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For the first time in English, the classic volume that developed a radical new understanding of free jazz and African American culture.1971, French jazz critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli cowrote Free Jazz/Black Power, a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism. It remains a testimony to the long ignored encounter of radical African American music and French left-wing criticism. Carles and Comolli set out to defend a genre vilified by jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic by exposing the new sound's ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was raging in the early 1970s. The two offered a political and cultural history of black presence in the United States to shed more light on the dubious role played by jazz criticism in racial oppression.This analysis critiques the critics, building a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice was virtually unknown. The authors reached radical conclusions--free jazz was a revolutionary reaction against white domination, was the musical counterpart to the Black Power movement, and was a music that demanded a similar political commitment. The impact of this book is difficult to overstate, as it made readers reconsider their response to African American music. In some cases it changed the way musicians thought about and played jazz. Free Jazz/ Black Power remains indispensable to the study of the relation of American free jazz to European audiences, critics, and artists.

The Beat! was the first book to explore the musical, social, and cultural phenomenon of go-go music. In this new edition, updated by a substantial chapter on the current scene, authors Kip Lornell and Charles C. Stephenson, Jr., place go-go within black popular music made since the middle 1970s--a period during which hip-hop has predominated. This styling reflects the District's African American heritage. Its super-charged drumming and vocal combinations of hip-hop, funk, and soul evolved and still thrive on the streets of Washington, D.C., and in neighboring Prince George's County, making it the most geographically compact form of popular music.Go-go--the only musical form indigenous to Washington, D.C.--features a highly syncopated, nonstop beat and vocals that are spoken as well as sung. The book chronicles its development and ongoing popularity, focusing on many of its key figures and institutions, including established acts such as Chuck Brown (the Godfather of Go-Go), Experience Unlimited, Rare Essence, and Trouble Funk; well-known DJs, managers, and promoters; and filmmakers who have incorporated it into their work. Now updated and back in print, The Beat! provides longtime fans and those who study American musical forms a definitive look at the music and its makers.

Whistle Stop traces the remarkable life of trumpeter and composer Kenny Dorham (1924–1972), whose journey from rural Texas to the forefront of modern jazz mirrors the broader story of Black resilience and creativity in twentieth-century America. Dorham was born in Freestone County to a sharecropping family whose roots stretch back to Reconstruction, when his great-grandfather owned and farmed land in East Texas. Raised there and in segregated East Austin, Dorham found his voice on the trumpet at Anderson High School, and after brief stops at Wiley College and in the army, he landed in New York just as bebop was transforming American music.Dorham quickly became a cornerstone of that transformation. From performing with Charlie Parker, Art Blakey, and Max Roach to mentoring younger talents like Joe Henderson, he played a defining role in shaping modern jazz. A gifted composer, collaborator, and teacher, Dorham also helped lay the foundation for formal jazz education. Yet despite his immense contributions and the respect given him by other musicians, he remained underrecognized by critics—even as he continued to influence the musical generations that followed him.Drawing on interviews, archival research, and family history, Whistle Stop offers a vivid portrait not only of a jazz innovator, but of a Texas family whose story stretches across emancipation, migration, segregation, and cultural transformation. More than fifty years after his passing, Kenny Dorham’s music and legacy continue to inspire—his whistle stop in jazz history still echoing.

Exploring how a once-obscure Charlton Comics character evolved into a complex, transmedia figure thanks to filmmaker James Gunn, Peacemaker: Satirizing the American Machismo delivers a sharp, accessible critique of toxic masculinity in American culture. Across five chapters, this book traces Peacemaker’s transformation from a one-note Cold War vigilante into a conflicted, satirical symbol of modern manhood. Beginning with the character’s origins under creators Joe Gill and Pat Boyette and his later reinvention at DC Comics, it offers both a publication history and an in-universe biography to help readers follow Peacemaker’s many forms across comics, television, and film. At its core, the study connects Peacemaker to larger cultural forces: violence, nationalism, gender politics, and the "manosphere." Drawing on comics scholarship, media theory, interviews with creators, and real-world political discourse, it shows how Peacemaker both embodies and subverts the ideals of hypermasculinity. Blending pop-culture analysis with academic insight, this volume argues that Peacemaker has become an unlikely site of resistance, capable of grappling with the toxic scripts he’s been handed and searching, sometimes awkwardly, for a different way to be a man.

