What it means to me to be a critic/reviewer? For a lot of readers, a "reviewer" or "critic" is an embittered failed novelist or worse, a barely restrained serial rapist. Book critics may take the form of a dilettante, theorist, essayist, or even historian, but almost never reviewers, who sometimes lack the distancing from the text required by the demands of academia synthesis.

In the late 50s after an unsuccessful stint in college, Larry Fink dropped out and began an odyssey of hitchhiking through America. Striking out that great Beat mecca, New York City, Fink settled down on Minetta Lane with a chap who fancied himself a poet. Larry was quick to hit McDougal Street where he met Turk, Mary, Bobbie, Motha, Ambrose, Randy and Mike Stanley, and not to mention Hugh Romney (aka Wavy Gravy) and LeRoi Jones and so many more - they soon left New York to cross America for Mexico - in search of the freedoms of the road.

Before there was hip hop, there was DJ Kool Herc. On a hot day at the end of summer in 1973 Cindy Campbell threw a back-to-school party at a park in the South Bronx. Her brother, Clive Campbell, spun the records. He had a new way of playing the music to make the breaks—the musical interludes between verses—longer for dancing. He called himself DJ Kool Herc and this is When the Beat Was Born. From his childhood in Jamaica to his youth in the Bronx, Laban Carrick Hill's book tells how Kool Herc came to be a DJ, how kids in gangs stopped fighting in order to breakdance, and how the music he invented went on to define a culture and transform the world.

Based on ten years of research among hip-hop producers, Making Beats was the first work of scholarship to explore the goals, methods, and values of a surprisingly insular community. Focusing on a variety of subjects—from hip-hop artists’ pedagogical methods to the Afrodiasporic roots of the sampling process to the social significance of “digging” for rare records—Joseph G. Schloss examines the way hip-hop artists have managed to create a form of expression that reflects their creative aspirations, moral beliefs, political values, and cultural realities. This second edition of the book includes a new foreword by Jeff Chang and a new afterword by the author.

The definitive illustrated collection of Beat culture from the people who made the scene--now in paperback It's been nearly fifty years since Jack Kerouac took to the road, but Beat culture continues to be a popular and influential force in today's writing, music, and art. With more than 75 contributors, this celebratory potpourri of words, illustrations, and photography contains original and previously published essays by Richard Miller, Ann Douglas, Johnny Depp, Michael McClure, Hettie Jones, Hunter S. Thompson, Joyce Johnson, Richard Hell, and others. It includes rare pieces from the Rolling Stone archives by William Burroughs, Lester Bangs, and Robert Palmer as well as intimate photographs by Robert Frank, Annie Leibovitz, and rarely seen photos taken by the Beats themselves. A rich tapestry of voices and a visual treat, this treasury of Beat lore and literature is a true collector's item whose entertainment value will go on...and on. "A huge dim sum cart of a book...a first-rate companion." --Publishers Weekly "Compelling reading." --The Denver Post

Gabi’s a girl in pieces. She wants a lot of things. Will she find the thing she needs most?

Caminar is the story of a boy who joins a small band of guerilla fighters who must decide what being a man during a time of war really means.