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Here is the complete inside story on the making of
Psycho, the forerunner of all psychothrillers. Rebello takes us behind the scenes at the creation of one of cinema’s boldest and most influential films. From Hitchcock’s private files and from new in-depth interviews with the stars, writers, and technical crew we get a unique and unparalleled view of the master at work.
All Ears
Criticism, Essays and Obituaries
Dennis Cooper
All Ears collects this important novelist’s lesser-known work as a journalist and essayist, and several new previously unpublished pieces. As a journalist, he is solid and well-formed. He has an approachable informality, unawed by massive celebrity. His straightforward interviews with Leonardo DiCaprio, Courtney Love, Keanu Reeves, and Bob Mould disarm...
Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music
Edward Whitelock and David Janssen
For a cultural movement that has no definite beginning, the sense of an ending is never very far below the surface of rock and roll music and lyrics. American popular music—from its earliest hymnals, through its growing commercial presentations via minstrelsy and vaudeville, through the explosion of technology...
In the end, the greatest challenge of digital living will be to manage the relationship we have with our own selves, as even that most intimate and nebulous connection is more and more mediated by digital technology.
Black Cool
One Thousand Streams of Blackness
Rebecca Walker
Black Cool explores the ineffable state and aesthetic of Black Cool. From the effortless reserve of Miles Davis in khakis on an early album cover, to the shock of resistance in black women’s fashion from Angela Davis to Rihanna, to the cadence of poets as diverse as Staceyann Chin and Audre Lorde, Black Cool looks at the roots of Black Cool and attempts...
Branwell
A Novel of the Bronte Brother
Douglas A. Martin
Branwell traces the life of Branwell Bronte, the sole brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte, from childhood to his alcohol and opium induced death at the age of 31. As the only son, Branwell is expected to make the fortune for the family, and immortalize the Bronte name. He is given no formal education, but is painstakingly tutored by his father, and...
Buskers
The On-the-Streets, In-the-Trains, Off-the-Grid Memoir of Two New York City Street Musicians
By Heth and Jed Weinstein
Watch Heth and Jed perform in NYC
Frustrated by the indifference of the music industry and the stacks of homemade CDs gathering dust in their closets, brothers Heth and Jed Weinstein made the radical decision to bring their music directly to the masses. They began playing on street corners,...
Curse & Berate in 69+ Languages
R.V. Branham, editor
This book identifies a broad array of crude, vulgar, offensive, scurrilous, lewd concepts, organized thematically, and translated into 69+ languages. It demonstrates how profanity is, in many ways, at the very root of what it means to be human and, inronic as this may sound, points to an alternative, if somewhat offensive vision for achieving global...
Death Wish
Christopher Sorrentino, Edited by Sean Howe
Part of Soft Skull’s DEEP FOCUS series
Deep Focus is a series of film books with a fresh approach. Take the smartest, liveliest writers in contemporary letters and let them loose on the most vital and popular corners of cinema history: midnight movies, the New Hollywood of the sixties and seventies, film noir, screwball comedies, international cult...
Enough About You
Notes Toward the New Autobiography
David Shields
Enough About You is a book about David Shields. But it is also a terrifically engrossing exploration and exploitation of self-reflection, self-absorption, full-blown narcissism, and the impulse to write about oneself. In a world awash with memoirs and tell-alls, Shields has created something unique: he invites the reader into his mind as he turns...
Heathers
John Ross Bowie
What’s your damage?
In 1989, Michael Lehmann’s black comedy Heathers drew a line in the sand, rebuffing the sweetness and optimism of John Hughes’s more popular fare with darkness and death. Launching the careers of Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, Heathers became a cult classic, ranking #5 on ntertainment Weekly’s list of the 50 Best High School Movies and inspiring...
I’m In the Band
Backstage Notes from the Chick in White Zombie
Sean Yseult
Art rock? Noise rock? Punk-metal? Alternative? White Zombie may have been unclassifiable, but it didn’t stop them from carving out a place for themselves in music history. The band became a multiplatinum, two-time Grammy nominee with the release of their 1992 album, La Sexorcisto. But while most people will remember their bizarre...
In Heaven Everything Is Fine
The Unsolved Life of Peter Ivers and the Lost History of New Wave Theatre
Josh Frank and Charlie Buckholtz
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon were leading a comedy renaissance, while punk and new wave turned the music world on its head. At the nexus was the underground, cable-access show New Wave Theatre, hosted by the visionary Peter Ivers....
Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen
Reverend Jen
With a very brief introduction by Jonathan Ames
Live Nude Elf chronicles The Reverend Jen Miller’s two-year career as a thirtysomething sex columnist for nerve.com; a sort of elvish-speaking, Lower East Side version of Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw. The columns each detail a different “sexperiment” that ranges from harrowing...
Love All the People: The Essential Bill Hicks
Bill Hicks
In 1993, not long after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, controversial comedian Bill Hicks found his final, scathing appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman abruptly excised at network demand. Months later, at age 32, he was dead.
Hicks could have been on all the chat shows. He could have had his own show on prime time. He could have got...