Meth cooks practice late industrial alchemy—transforming base materials, like lithium batteries and camping fuel, into goldMeth alchemists all over the United States tap the occulted potencies of industrial chemical and big pharma products to try to cure the ills of precarious living: underemployment, insecurity, and the feeling of idleness. Meth fires up your attention and makes repetitive tasks pleasurable, whether it’s factory work or tinkering at home. Users are awake for days ...

Un americano a Spaccanapoli, un antropologo che per oltre dieci anni si mimetizza tra i vicoli e le periferie e s’insinua nell’ambiente della musica neomelodica napoletana: nasce così Napoli sotto traccia, un libro che racconta in presa diretta quel mondo di confine dove la tradizionale arte di arrangiarsi finisce nelle fitte trame della malavita. Dal 1998 al 2011 Jason Pine, newyorkese, ha condotto la sua indagine sul campo, vivendo fianco a fianco con i maggiori protagonisti della scena ...

Meth cooks practice late industrial alchemy—transforming base materials, like lithium batteries and camping fuel, into goldMeth alchemists all over the United States tap the occulted potencies of industrial chemical and big pharma products to try to cure the ills of precarious living: underemployment, insecurity, and the feeling of idleness. Meth fires up your attention and makes repetitive tasks pleasurable, whether it’s factory work or tinkering at home. Users ar...

“In Naples, there are more singers than there are unemployed people.” These words echo through the neomelodica music scene, a vast undocumented economy animated by wedding singers, pirate TV, and tens of thousands of fans throughout southern Italy and beyond. In a city with chronic unemployment, this setting has attracted hundreds of aspiring singers trying to make a living—or even a fortune. In the process, they brush up against affiliates of the region’s violent organized crime networks,...

This book is addressed to “lovers of paradoxes” and we have done our utmost to assemble a stellar cast of Neapolitan and American scholars, intellectuals, and artists/writers who are strong and open-minded enough to wrestle with and illuminate the paradoxes through which Naples presents itself. Naples is a mysterious metropolis. Difficult to understand, it is an enigma to outsiders, and also to the Neapolitans themselves. Its very impenetrableness is what makes it so deliriously and irresi...

Whispering Pines is the first comprehensive history of Canada’s immense songwriting legacy from Gordon Lightfoot to Joni Mitchell. Canadian songwriters have always struggled to create work that reflects the environment in which they were raised while simultaneously connecting with a mass audience. For most of the 20th century that audience lay outside Canada making the challenge that much greater. While nearly every songwriter who successfully crossed this divide did so by immersing themse...

In the isolated town of Pine Hollow, silence is never empty—it watches, remembers, and accuses.Jason Long has lived on the edge of the forest for most of his life, far from the town that never truly accepted him. Quiet, withdrawn, and deeply scarred by a violent childhood, he finds solace only among the whispering pines. But when a young child vanishes along the Hollow Road, Pine Hollow's fear needs a face—and Jason becomes the perfect suspect.As Sheriff Thomas Daniels lead...

There are creatures lurking in our world. Obscure creatures long relegated to myth and legend. They have been sighted by a lucky-or unlucky-few, some have even been photographed, but their existence remains unproven and unrecognized by the scientific community.These creatures, long thought gone, have somehow survived; creatures from our nightmares haunting the dark places. They swim in our lakes and bays, they soar the night skies, they hunt in the woods. Some are from our past, an...