In the realm of poetry, where words dance and emotions soar, Louis Untermeyer's "Challenge" stands as a timeless masterpiece. This unabridged edition invites readers to embark on a literary journey that explores the depths of human experience. From the poignant musings on love and loss to the stirring anthems of social justice, Untermeyer's verses ignite the imagination and challenge the boundaries of the heart. Prepare to be captivated by the lyrical brilliance and profound insights that ...

An insightful and wide-ranging look at one of America’s most popular genres of music, Walking the Line: Country Music Lyricists and American Culture examines how country songwriters engage with their nation’s religion, literature, and politics. Country fans have long encountered the concept of walking the line, from Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” to Waylon Jennings’s “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line.” Walking the line requires following strict codes, respecting territories, and, sometime...

The life of blues legend Robert Johnson becomes the centerpiece for this innovative look at what many consider to be America's deepest and most influential music genre. Pivotal are the questions surrounding why Johnson was ignored by the core black audience of his time yet now celebrated as the greatest figure in blues history.Trying to separate myth from reality, biographer Elijah Wald studies the blues from the inside -- not only examining recordings but also the recollections of...

The essential playlist of great writing about the music that rocked America, with fifty landmark pieces on Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Lez Zepplin, and other rock n’ roll legendsJonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar's Shake It Up invites the reader into the tumult and excitement of the rock revolution through fifty landmark pieces by a supergroup of writers on rock in all its variety, from heavy metal to disco, punk to hip-hop. Stanley Booth describes a record...

New York Times best-selling author Cornel West is one of America’s most provocative and admired public intellectuals. Whether in the classroom, the streets, the prisons, or the church, Dr. West’s penetrating brilliance has been a bright beacon shining through the darkness for decades.Yet, as he points out in this new memoir, "I’ve never taken the time to focus on the inner dynamics of the dark precincts of my soul." That is, until now. Brother West

NPR Best Books of 2017In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR's acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate difficult emotions and truths about our most fraught social issues, most notably sex and race.In Good Booty, Ann Powers explores how popular music became America's primary erotic art form. Powers takes us from nineteenth-century New Orl...

An insightful music writer brilliantly reinterprets the lives of three pop geniuses and the soul revolution they launched.Soul music is one of America's greatest cultural achievements, and Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Curtis Mayfield are three of its most inspired practitioners. In midcentury America it was soul music—particularly the dazzling stream of recordings made by these three stars—that helped bring the gospel vision of the black church into the main...

Praised as "suave, soulful, ebullient" (Tom Waits) and "a meticulous researcher, a graceful writer, and a committed contrarian" (New York Times Book Review), Elijah Wald is one of the leading popular music critics of his generation. In The Blues, Wald surveys a genre at the heart of American culture. It is not an easy thing to pin down. As Howlin' Wolf once described it, "When you ain't got no money and can't pay your house rent and can't buy you no food, you've damn sure got the blues." I...

“The beloved ’60s soul titan . . . comes alive in [Jonathan] Gould’s insightful, well-researched biography.”—People“Magisterial . . . With meticulous scholarship [and] lively prose . . . Gould has created a vital book that helps contextualize one of the most important figures in pop music.”—Boston GlobeAN NPR AND ROLLING STONE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAROtis Redding remains an immortal presence ...

The birth of rock 'n roll ignited a firestorm of controversy--one critic called it "musical riots put to a switchblade beat"--but if it generated much sound and fury, what, if anything, did it signify? As Glenn Altschuler reveals in All Shook Up, the rise of rock 'n roll--and the outraged reception to it--in fact can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s, a decade that saw a great struggle for the control of popular culture. Altschuler shows, in particul...

"No previous writer has so transportingly or authoritatively revealed Mr. Dylan against receding vistas of American music and culture." —Robert Polito, The New York Times Book ReviewGreil Marcus's widely acclaimed book is about the secret music (the so-called "Basement Tapes") made by Bob Dylan and the Band while in seclusion in Woodstock, New York, in 1967 a folksy yet funky, furious yet hilarious music that remains as seductive and baffling today as it w...

“Fifty years after its first publication, Country Music USA still stands as the most authoritative history of this uniquely American art form. Here are the stories of the people who made country music into such an integral part of our nation’s culture. We feel lucky to have had Bill Malone as an indispensable guide in making our PBS documentary; you should, too.”—Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, Country Music: An American Family StoryFrom reviews of previous ed...