"Rust in Peace details the making of Megadeth's iconic record, which was released in 1990, at an incredible time of flux and creativity in the rock world. Relayed by the lead vocalist and guitarist of Megadeth himself, Dave Mustaine, the book covers the process of hiring the band and supporting cast, of trying to handle the ensuing success, and ultimately the pressure of fame and fortune -- which caused the band to finally break-up. In short, it's a true story of groundbreaking anti-pop that was moving toward the mainstream (or the mainstream that was moving toward the band), at a time of great cultural change, power, ego, drugs, and other vices that went hand-in-hand with Rock N' Roll, circa the late eighties-early nineties. Little did Mustaine know that the birth pangs of the record were nothing compared to the oncoming pain and torment that would surround it. Alcohol, drugs, sex, money, power, property, prestige, the lies the band was told by the industry -- and the lies they told each other -- were just beginning, and much like rust in real life, these factors would ultimately eat away at the band's bond until only the music survived."--Amazon.com

"Comprehensive and intelligently organized. . . . Jazz aficionados . . . should be grateful to have so much good writing on the subject in one place."-- The New York Times Book Review "Alluring. . . . Capture[s] much of the breadth of the music, as well as the passionate debates it has stirred, more vividly than any other jazz anthology to date."-- Chicago Tribune No musical idiom has inspired more fine writing than jazz, and nowhere has that writing been presented with greater comprehensiveness and taste than in this glorious collection. In Reading Jazz , editor Robert Gottlieb combs through eighty years of autobiography, reportage, and criticism by the music's greatest players, commentators, and fans to create what is at once a monumental tapestry of jazz history and testimony to the elegance, vigor, and variety of jazz writing. Here are Jelly Roll Morton, recalling the whorehouse piano players of New Orleans in 1902; Whitney Balliett, profiling clarinetist Pee Wee Russell; poet Philip Larkin, with an eloquently dyspeptic jeremiad against bop. Here, too, are the voices of Billie Holiday and Charles Mingus, Albert Murray and Leonard Bernstein, Stanley Crouch and LeRoi Jones, reminiscing, analyzing, celebrating, and settling scores. For anyone who loves the music--or the music of great prose--Reading Jazz is indispensable. "The ideal gift for jazzniks and boppers everywhere. . . . It gathers the best and most varied jazz writing of more than a century."-- Sunday Times (London)

"One of the most promising young poet-critics in America" ( Los Angeles Times ) examines a revolutionary generation of poets. Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz formed one of the great constellations of talent in American literature. In the decades after World War II, they changed American poetry forever by putting themselves at risk in their poems in a new and provocative way. Their daring work helped to inspire the popular style of poetry now known as "confessional." But partly as a result of their openness, they have become better known for their tumultuous lives—afflicted by mental illness, alcoholism, and suicide—than for their work. This book reclaims their achievement by offering critical "biographies of the poetry"—tracing the development of each poet's work, exploring their major themes and techniques, and examining how they transformed life into art. An ideal introduction for readers coming to these major American poets for the first time, it will also help veteran readers to appreciate their work in a new light.

"Taking as his point of departure the authors, the audience, and the texts of Victorian writings on sex in general and of Victorian pornography in particular, Steven Marcus offers a startling and revolutionary perspective on the underside of Victorian culture. The way these subjects were regarded--and the way our notions of the Victorians continue to change, as the efforts of contemporary scholarship restore them to their full historical dimensions--are matters today of some surprise and wonder. Marcus first examines the writings of Dr. William Acton, who may be said to represent the "official views" of sexuality held by Victorian society, and Henry Spencer Ashby, the first and most important bibliographer-scholar of pornography. He then turns to the most significant work of its kind from the period, the eleven-volume anonymous autobiography My Secret Life. There follows an analysis of four pornographic Victorian novels--an analysis that throws an oblique but fascinating light on the classics of Victorian literature--and a review of the odd flood of Victorian publications devoted to flagellation. The books concludes with a chapter propounding a general theory of pornography as a sociological phenomenon. Most of the writers and writing being discussed by Marcus belong to Victorian sub-literature rather than to literature proper; in this way the work remains connected to a consideration of the exotic sub-literature. A brilliantly written book in its own right, this work transformed the study of the Victorian period as did no other." -- Provided by publisher

In her latest work of personal criticism, Nancy K. Miller tells the story of how a girl who grew up in the 1950s and got lost in the 1960s became a feminist critic in the 1970s. As in her previous books, Miller interweaves pieces of her autobiography with the memoirs of contemporaries in order to explore the unexpected ways that the stories of other people's lives give meaning to our own. The evolution she chronicles was lived by a generation of literary girls who came of age in the midst of profound social change and, buoyed by the energy of second-wave feminism, became writers, academics, and activists. Miller's recollections form one woman's installment in a collective memoir that is still unfolding, an intimate page of a group portrait in process.

