When Chris found his brother Alex that November morning, their story didn't end, it demanded to be told. Growing up in Northeast Portland, Chris and Alex were inseparable. They shared a bedroom, a basketball hoop, and the weight of their father's anger and addiction. On the court, they found a language that transcended words, a rhythm of passes and rebounds that kept them tethered through the chaos of their parents' divorce, their father's violence, and the uncertainty that shadowed their ...

Step quietly among the shelves of the Grand Oak Library, where adventurous cats explore, play, and uncover mysteries hidden in ancient tomes. This lyrical, magical series celebrates knowledge, courage, and the joy of discovery in a library that is alive with wonder.

Paws & Reflect: 9 Feline Fables is a heartwarming collection of tales featuring curious kittens, wise old cats, and courageous strays. From shelter cages to ancient libraries, alleys to ships, each story explores growth, belonging, and truth through feline eyes—perfect for middle-grade readers who love cats and meaningful adventures.

The Routledge Companion to Music, Autoethnography, and Reflexivity represents a substantial contribution to the field of writing reflexively about an individual’s practice within music studies. In seven sections, 22 original chapters by a diverse set of contributors consider writing about personal activities from the points of view of performance, composition, musicology, and pedagogy, drawing on a range of traditions from Western art-music to popular music to ethnomusicology. A r...

This collection of essays explores the myriad ways in which the women’s suffrage movement in Britain in the nineteenth century and twentieth century engaged with and was expressed through literature, art and craft, music, drama and cinema.Uniquely, this anthology places developments in the constituent arts side by side, and in dialogue, rather than focusing on a single field in isolation. In so doing, it illustrates how creative endeavours in different artforms converged in support...

This book demonstrates the significance of transnationality for studying and writing the lives of artists. While painters, musicians and writers have long been cast as symbols of their associated nations, recent research is increasingly drawing attention to those aspects of their lives and works that resist or challenge the national framework. The volume showcases different ways of treating transnationality in life writing by and about artists, investigating how the transnational can offer...

Researching and writing about contemporary art and artists present unique challenges for scholars, students, professional critics and creative practitioners alike. This collection of essays from across the arts disciplines—music, literature, dance, theatre and the visual arts—explores the challenges and complexities raised by engaging in researching and writing on living or recently deceased subjects and their output. Different sections explore critical perspectives and case studies in rel...

When writer and director Joss Whedon created the character Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he could hardly have expected the resulting academic interest in his work. Yet almost six years after the end of Buffy on television, Buffy studies—and academic work on Whedon's expanding oeuvre—continue to grow. Now with three hugely popular television shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, and the film Serenity all available on DVD, scholars are evaluating countless aspects of the Whedon un...

"Higgins' love of music and cultural variety is evident throughout. She writes in a relaxed, accessible, sophisticated style…Highly recommended."— ChoiceFrom our first social bonding as infants to the funeral rites that mark our passing, music plays an important role in our lives, bringing us closer to one another. In this book, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins investigates this role, examining the features of human perception that enable music's uncanny...

Is a tower block, your unmade bed, your lavatory basin, or the bicycle chained to the gate next door a work of art? Why should a novel have a beginning, a middle, and an end; or even a story? Whether we recognise it or not, virtually every aspect of our life today has been influenced in part by the aesthetic legacy of Modernism. In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler examines how and why Modernism began, explaining what it is and showing how it has gradually informed a...

In the last 50 years, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have increasingly turned to studying creativity, so we now know more about it than ever before. However, until about a decade ago, creativity researchers focused only on highly valued activities, such as creating masterpieces in art and making highly significant discoveries in science. In Explaining Creativity, R. Keith Sawyer extends the study of creativity by examining not only these endeavors, but also movie...

The Art of Teaching Music takes up important aspects of the art of music teaching ranging from organization to serving as conductor to dealing with the disconnect between the ideal of university teaching and the reality in the classroom. Writing for both established teachers and instructors on the rise, Estelle R. Jorgensen opens a conversation about the life and work of the music teacher. The author regards music teaching as interrelated with the rest of lived life, and her themes encompa...