Whistle Stop traces the remarkable life of trumpeter and composer Kenny Dorham (1924–1972), whose journey from rural Texas to the forefront of modern jazz mirrors the broader story of Black resilience and creativity in twentieth-century America. Dorham was born in Freestone County to a sharecropping family whose roots stretch back to Reconstruction, when his great-grandfather owned and farmed land in East Texas. Raised there and in segregated East Austin, Dorham found his voice on the trumpet at Anderson High School, and after brief stops at Wiley College and in the army, he landed in New York just as bebop was transforming American music.Dorham quickly became a cornerstone of that transformation. From performing with Charlie Parker, Art Blakey, and Max Roach to mentoring younger talents like Joe Henderson, he played a defining role in shaping modern jazz. A gifted composer, collaborator, and teacher, Dorham also helped lay the foundation for formal jazz education. Yet despite his immense contributions and the respect given him by other musicians, he remained underrecognized by critics—even as he continued to influence the musical generations that followed him.Drawing on interviews, archival research, and family history, Whistle Stop offers a vivid portrait not only of a jazz innovator, but of a Texas family whose story stretches across emancipation, migration, segregation, and cultural transformation. More than fifty years after his passing, Kenny Dorham’s music and legacy continue to inspire—his whistle stop in jazz history still echoing.

Paul Auster (b. 1947) is one of the most critically acclaimed and intensely studied authors in America today. His varied career as a novelist, poet, translator, and filmmaker has attracted scholarly scrutiny from a variety of critical perspectives. The steadily rising arc of his large readership has made him something of a popular culture figure with many appearances in print interviews, as well as on television, the radio, and the internet. Auster's best-known novel may be his first, City of Glass (1985), a grim and intellectually puzzling mystery that belies its surface image as a detective novel and goes on to become a profound meditation on transience and mortality, the inadequacies of language, and isolation. Fifteen more novels have followed since then, including The Music of Chance, Moon Palace, The Book of Illusions, and The Brooklyn Follies. He has, in the words of one critic, "given the phrase 'experimental fiction' a good name" by fashioning bona fide literary works with all the rigor and intellect demanded of the contemporary avant-garde. This volume-the first of its kind on Auster-will be useful to both scholars and students for the penetrating self-analysis and the wide range of biographical information and critical commentary it contains. Conversations with Paul Auster covers all of Auster's oeuvre, from The New York Trilogy of which City of Glass is a component to Sunset Park (2010), along with his screenplays for Smoke (1995) and Blue in the Face (1996). Within, Auster nimbly discusses his poetry, memoir, nonfiction, translations, and film directing.

This biography tells the story of one of the most notorious figures in the history of popular music, Morris Levy (1927–1990). At age nineteen, he cofounded the nightclub Birdland in Hell’s Kitchen, which became the home for a new musical style, bebop. Levy operated one of the first integrated clubs on Broadway and helped build the careers of Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell and most notably aided the reemergence of Count Basie. In 1957, he founded a record label, Roulette Records. Roulette featured many of the significant jazz artists who played Birdland but also scored top pop hits with acts like Buddy Knox, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Joey Dee and the Starliters, and, in the mid-1960s, Tommy James.Stories abound of Levy threatening artists, songwriters, and producers, sometimes just for the sport, other times so he could continue to build his empire. Along the way, Levy attracted “investors” with ties to the Mafia, including Dominic Ciaffone (a.k.a. “Swats” Mulligan), Tommy Eboli, and the most notorious of them all, Vincent Gigante. Gigante allegedly owned large pieces of Levy’s recording and retail businesses.Starting in the late 1950s, the FBI and IRS investigated Levy but could not make anything stick until the early 1980s, when Levy foolishly got involved in a deal to sell remaindered records to a small-time reseller, John LaMonte. With partners in the mob, Levy tried to force LaMonte to pay for four million remaindered records. When the FBI secretly wiretapped LaMonte in an unrelated investigation and agents learned about the deal, investigators successfully prosecuted Levy in the extortion scheme. Convicted in 1988, Levy did not live to serve prison time. Stricken with cancer, he died just as his last appeals were exhausted. However, even if he had lived, Levy’s brand of storied high life was effectively bust. Corporate ownership of record labels doomed most independents in the business, ending the days when a savvy if ruthless hustler could blaze a path to the top.

