‘Liner Notes is, unsurprisingly, as good as its author’s songs, with moments of sharp humor alternating with real-life pain, and vivid reflections on love, death, and the whole damn thing. Loudon Wainwright is a true original: not like anyone else, just as he set out to be.’ Salman Rushdie In the late 1960s, Loudon Wainwright III established himself as a loner, deliberately standing outside the conventional. He recorded his first album in 1969, full of raw, angry poetry, but it was the 1972 novelty song ‘Dead Skunk’ that brought him popular recognition. Wainwright’s songs are as hilarious as they can be painful. In Liner Notes, he details the family history and fractured relationships that have informed him: the alcoholism, infidelities and competitiveness; the successes, joys and love. Wainwright writes poignantly about being a son, a parent, a brother and a grandfather while re-printing selections from his father’s columns and meditating upon family, inspiration and art. As plain-speaking on the page as in his songs, Wainwright lays everything bare in this heartfelt memoir of music and family. His lyrics adorn and inform the text, amplifying his prose and connecting his songs to the life he led. ‘He is unafraid and clear-eyed about the events of his life – and utterly engaging.’ Rosanne Cash ’Fans of the self-lacerating, painfully funny Wainwright III will find the memoir they want here’ Kirkus Reviews

A memoir by the influential Grammy Award-winning singer and acto - son of journalist Loudon Wainwright, father of Rufus, Martha, Lucy, and Lexie - a captivating meditation on relationships and creativity from the patriarch of one of America's great musical families. Wainwright's song lyrics are represented throughout the book, amplifying his prose and showing the connections between the songs and real life. A funny and insightful meditation on family, inspiration, and art, Wainwright's memoir will thrill fans, readers, and anyone who appreciates the intersection of music and life.

This book, a sequel and companion volume to Marcus's Real Life Rock: The Complete Top Ten Columns, 1986-2014, is a collection of hundreds of items from the crisscrossing spectrum of culture and politics throughout the tumultuous past six years of American life. Tracking the evolution of national identity during the convulsive Trump administration, Marcus spotlights the most whip-smart cultural artifacts to compose a mosaic portrait of American society, replete with unexpected heroes and villains, absurdity and its consequences, humor and despair, terror and defiance--as seen through media, music, and more. Bursting with Marcus's effortless, no-nonsense, unapologetic verve, this book features seventy-three columns from 2014 through February 2021.

Surrender to the Rhythm takes a trip back to the world before punk. Covering the bands, the pubs, the characters, the albums, the songs and the personal histories that emerged out of the 60s, it shows how they provided the foundations for the musical explosion that swept the UK after 1977. The role of London's Irish community in enabling this is discussed, as are the economic circumstances that prevailed then, both being factors which briefly led to a heavy concentration of affordable music venues in north London. Featuring in depth interviews with many of the period's leading musicians, it reassesses the brief pub-rock phenomenon and argues that its importance was greater than perceived at the time.

The 1970s saw a wave of singer-songwriters flood the airwaves and concert halls across the United States. This book organizes the stories of approximately 150 artists whose songs created the soundtrack to people's lives during the decade that forever shaped musical composition. Some well-known, others less known, these artists were the song-poets and storytellers who wrote their own music and lyrics. Featuring biographical information and discography overviews for each artist, this is the only one-volume encyclopedic overview of this topic. Featured artists include Carole King and James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Gordon Lightfoot, Elvis Costello and dozens of other song-poets of the seventies.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

"Nearly all of us either have had or have heard of an experience in which a soul already departed reaches back to us who have been left behind.... Sometimes, it's no more than a whisper, a familiar smell in the air, or just the feeling of presence as vivid as when the loved one was still alive. These moments are just that...moments, a glimpse behind the veil; not a letter from heaven, but a postcard." (Dan Gordon, Postcards from Heaven) A postcard from heaven is not a revelation from on high -- rather, it's "a whisper, a familiar smell in the air, or just the feeling of presence" of someone who's passed away. It is just enough of a message to imply that what we call life is not ended by what we call death. Dan Gordon has been receiving these postcards all his life -- from his father, his older brother, and his son Zaki, who was killed in a car accident when he was only twenty-two. Postcards from Heaven is the beautiful, inspirational memoir of four generations of a remarkable family and how they remain interconnected, a part of one another's stories, even after passing to the other side. Here is the span of his father's long life, moving and funny, from the Russian Revolution to his improbable Depression-era courtship of a woman named Goddess -- Gordon's mother -- to his spiritual later years in Israel; his incorrigible older brother's mischievous magic, able to find humor even in cancer treatment; and his brilliant son, a natural storyteller who looked destined to follow his father into the movie business. These are the stories of their lives on earth as well as after death. Full of humor, compassion, and love, Postcards from Heaven comforts and assures us that those we loved can reach back to those of us still on earth -- and, if only we are attentive enough to listen, we can hear them say, Got here safe. It's really beautiful. Much love, till we meet again.