'There is no more carefully chosen yet eclectic anthology series in existence in Britain today' – Susan Haigh, The Short ReviewBest British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor's brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, ne...

A DREAM OF KINGS is a novel of Civil War Days; an intense, lyric projection of Tom Christopher's growth to manhood, and a deeply moving love story.Tom Christopher is an orphan, raised by his Aunt Sarah in a West Virginia river town. He shares a strange, lonely childhood with a girl whom Sarah Holmbrook has also taken in, Cathie. Through their early years these two children are sustained by their dream of a glowing God-like figure who never appears in the novel and yet pervades it—Ab...

With Good night the pleasure was ours, David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour into a book-length poem, bringing to a close the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphones. In Good night the pleasure was ours, the world outside the tour filters in with eccentric sparseness. From teenage punk bands to ensembles without fixed membership, and from solo performance to a group aug...

This book proposes that the collective responsibility of teachers as classroom and school leaders working together to solve their own problems provides the fulcrum of school change. It makes the case that teachers and school leaders do not operate in a vacuum, but rather, they work within the larger context of policy and other social influences. Grubb and Tredway provide the building blocks of history, policy, and social analysis that are necessary if teachers are to be effective in the co...

The voice in the headphones says, “you’re rolling” . . .The Voice in the Headphones is an experiment in music writing in the form of a long poem centered on the culture of the recording studio. It describes in intricate, prismatic detail one marathon day in a recording studio during which an unnamed musician struggles to complete a film soundtrack. The book extends the form of Grubbs's previous volume Now that the audience is assembled, sharing its goal o...

John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free im...

Following his investigation into experimental music and sound recording in Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs turns his attention to the live performance of improvised music with an altogether different form of writing. Now that the audience is assembled is a book-length prose poem that describes a fictional musical performance during which an unnamed musician improvises the construction of a series of invented instruments before an audience that is alternately cont...