In this book, Alfred Kazin, who for more than 30 years has been one of the central figures of America's intellectual life, takes us into his own life and times. His autobiography encompasses a personal story openly told; an inside look at New York's innermost intellectual circles; strong and intimate revelations of many of the most important writers of the century; and brilliantly astute observations of the literary accomplishments, atmosphere, and fads of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s in the context of America's shifting political gales.

"An essential exploration of a rich literary tradition from the Bible to modern times, by a "rare literary authority" (New York Times Book Review). Jews have long embraced their identity as "the people of the book." But outside of the Bible, much of the Jewish literary tradition remains little known. The People and the Books shows how central questions and themes of our history and culture are reflected in the Jewish literary canon: the nature of God, the right way to understand the Bible, the relationship of the Jews to their Promised Land, and the challenges of living as a minority in Diaspora. Adam Kirsch explores eighteen classic texts including the biblical books of Deuteronomy and Esther, the philosophy of Maimonides, the autobiography of the medieval businesswoman Gluckel of Hameln, and the Zionist manifestos of Theodor Herzl. From the Jews of ancient Rome to the mystical devotees of Hasidism in Eastern Europe, The People and the Books brings the treasures of Jewish literature to life and offers new ways to think about their enduring power and influence"--

"Renowned producer, director, and B-movie showman Charles Band takes readers on a wild romp through Hollywood's decidedly un-Oscarworthy underbelly, where mayhem and zombies reign supreme, and cheap thrills and entertainment are king." --

"Astute and provocative....Blends the sophistication of recent feminist theory with highly textured details fro the lives of independent and ambitious women." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Drawing on the experience of celebrated women, from George Sand and Virginia Woolf to Dorothy Sayers and Adrienne Rich, Heilbrun examines the struggle these writers undertook when their drives made it impossible for them to follow the traditional "male" script for a woman's life. Refreshing and insightful, this is an homage to brave women past and present, and an invitation to all women to write their own scripts, whatever they may be.

"With the wit and penetration well known to readers of Balzac's Omelette and Monsieur Proust's Library, Anka Muhlstein's PEN AND BRUSH revisits the delights of the French novel. This time she focuses on late 19th- and 20th-century writers--Balzac, Zola, Proust, Huysmans, and Maupassant--through the lens of their passionate involvement with the fine arts. She delves into the crucial role that painters play as characters in their novels, which she pairs with an exploration of the profound influence that painting exercised on the novelists' techniques, offering an intimate view of the intertwined worlds of painters and writers at the time. Muhlstein's deftly chosen vignettes bring to life a portrait of the nineteenth century's tight-knit artistic community, where Cezanne and Zola befriended each other as boys and Balzac yearned for the approval of Delacroix. She leads the reader on a journey of spontaneous discovery as she explores how a great painting can open a mind and spark creative fire"--

A collection of lectures delivered in May 2002 under the auspices of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. Analyzes autobiographical works of seven Jews from antiquity to the 20th century. Two of these reflect despair in the midst and in the wake of World War II. Ch. 4 (pp. 103-138), "Autobiography as Farewell I: Stefan Zweig, " discusses the Austrian Jewish writer, who committed suicide in 1942, as a non-Zionist universalist even in the face of Nazism. Pp. 131-136 deal with the persecution of the Jews. Ch. 5 (pp. 139-174), "Autobiography as Farewell II: Sarah Kofman, " discusses the life and works of Kofman, who committed suicide in 1994. Focuses on her "Rue Ordoner, Rue Labat" and her Holocaust experiences as a child in Paris. Her father was killed in Auschwitz, and Kofman was looked after by a Christian woman to whom she felt closer than her mother. Deals with the conflicts in Kofman's sexual and religious identities.

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of" Fierce Attachments "and "The End of the Novel of Love"All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question "The Situation and the Story" asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.” —Harold Bloom “ The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of American Studies. Written with grace and wit, it skillfully blends Daniel Aaron’s personal story with the history of the field he has done so much to create. This is a first-rate book by a first-rate scholar.” —David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard. Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty. Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few. Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.

Tracing the growth of ancient biography from the fifth century to the first century B.C., Arnaldo Momigliano asks fruitful questions about the origins and development of Greek biography. By clarifying the social and intellectual implications of the fact that the Greeks kept biography and autobiography distinct from historiography, he contributes to an understanding of a basic dichotomy in the Western tradition of historical writing. The Development of Greek Biography is fully annotated, and includes a bibliography designed to serve as an introduction to the study of biography in general. This classic study is now reissued with the addition of Momigliano's essay "Second Thoughts on Greek Biography" (1971).