Listen to This stands out as the first book exclusively dedicated to Davis's watershed 1969 album, Bitches Brew. Victor Svorinich traces its incarnations and inspirations for ten-plus years before its release. The album arrived as the jazz scene waned beneath the rise of rock and roll and as Davis (1926-1991) faced large changes in social conditions affecting the African-American consciousness. This new climate served as a catalyst for an experiment that many considered a major departure. Davis's new music projected rock and roll sensibilities, the experimental essence of 1960s' counterculture, yet also harsh dissonances of African-American reality. Many listeners embraced it, while others misunderstood and rejected the concoction.Listen to This is not just the story of Bitches Brew. It reveals much of the legend of Miles Davis--his attitude and will, his grace under pressure, his bands, his relationship to the masses, his business and personal etiquette, and his response to extraordinary social conditions seemingly aligned to bring him down. Svorinich revisits the mystery and skepticism surrounding the album, and places it into both a historical and musical context using new interviews, original analysis, recently found recordings, unearthed session data sheets, memoranda, letters, musical transcriptions, scores, and a wealth of other material. Additionally, Listen to This encompasses a thorough examination of producer Teo Macero's archives and Bitches Brew's original session reels in order to provide the only complete day-to-day account of the sessions.

Until the first edition of Steven Spielberg: A Biography was published in 1997, much about Spielberg's personality and the forces that shaped it had remained enigmatic, in large part because of his tendency to obscure and mythologize his own past. But in this first full-scale, in-depth biography of Spielberg, Joseph McBride reveals hidden dimensions of the filmmaker's personality and shows how deeply personal even his most commercial work has been.This new edition adds four chapters to Spielberg's life story, chronicling his extraordinarily active and creative period from 1997 to the present, a period in which he has balanced his executive duties as one of the partners in the film studio DreamWorks SKG with a remarkable string of films as a director. Spielberg's ambitious recent work--including Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, A. I. Artifucial Intelligence, Minority Report, The Terminal and Munich--has continually expanded his range both stylistically and in terms of adventurous, often controversial, subject matter.Steven Spielberg: A Biography brought about a reevaluation of the great filmmaker's life and work by those who viewed him as merely a facile entertainer. This new edition guides readers through the mature artistry of Spielberg's later period in which he manages, against considerable odds, to run a successful studio while maintaining and enlarging his high artistic standards as one of America's most thoughtful, sophisticated, and popular filmmakers.

Written by a descendant of the Hollow, this book recounts graphic episodes of the feuds and fights that made this region in south Mississippi famous.

Enjoy these literary conversations with some of the foremost authors writing in America today. Though writing is what they do best, talking about literature is an act that the Mississippi writers included here do marvelously well. This is the first of two volumes of interviews with eleven of the state's prizewinning writers. This series shows that Mississippi continues to flourish with authors of importance and acclaim. Included in this first volume are Jones's informal conversations with Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Elizabeth Spencer, Barry Hannah, and Beth Henley.Mississippi Writers Talking provides new insights into understanding the views, the works, and the craft of principal American authors who are Mississippians. They speak with candor about themselves and tell of the urges that brought them to write the books and stories for which they are best known.Volume two includes interviews with Walker Percy, Margaret Walker, Ellen Douglas, Willie Morris, Turner Cassity, and James Whitehead.

