Drawing on more than 270 original interviews with female artists and women working behind the scenes in A&R, marketing, music publishing, and production, She Bop presents a feminist history of women in popular music, from 1920s blues to the present day. Talking to iconic artists from Eartha Kitt and Nina Simone to Debbie Harry and Beyoncé, acclaimed author Lucy O'Brien charts how women have negotiated 'old boy' power networks to be seen and to get...

A remarkable collection of essays and reviews on everything from Philip Roth to Margaret Atwood, from race in America to the shocking state of the GOP—from the national bestselling author of Birds of America and a master of contemporary American fiction.
“The kind of book, and the kind of human, you’d want to guide you through the past few decades in letters and culture.... Moore is one of our best documentarians...

All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to...

"Over the last decade William Giraldi has established himself as a charismatic and uncompromising literary essayist. American Audacity gathers Giraldi's fierce and witty considerations of American writers and themes, including a never-before-published appreciation of James Baldwin and an introductory call to arms for twenty-first-century American literature. With deep seeing and enormous learning, Giraldi considers giants from the past (Herman Melville,...

"A personal history of comedy from the 1950s to the present, with interviews conducted by the author"--

"How can art help us make sense--or nonsense--of the world? If wrong life cannot be lived rightly, as Theodor Adorno had it, what weapons and strategies for living wrongly can art provide? With the same intelligence that animates his poetry, Michael Robbins addresses this weighty question while contemplating the idea of how strange it is that we need art at all. Ranging from Prince to Def Leppard, Lucille Clifton to Frederick Seidel, Robbins's mastery...

Heaney's ten lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, collected here in “The Redress of Poetry”, explore the poetry of a wide range of writers, from Christopher Marlowe to John Clare to Oscar Wilde. Whether he concentrates on moments in the works under discussion, or is concerned to advance his general subject, Heaney's insight and eloquence are themselves of poetic order.