In the Spring after the Stonewall Riots, a California teenager began a journey that shattered the boundaries of sexual identity. When Beth Elliott became the very first to transition from male to female to be an out lesbian, she rocked the newly above-ground LGBT world—and it rocked her back. Historians and sexologists now routinely relate how radical dyke feminists drove her out of the nation’s first lesbian rights organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, in 1972. Her only chance to tell h...

All hail King George of the four square court in this laugh-out-loud tale of a meteoric rise to playground power and subsequent fall from grace.George hates recess. He’s always frozen in freeze tag, the first found in hide-and-seek, and he never scores in soccer. But all of that changes when he discovers that he has a knack for the game four square. He quickly becomes reigning king of the court — but with power and prestige come the pressure to stay on top....

There is a world of music - beautiful, thrilling, powerful and romantic music - that one composer wrote to express the theme of Redemption Through Love. Richard Wagner set out to transform the world through art. He was hip to the power of myth long before Joseph Campbell, and even before Carl Jung himself. Wagner’s ten “sacred music dramas” move people so deeply they have inspired observations like “Some people are made to feel by his music that they are in touch with the depths of their o...

There is a world of music, beautiful, thrilling, powerful and romantic music, that one composer wrote to express the theme of Redemption Through Love! He wrote this music for “sacred music dramas” he believed could transform the world through art. His stories come from legends and mythology and folk tales, and he meant them to resonate deep within the subconscious mind, long before modern psychology knew this could be done. And they do. His music has inspired observations like “Some people...

This recording has been digitally produced, by DeepZen Limited, using a synthesized version of an audiobook narrator’s voice under license. DeepZen uses Emotive Speech Technology to create digital narrations that offer a similar listening experience to human narration.Giles Maltravers, the rakish Earl of Longwood, is weary of society life, duels and even his mistress. Anna Lawrence, nineteen and inspired by Lord Byron’s poems, is determined to seek a life of travel and adventure. B...

VINTAGE SCIENCE FICTION BY VISIONARY WOMENWritten between 1931 and 1979, these 13 stories show how different women have, in different eras, envisioned the future of their gender. Selecting its contents from lesser known writers, Future Eves presents Leslie F. Stone's novelette, "The Conquest of Gola" (1931), an encounter with Earth males told from the point of view of an alien matriarch. So far ahead of its time, nothing like it would be attempted again in...

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque - and occasionally so intemperate?John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every morning and evening on the stairs of his parents' house, where it hung for safety during the Second World War. He has been studying and perfo...

This "monumental" portrait of the man, his music, and the world in which he lived is "a truly remarkable biography" ( The Christian Science Monitor).Jan Swafford's biographies of Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven, more than a decade in the making, peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathi...

A preeminent composer, music scholar, and biographer presents an engaging and accessible introduction to classical musicFor many of us, classical music is something serious -- something we study in school, something played by cultivated musicians at fancy gatherings. In Language of the Spirit, renowned music scholar Jan Swafford argues that we have it all wrong: classical music has something for everyone and is accessible to all. Ranging from Gregorian cha...

*'*The ideal interpreter of the Ring ... a fascinating and valuable study ... absorbing and convincing' *Sunday TimesThe Ring of the Nibelung* is one of the greatest works of art created in modern times. Roger Scruton's brilliant and passionate exploration of the drama, music, symbolism and philosophy of Wagner's masterpiece - with its themes of love, death, sacrifice and freedom - shows how, ultimately, it expresses the truth about the human condi...

Two-and-a-half centuries after his death, the complex life of composer Johann Sebastian Bach continues to fascinate.Bach's colorful life was anchored in his belief that "music has been ordered by God's Spirit"?so much so that he began each composition by scrawling Jesu, juva (Jesus, help me) at the top of a blank page and concluded each with S.D.G. (short for Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone be the glory). Through the eyes of noted music and culture writer Rick Marsc...

Do you cringe when your opera-loving friends start raving about the latest production of Tristan? Do you feel faint just thinking about the six-hour performance of Parsifal you were given tickets to? Does your mate accuse you of having a Tannhäuser complex? If you're baffled by the behavior of Wagner worshipers, if you've longed to fathom the mysteries of Wagner's ever-increasing popularity, or if you just want to better understand and enjoy the performances you're attending, you'll find t...