Enjoy these literary conversations with some of the foremost authors writing in America today. Though writing is what they do best, talking about literature is an act that the Mississippi writers included here do marvelously well. This is the first of two volumes of interviews with eleven of the state's prizewinning writers. This series shows that Mississippi continues to flourish with authors of importance and acclaim. Included in this first volume are Jones's informal conversations with Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Elizabeth Spencer, Barry Hannah, and Beth Henley.Mississippi Writers Talking provides new insights into understanding the views, the works, and the craft of principal American authors who are Mississippians. They speak with candor about themselves and tell of the urges that brought them to write the books and stories for which they are best known.Volume two includes interviews with Walker Percy, Margaret Walker, Ellen Douglas, Willie Morris, Turner Cassity, and James Whitehead.

This richly detailed outline of William Faulkner's life is written by an eminent French scholar who brings new insights to the Nobel Laureate's career and writings.This book is intended to be a quick reference guide to Faulkner's works as they relate to his life. Principally an outline of a literary career, it will serve as a useful aid for students beginning a study of Faulkner's novels. It gives emphasis year-by-year to the main events in his life and to his professional activity. For the major works Gresset gives an account of the inception, composition, revisions, and publication. In addition, to summarize Faulkner's publications in a given year, Gresset provides a list of the fiction published during the period. From the time of Faulkner's death in 1962 through 1984 the chronology provides a publishing history of new original Faulkner material as well as information about important books and events that relate to Faulkner. ""The figure that looms behind this Chronology,"" Gresset says in his introduction, ""is that of a hard-gutted and hard-fisted little man whose rather unhappy life may well have found only in literature ... the deep satisfaction ... that he never ceased to yearn after."" Michel Gresset, the author of Faulkner ou la fascination, I: Poetique de regard, edited volume one of the Pleiade edition of Faulkner in France.

These collected interviews, like a visit with Percy at his home on the Bogue Falaya River, provide refreshing close-up encounters with one of America's most celebrated writers.These twenty-seven interviews cover a period of twenty-two years, from the time of the publication of Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, in 1961, until 1983, when he was interviewed about his friendship with Thomas Merton.This volume is the second in the Literary Conversations series. These unabridged interviews, collected from a variety of sources, will give reading pleasure to general readers who wish to know Percy and his works more closely, and they will be of great use to Percy scholars.

This is a selection of interviews with William Styron published during the period 1951-1984, from the months just following publication of Lie Down in Darkness, his first novel, to the period after publication of Sophie's Choice. Some twenty-five interviews are reprinted here, including six that are translated from the French and published in this country for the first time.Styron is one of the most frequently interviewed writers of his generation. Unlike Faulkner, to whom he was often compared early in his career, Styron has learned to be a patient and cooperative interview subject. His comments in these interviews reveal much about the sources of his fiction and about his early life. He also reacts to attacks on his work, comments on his mission as a writer, and describes his compositional habits.This is a useful collection for those who wish to know Styron better and to be guided by his conversations to clearer insights into his writing. For scholars and for general readers alike it will have much appeal. It gives the reader a sense of being in Styron's presence, of enjoying his flashes of wit and intellect, and of realizing how remarkable his achievement has been and how universally he is admired.

Collected interviews with the author of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Glass Menagerie.

As this collection of interviews shows, Flannery O'Connor's fiction, though bound to a particular time and place, embodies and reveals universal ideas. O'Connor's curiosity about human nature and its various manifestations compelled her to explore mysterious places in the mind and heart. Despite her short life and prolonged illness, O'Connor was interviewed in a variety of times and locations. The circumstances of the interviews did not seem to matter much to O'Connor; her approach and demeanor remained consistent. Her self-knowledge was always apparent, in her confidence in herself, in her enterprise as a writer, and in her beliefs. She could penetrate the surfaces; she could see things in depth. Her perceptions were wide-ranging and insightful. Her interviews, given sparingly but with careful reflection and precision, make a unique contribution to an understanding of her fiction and to the evolving narrative of her short but influential life. Dr. Rosemary M. Magee is Vice President and Secretary of the University at Emory University.

