Tim Parrish’s “The Critic” is a slightly surrealist account of the fraught, yet creative relationship cultivated between artists and critics. We meet a music critic who has devoted his entire life to covering the career of an elusive, Bob Dylan-esque musician referred to as “The Twerp.” But as the critic begins to hear The Twerp’s voice everywhere, we learn his vocation may have turned the corner into obsession.Tim Parrish is a professor in The Department of English at Virginia Tec...

Fear and What Follows is a riveting, unflinching account of the author's spiral into racist violence during the latter years of desegregation in 1960s and 1970s Baton Rouge. About the memoir, author and editor Michael Griffith writes, "This might be a controversial book, in the best way--controversial because it speaks to real and intractable problems and speaks to them with rare bluntness."The narrative of Parrish's descent into fear and irrational behavior begins with bi...

The Jumper is an old-fashioned, modern novel both dark and funny. Its central character, Jimmy Strawhorn, grows up on a ranch in West Texas thinking he’s an orphan but is summoned to Baton Rouge, where he discovers his past is stranger than he can imagine.Jimmy tries to navigate his urge to jump from high places, his fear of falling in love, and a complex family history full of deceit and racial ambiguity. At the same time, two other eccentric main characters, named Sandra...

Fear and What Follows is a riveting, unflinching account of the author's spiral into racist violence during the latter years of desegregation in 1960s and 1970s Baton Rouge. About the memoir, author and editor Michael Griffith writes, “This might be a controversial book, in the best way—controversial because it speaks to real and intractable problems and speaks to them with rare bluntness.”The narrative of Parrish's descent into fear and irrational behavior begins with big...

(Easy Piano Songbook). 50 great pop classics for beginning pianists to learn, including: Autumn Leaves * Candle in the Wind * Chopsticks * Don't Know Why * Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) * Hallelujah * Happy * Happy Birthday to You * Heart and Soul * Hotel California * I Walk the Line * Just the Way You Are * Let It Be * Let It Go * Your Song * Moon River * Over the Rainbow * Piano Man * Stand by Me * Summertime * Unchained Melody * What a Wonderful World * Yesterday * and more.

From scary to heartwarming and hilarious, an assortment of behind-the-scenes, true stories about life as an undertaker.From shoot-outs at funerals to dead men screaming and runaway corpses, undertakers have plenty of unusual stories to tell—and a special way of telling them.In this macabre and moving compilation, funeral directors across the country share their most embarrassing, jaw-dropping, irreverent, and deeply poignant stories about life at death’s do...

The first graphic novel—a mesmerizing fictional chronicle of a universal American experience.Through a quartet of four interwoven stories, A Contract With God express the joy, exuberance, tragedy, and drama of life on the mythical Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx. This is the legendary book that launched a new art form and reaffirmed Will Eisner as one of the great pioneers of American graphics.

What’s a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what’s contemporary culture supposed to do with novelists? In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the “white elephant” role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers.A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he’s written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in...

Master storyteller Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) presents this gripping and remarkable New York Times bestselling crime novel about a damaged young man who embarks on an ill-advised kidnapping plot—a work as taut and riveting as anything he has ever written.Once upon a time, a fellow named Richard Bachman wrote Blaze on an Olivetti typewriter, then turned the machine over to Stephen King, who used it to write Carrie. Bachman d...

Vintage presents the paperback edition of the wild and brilliant writings of Lester Bangs--the most outrageous and popular rock critic of the 1970s--edited and with an introduction by the reigning dean of rack critics, Greil Marcus.

Jimmy Lee Hickam grew up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. It is the poorest road, in the poorest county, in the poorest region of the state. To make things worse, the name Hickam is synonymous with trouble. Jimmy Lee hails from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hardscrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. This life, ...

Thirty teen voices - flirting, mocking, musing, some fun, some serious, on subjects as different as loss, texting and (yes) spaceships. Monologues for practice, class, audition and performance from the author of "Monologues for Teens and Twenties". NOTE: Certain of these pieces - based on experiences of actual teens - address difficult issues which may be considered "Adult" by some readers.