood through his website www.leonardmaltin.com, and a social media presence that includes an active Facebook page and a Twitter feed with more than 66,000 followers. In ...

In Magnificent Obsession: The Outrageous History of Film Buffs, Collectors, Scholars, and Fanatics, author Anthony Slide looks at the way film has dominated the minds and lives of film buffs, film collectors, film academics, and just plain fans of past movies. Based on the author’s more than fifty years in the field and his personal, up-front knowledge of...

In the style of New York Times bestsellers You Can’t Touch My Hair, Bad Feminist, and I’m Judging You, a timely collection of alternately hysterical and soul‑searching essays about what it is like to grow up as a creative, sensitive black man in a world that constantly tries to deride and diminish your humanity.

It hasn’t been easy being Michael Arceneaux.
...

The world of the circus has a long and colourful history but it was with a man named Philip Astley that the ‘modern’ circus was founded. It was 250 years ago, in April 1768, that Astley pegged out a circular ride on the banks of the river Thames and gave performances of trick riding to a paying audience. Trick riding was nothing new, so what made Astley so...

The Life of Death: The Bare Bones of Undertaking by Ralph Rossell

Growing up, living in, and working in a small-town funeral home may not be for everyone, but it certainly means life is never dull. Ralph was born the month his father and mother moved to Flushing, Michigan, to work in his uncle's funeral home. Dinners and sleep interrupted by calls from...

A tour diary of life on the road with one of Minnesota’s greatest bands—with nearly 100 never-before-seen photographs

“Don’t bore us, get to the chorus” is Bill Sullivan’s motto, which will come as no surprise to anyone who opens Lemon Jail. A raucous tour diary of rock ’n’ roll in the 1980s, Sullivan’s book puts us in the van with the Replacements in the...

"At the forefront of all the serious new fiction released this year." - Midwest Book Review

Driven by the frenzy of fan clubs, Beatles concerts, and endless dreams and meeting schemes, Diary of a Beatlemaniac: A Fab Insider’s Look at the Beatles Era romps through the heady, roller-coaster days of Beatlemania as seen through the eyes of one Philadelphia schoolgirl and her band of “Beatle Buddies.” Compiled from the author’s own diary and extensive...

Celebrity Chef Blends Healthy Food & Harmonious Music

 To Stimulate the Reader’s Appetite for

Love and Life in New Interactive Cookbook

If music be the food of love, imagine what could happen when you mix in healthy recipes along with dazzling stories of celebrities and their favorite foods while blending in emotionally-charged music?...

A book of haiku and illustrations from the mind of Martin, the talking, angst-ridden, introspective dog from the ABC TV series, Downward Dog.

Sam Hodges is part of the writing and creative team of the ABC TV sitcom Downward Dog and he provides the distinct voice for Martin on the show. Hodges is also an accomplished director, having won numerous awards for...

Anonymous break up stories from men and women, old and young, serious and silly and the cartoons that inspired them. Author and artist Hilary Campbell turns the painful into the hilarious, validating emotions from forgotten middle school tragedies to relationships that ended only hours ago.

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell is an award-winning documentary filmmaker...

Mary Tyler Moore was a legendary television and film performer who was much loved and lauded by millions as the personification of sweetness and innocence filtered through a sanitized television world. But as fate would have it, Moore was so much more than that. Coming of age at a time when feminism and women’s rights were on the march across the land...

In 2016, a female videogame programmer and a female journalist were harassed viciously by anonymous male online users in what became known as GamerGate. Male gamers threatened to rape and kill both women, and the news soon made international headlines, exposing the level of abuse that many women and minorities face when participating in the predominantly...

Selfies are ubiquitous. They can be silly or serious, casual or curated. Within moments, smart phone users can capture their image and post it across multiple social media platforms to a global audience. But do we truly understand the power of image in our image-saturated age? How can we seek God and care for each other in digital spaces?

Craig Detweiler, a...

Have you ever been a fan of a show that was canceled abruptly or that killed off a beloved character unexpectedly? Or perhaps it was rebooted after a long absence and now you’re worried it won’t be as good as the original? Anyone who has ever followed entertainment closely knows firsthand that such transitions can be jarring. 

Indeed, for truly loyal fans...

By June 1993, when Washington, D.C.'s Fugazi released their third full-length album In on the Kill Taker, the quartet was reaching a thunderous peak in popularity and influence. With two EPs (combined into the classic CD 13 songs) and two albums (1990's genre-defining Repeater and 1991's impressionistic follow-up Steady Diet of Nothing) inside of five...

Two and a half decades on, Jawbreaker's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (1993-94) is the rare album to have lost none of its original loyalty, affection, and reverence. If anything, today, the cult of Jawbreaker-in their own words, "the little band that could but would probably rather not"-is now many times greater than it was when they broke up in 1996. Like the...

Transformer, Lou Reed's most enduringly popular album, is described with varying labels: it's often called a glam rock album, a proto-punk album, a commercial breakthrough for Lou Reed, and an album about being gay. And yet, it doesn't neatly fit into any of these descriptors. Buried underneath the radio-friendly exterior lie coded confessions of the...

What were Prince's politics? What did he believe about God? And did he really forsake the subject-sex-that once made him the most subversive superstar of the Reagan era? In this illuminating thematic biography, Joseph Vogel explores the issues that made Prince one of the late 20th century's most unique, controversial, and fascinating artists.

Since his...

Brush up on your American history trivia skills with this fun-filled puzzle book!
History buffs, trivia enthusiasts, and anyone who loves brain games will welcome this collection of word search puzzles. All of the 88 puzzles and their solutions offer an entertaining approach to American history, and every page contains clues to interesting tidbits about the...

Travel the world with this first-class puzzle treasury!
Where would you find the Spanish Steps? What's the modern-day name for Byzantium? Where's Wrigley Field? These and many other questions related to an international array of cultures are asked and answered in this treasury of fact-filled puzzles, which offer an entertaining and informative way to learn...

Adulting got you down?

Whether you just polished off your college graduation cake, are in your twenties or thirties struggling through a quarter-life crisis, you're simply trying to figure out how to become all grown up, or you're a parent looking for that perfect college graduation gift or Christmas gift for your twentysomething, 101 Questions You Need...

The world of Rock and Roll overflows with more decadence than you can shake a coke vial at: sex, drugs, booze, more sex, music and… food. Yes, food. Before the legends take the stage, they need their high-protein, low-fat, gluten-free, carbo-loaded favorite foods. And they need a lot of it; more food than you’ll see at a billionaire’s bar mitzvah or...

When you think about the 1970s, what comes to mind? Flares? Queen? Rocky?

The 1970s was one of the most exciting, innovative and colourful decades of recent history. With major events in music, film and television, the introduction of new technology, and the rising tide of socio-political change, the decade played a key role in British social history.

This...

Rita Lakin was a pioneer a female scriptwriter in the early 1960s when Hollywood television was exclusively male. For years, in creative meetings, she was literally "the only woman in the room." In this breezy but heartfelt remembrance, Lakin takes readers to a long-forgotten time when women were not considered worthy or welcome at the creative table...