Truman Capote once said, ""The thing I like to do most in the whole world is talk ...,"" and talk he does in the more than two dozen interviews collected in this book. The topics are often gossip about the famous people Capote ran with, but always he provides revealing information about his writings--the authors who inspired him, his meticulous methods of research and composition, and his personal reverence for the craft of authorship. He was, as the editor notes, ""fiercely devoted to his art, and keenly aware of his place in the world of letters.""While his detractors, such as Ernest Hemingway and Gore Vidal, spoke out long and loud against the feisty and media-minded writer from Louisiana, Capote here has the last word. What emerges is a portrait of the author as pop cult figure--unabashed in his pursuit of fame and fortune but unstinting in his devotion to becoming one of America's major prose stylists.These interviews range from the first he granted after the publication of his first novel through his shockingly personal self-interview which appeared at the end of his last major work.

This collection of twenty-one unabridged interviews puts us immediately in the company of one of the presiding literary figures of our times. This revered editor, poet, literary historian, and critic encapsulates seven decades of American literature in these conversations that took place between 1942 and 1985.Full of insights and strong opinions, direct, salty, Cowley converses candidly with his interviewers about himself and about many subjects and personages that have shaped our national literature in the last century.Throughout this volume Cowley gives vivid accounts of his close alliances with such widely diverse and individual authors as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, John Cheever, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey.From these interviews emerges a literary man who inspires the reader's renewed admiration and gratitude. In the common bond uniting great authors Cowley sees the manifestation of a Republic of Letters with laws, intelligence, and confraternity. These magnificently articulate interviews leave little doubt that Cowley is its elder statesman.

This volume includes twenty-six conversations with Lillian Hellman, ranging from early newspaper interviews on the occasions of the Broadway openings of her plays through extended talks with her which appears in the Paris Review, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, down to her last interviews in the early 1980s.In all these interviews, Miss Hellman gives her own account of her eventful and exciting life, her evaluations and analyses of her plays and accounts of how and why they came to be written. Throughout, her views are expressed with the pungency, directness, honesty, and wit which made Lillian Hellman such a universally admired and respected figure.Hellman was seldom far from where the action was. The controversies in which she was involved are equaled only by the honors she received. This volume supplements her own memories by providing her own account of her life as she lived it--rather than from the vantage of the late 1960s and 1970s when she composed the memoirs.

The Civil Rights Movement warrants continuing and extensive examination. The six papers in this collection, each supplemented by a follow-up assessment, contribute to a clearer perception of what caused and motivated the movement, of how it functioned, of the changes that occurred within it, and of its accomplishments and shortcomings. Its profound effect upon modern America has so greatly changed relations between the races that C. Vann Woodward has called it the ""second revolution.""In a limited space the eleven scholars range with a definitive view over a large subject. Their papers analyze and emphasize the Civil Rights Movement's important aspects: its origins and causes, its strategies and tactics for accomplishing black freedom, the creative tensions in its leadership, the politics of the movement in the key state of Mississippi, and the role of federal law and federal courts.In this collection a scholarly balance is achieved for each paper by a follow-up commentary from a significant authority. By deepening the understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, these essays underscore what has been gained through struggle, as well as acknowledging the goals that are yet to be attained.

In these stimulating papers from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in 1985, feminism and Faulkner studies collide, with beneficial results for each.The disruptive and disturbing characterization of women in Faulkner's fictional world and the influence of actual women in the novelist's life are given attentive study in these papers. The contributors to this collection consider questions debated for many decades in Faulkner studies and those recently raised to prominence under the illuminating ray of feminist criticism.""There is throughout Faulkner something disturbing,"" Noel Polk observes, ""about the comprehensiveness with which women in his work are associated with blood and excrement and filth and death.

Arthur Miller clearly enjoys militantly civil conversation. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Miller in interview is his willingness to answer question after question with grace and substance, with a sense of social commitment and metaphysical curiosity.These interviews complement the plays and his more formal and well-known theater essays, revealing his dramatic and aesthetic theories, his concern with language and structure, his awareness of the inner reality of his characters and how these concerns broaden to highlight universal social and metaphysical issues. Miller in conversation provides a unique insight into both the dramatic works and the man behind those works.Through forty years of the best of Miller interviews, similar concerns surface, but with one crucial difference: the actor/audience barrier is minimized, and the listener is left with the delightful prospect of engaging Miller, not through Willy Loman or Kate Keller, or through critics ""interpreting"" the plays, but through the very person who reinvented so much of contemporary drama.