Bay City Babylon tells the story of the unlikely pop phenomenon that was the Bay City Rollers -- from their humble Scottish beginnings to worldwide fame and adulation, and what's happened to them since. It's a classic tale of rock stardom with all the trappings, excesses, anguish, and exhilaration that go with it. Featuring interviews with band members and those that were along for the "Rollermania" ride in the '70s. Plus, many never before published photographs and new "10th Anniversary" chapters that update the BCR story with details of their groundbreaking lawsuit for millions of dollars in unpaid record company royalties and their 2015 reunion.

A FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022 – Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, LitHub, Electric Literature, LGBTQ Reads, Latinx in Publishing *Recommended by The New York Times* In this contemporary debut novel—an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity —Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends. Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds. Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.

What happened to the Bay City Rollers is one of the greatest scandals in music industry. When The Screaming Stops reveals the dark truth behind 'rollermania', the pioneering boy band fad which gripped the UK in the seventies, exposing the sinister undercurrents which underpinned the band's phenomenal success. Dazzled by sudden global fame and under the grip of their Svengali manager Tom Paton, the Bay City Rollers descended into a world of depravity, victimhood, crime and psychosis. Whilst promoting his young lads as clean-living teetotalers, Tom Paton subjected them to various forms of sexual abuse; band members became hooked on drugs and their fall was almost as rapid as their rise, leaving them penniless and emotionally destroyed. In 1979, Paton was finally convicted of gross indecency with teenage boys. That such exploitation could have happened to one of the world's most famous boy bands is a brutal reminder that conspiracies of silence about sexual exploitation were once the norm in the music and entertainment business. The Dark History Of The Bay City Rollers is a no-holds-barred expose of sex, drugs and financial mismanagement based on over 500 hours of interviews with many of the band's closest associates, including former members. When The Screaming Stops includes curated music. Whilst you read the book, hear the classic songs of the Bay City Rollers and surround yourself with the music that surrounded them.

A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar Oakland As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and home-owner politics. Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension. American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership. Using the East Bay as a starting point, Robert Self gives us a richly detailed, engaging narrative that uniquely integrates the most important racial liberation struggles and class politics of postwar America.

The north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a priest. Afterwards, both the man and the metal must be purified. These are the rules and the laws; they are well made. It is forbidden to cross the great river and look upon the place that was the Place of the Gods-this is most strictly forbidden. We do not even say its name though we know its name. It is there that spirits live, and demons-it is there that there are the ashes of the Great Burning. These things are forbidden- they have been forbidden since the beginning of time.