Examines the personal values and philosophies of Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum in relation to the pressures and conditions under which they lived in the Nazi era. All had "strong Christian affinities." Under the challenge of terror they were "Christians by choice, Jews by decree." Each responded to her Jewishness in a distinct way: Stein felt close to the Jews; Weil had a hateful attitude toward them and tried to obliterate herself as a Jew; Frank and Hillesum both affirmed their Jewish identities. In the face of Hitler, each, in her own way, resisted.

Philippines is Hélène Cixous's reverie or 'true dreaming' which intertwines Freud's uneasy views on telepathy, autobiographical memories conflating Algeria and Paris, childhood and adult life, shared with her brother 'Pete', and literary evocations from Proust and George du Maurier's forgotten novel Peter Ibbetson. Amid telepathic conversations, real or imagined, and life events uncannily answering one another from a distance, Cixous's dense evocative journey ceaselessly 'returns to its starting point' and, like the twin almonds in one shell evoked by the title, reveals intimate, secret bonds between scenes and beings, real and fictional. Its interpretive sharpness delivered with stylistic elegance and candour will make this study typical of Cixous's art, which plies between literature and criticism, appealing not only to scholars and critics interested in psychoanalysis, autobiography and the act of reading, but also to a broader readership captivated by the hallucinatory coincidences between life, dream and fiction, when 'Reality is the dream. The dream is the true reality'.

Although A.B. Marx is not often acknowledged as such, he remains Western music's single most influential theorist, as the person who gave Sonata Form its name and codified its elements. Above a certain level of proficiency, there is not a single musician in the Western Classical tradition who does not know Sonata Form: they know Marx's legacy, if not his name. Further awareness of Marx as a man is especially important. The naming of Sonata form, and the discussion of its elements, was invested with convictions about music that Marx was among the very first to hold, and which we continue to value: for instance, that a composer's formal choices are not made just by convention, but with intention, and that the way in which a work unfolds is itself meaningful; or that music of any era reflects the aesthetic priorities of its age. Those convictions, in turn, spring from Marx's vigorous intellectual engagement with the world around him, its thinkers, its writers, and its politics. This translation provides a unique opportunity to read Marx in his own words. His Recollections from My Life were published in 1865, Marx's last book to appear during his lifetime, and have not been republished either in the German original, nor in any translation. Our translation with annotation and commentary will make available to English-readers this important view of music in Germany during the time of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and other familiar names from the concert hall.

"In 1966, at the ripe age of 22, Richard Goldstein approached The Village Voice with a novel idea. "I want to be a rock critic," he said. "What's that?" the editor replied. It was a logical question, since rock criticism didn't yet exist. In the weekly column he would produce for the Voice, Goldstein became the first person to write regularly in a major publication about the music that changed our lives. He believed deeply in the power of rock, and, long before it was acceptable, he championed the idea that this music was a serious art form. From his unique position in journalism, he saw the full arc of events that shaped culture and politics in the 1960s--and participated in them, too. He toured with Janis Joplin, spent a day at the Grateful Dead house in San Francisco, and dropped acid with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. He was present for Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the student uprising at Columbia, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He was challenged to a boxing match by Norman Mailer, and took Susan Sontag to her first disco. Goldstein developed close relationships with several rock legends--Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, to name two--and their early deaths came as a wrenching shock, fueling his disillusionment as he watched the music he loved rapidly evolve from a communal rite to a vast industry--and the sense of hope for radical social upheaval fade away. Another Little Piece of My Heart is the intimate memoir of the writer as a young man with profound ambition. It is also a sweeping personal account of a decade that no one else could provide--a deeply moving, unparalleled document of rock and revolution in America"--

Unlike the literary traditions of the United States, England, and France, the first century of Hebrew literature was lacking in women novelists; women tended to write poetry, while prose fiction was mainly the domain of male writers. Since the 1980s, however, there has been a virtual explosion of commercially successful Hebrew fiction by women that includes many traditionally male genres, such as the historical novel, fictional autobiography, and the mystery novel. No Room of Their Own is a comparative analysis of recent Israeli fiction by women and some of its Western models, from Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir to Marilyn French and Marie Cardinal. Feldman shows the richness and subtleties of Israeli women's fiction as she explores the themes of gender and nation, as well as the (non)representation of the "New Hebrew Woman" in five authors -- the "foremothers" of the contemporary boom in Israeli Women's fiction: Amalia Kahana-Carmon ( Up on Montifer, With Her on Her Way Home), Shulamith Hareven ( City of Many Days, Thirst, The Vocabulary of Peace), Netiva BenYehuda ( The Palmach Trilogy), Ruth Almog ( Women, The Story of a [Writer's] Block, Roots of Air), and Shulamit Lapid ( Gei Oni).

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler{u2019}s Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories{u2014}an 2Austro-Modernism3 that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus{u2019}s drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti{u2019}s memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein{u2019}s notebooks and Paul Celan{u2019}s lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers