Having spent seven years researching and writing about Prince (and another year updating the book), I spoke to as many people who worked and lived with him as I could. While my book is rich with information gleaned from interviews, alongside my own analysis, there were a few people who didn’t talk to me. Of the above, I did talk to Dez Dickerson, but the others were holding off (presumably because their own books were in the works). All the books below work as perfect compliments to mine and are all must-haves for any Prince fan’s purple library.
Prince was different things to different people and one of the things you’ll discover through these books is that they work as a mosaic showing different sides of him. Only two people will ever know what it was like to be married to Prince, and Mayte is one of them.
In The Most Beautiful, a title inspired by the hit song Prince wrote about their legendary love story, Mayte Garcia for the first time shares the deeply personal story of their relationship and offers a singular perspective on the music icon and their world together: from their unconventional meeting backstage at a concert (and the long-distance romance that followed), to their fairy-tale wedding (and their groundbreaking artistic partnership), to the devastating losses that ultimately dissolved their romantic relationship for good. Throughout it all, they shared a bond more intimate than any other in Prince's life. No one else can tell…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Having spent seven years researching and writing about Prince (and another year updating the book), I spoke to as many people who worked and lived with him as I could. While my book is rich with information gleaned from interviews, alongside my own analysis, there were a few people who didn’t talk to me. Of the above, I did talk to Dez Dickerson, but the others were holding off (presumably because their own books were in the works). All the books below work as perfect compliments to mine and are all must-haves for any Prince fan’s purple library.
One of the few musicians who continued to interact with Prince (on and off) from the beginning to near the end of his career, Morris Day was well-placed to write an account of the musician. Written in collaboration with the excellent biographer and music writer, David Ritz, this is an interesting (if whacky) book.
To tell the story of Morris Day is to tell the story of Prince. Not because they were inseparable or because their paths never diverged, but because, even when their paths did diverge, they always intersected again. Each artist lifted the other up, pushing one another to be something bigger and better than they thought themselves capable of. There was plenty of one-upmanship and some (un)healthy competition, but the respect Day and Prince had for one another never wavered, from the time they met in junior high until His Royal Badness's untimely death in 2016.
Having spent seven years researching and writing about Prince (and another year updating the book), I spoke to as many people who worked and lived with him as I could. While my book is rich with information gleaned from interviews, alongside my own analysis, there were a few people who didn’t talk to me. Of the above, I did talk to Dez Dickerson, but the others were holding off (presumably because their own books were in the works). All the books below work as perfect compliments to mine and are all must-haves for any Prince fan’s purple library.
It was one of the great strokes of good fortune in Prince’s career that one of his earliest engineers was a brilliant musicologist.
Of course, the reverse is true too, and Rogers’ extraordinary knowledge of music is brought to life (at least in part) by the time she spent alone in the studio with Prince, in the middle of the night, at Christmas, whenever he called.
This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you. But it's also a story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in Los Angeles, rose to become Prince's chief engineer for Purple Rain, and then created other No. 1 hits ,including Barenaked Ladies' "One Week," as one of the most successful female record producers of all time.
Now an award-winning professor of cognitive neuroscience, Susan Rogers leads readers to musical self-awareness. She explains that we each possess…
Separating the true stories from the myths, The Duty of Memory provides a deeper understanding of the diverse motivations that drove ordinary people to join an underground network of French Resistants despite terrible odds and horrifying consequences.
This book takes the reader inside the true story of men and women…
Having spent seven years researching and writing about Prince (and another year updating the book), I spoke to as many people who worked and lived with him as I could. While my book is rich with information gleaned from interviews, alongside my own analysis, there were a few people who didn’t talk to me. Of the above, I did talk to Dez Dickerson, but the others were holding off (presumably because their own books were in the works). All the books below work as perfect compliments to mine and are all must-haves for any Prince fan’s purple library.
Dickerson’s book was the first book by a Prince associate written while Prince was still alive.
Given how carefully his former boss guarded his history, it must have been nerve-wracking to write. But it’s impossible not to imagine Prince being charmed by this sweet account of their early years of making music and their adventures on the road.
I’m told by those who knew him that the book sounds exactly as he used to talk. This provides an essential insight into one of Prince’s most productive periods.
Many books have been written about the illustrious career of pop superstar Prince, but none was ever written by a member of his band. In this first-hand, eyewitness account of the meteoric rise of this pop icon and his early days, original Prince guitarist Dez Dickerson tells his story. As a man who was on the inside from Prince's legendary early concerts all the way to his massive breakthrough with "1999", Dez has a story to tell that has yet to be told. Tracing Dez's involvement with the band from his first audition in 1978 until his departure in 1983,…
I grew up in an isolated rural pub in England. My love of folk horror was born of a strong nostalgia for that time and it has fed into both my writing and my reading. I understood isolation, small communities, the effect of strangers, as well as the sense of ‘otherness’ in the atmosphere of the countryside – the calm before the storm, the liminal twilight. It also meant that I could tell when a writer had captured the ‘essence’ of folk horror. When the author weaves a story between the landscape and man, blends traditions and mythology – they take me to that place I know.
Coy Hall is a newer writer on the scene but the work he has produced so far has been of exceptional quality.
This particular book contains short stories which interlink yet standalone. Hall’sGrimoire of the Four Impostershas its folk horror set against the historical backdrop of the 16th and 17th centuries. I freely admit to being a history fan and seeing this mixed with a favourite subgenre is a delight.
The stories are dark and menacing, vibrant with character, and melding folklore and the occult into a showcase of storytelling. They show that folk horror can be done differently.
My expertise as a scholar of the women’s music movement spans 40 years--ever since I attended my first concert and music festival in 1981. A lecturer at UC-Berkeley, I’m the author of 19 books on women’s history, and published the first book on women’s music festivals, Eden Built By Eves, in 1999 (now out of print.) More recently I’ve organized exhibits on the women’s music movement for the Library of Congress, co-authored The Feminist Revolution(which made Oprah’s list), and I’m now the archivist and historian for Olivia Records.
The child of Communist parents, Alix would grow up to be one of the most profound movers and shakers of the lesbian music movement, producing the first full-length lesbian album, Lavender Jane Loves Women, in 1973. But this memoir is a series of chapters on her early years growing up in the 1950s with progressive activists and folk club life, embarking on her own career in the folk circuit, singing against the backdrop of repressive politics, and coming into the women’s movement as a married mother about to fall in love with another woman.
Women’s music legend Alix Dobkin for the first time chronicles her rise to fame as the first artist to record an openly lesbian album in 1973. Her story, however, opens much earlier in postwar New York City, where, growing up in a Communist family, she watches Jackie Robinson steal home, rubs elbows with radical Left celebrities like Paul Robeson, and comes of age under the watchful eye of the FBI. Dobkin herself joins the party at the height of the McCarthy witch hunts and offers readers a firsthand glimpse of daily life as a young person living under government surveillance.…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
On the day I was born, crucial scenes for both The Exorcist and The Wicker Man were being filmed, forever marking me as a member of the Haunted Generation. The strange, the aberrant, the unsettling, and the obscure have bedevilled me ever since. In search of the wyrd and the eerie, I have stumbled upon many forgotten ghosts and shadowy remembrances.
My writing is marked by the joy and terror of growing up in an odd time that melded the paranormal and the scientific, the cutting edge and the nondescript, all broadcast through grainy waves, picked up by shaky antennas, displayed on staticky televisions, and remembered hazily through nostalgia darkly.
I am a movie, book, and culture fanatic, but the ultimate medium for me is music.
Hauntology and folk horror are both greatly informed by music and have subsequently resulted in music that is informed by the concepts of hauntology and folk horror. I focus a lot on this reciprocal relationship in my book, but no one has explored the connections between the music of the past and the music of the future in greater detail than Rob Young in Electric Eden.
Starting with the revival of folk music in England, this book ranges through psychedelic and acid folk, touching on rock, prog, classical, experimental, and electronic music in a dizzying but exhilarating tour of the weirdos, outcasts, and visionaries that ushered in a new age of music with one foot in rural heritage and the other in futuristic utopian dreams.
A new edition as part of the Faber Greatest Hits - books that have taken writing about music in new and exciting directions for the twenty-first century.
Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music is a seminal book on British music and cultural heritage, that spans the visionary classical and folk tradition from the nineteenth-century to the present day.
'A thoroughly enjoyable read and likely to remain the best-written overview for a long time.' GUARDIAN
'A perfectly timed, perfectly pitched alternative history of English folk music . . . wide-ranging, insightful, authoritative, thoroughly entertaining.' NEW STATESMAN
My expertise as a scholar of the women’s music movement spans 40 years--ever since I attended my first concert and music festival in 1981. A lecturer at UC-Berkeley, I’m the author of 19 books on women’s history, and published the first book on women’s music festivals, Eden Built By Eves, in 1999 (now out of print.) More recently I’ve organized exhibits on the women’s music movement for the Library of Congress, co-authored The Feminist Revolution(which made Oprah’s list), and I’m now the archivist and historian for Olivia Records.
Not everyone who loves and admires this folk musician, the half-sister of Pete Seeger and a longtime collector of English folk ballads, knows her as the songwriter behind Roberta Flack’s hit “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face;” hence the title. The quirky style of this real page-turner provides fantastic stories of folk heritage, song collecting, love, child-rearing, radio performance activism, encounters with English Travelers, travels to China, and life growing up as a daughter of the ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger.
A SUNDAY TIMES AND TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE THE BOOKSELLER'S Most Picked Book in General Non-Fiction Round Ups of 2017
Peggy Seeger is one of folk music's most influential artists and songwriters. Born in New York City in 1935, she enjoyed a childhood steeped in music and left-wing politics - they remain her lifeblood. After college, she travelled to Russia and China - against US advice - before arriving in London, where she met the man with whom she would raise three children and share the next thirty-three years: Ewan MacColl. Together,…
My name is Lee Andrew Taylor. I write novels and screenplays, mostly in the horror genre, with a few signed by Producers since 2021. I write what I see. It’s worked for me so far, with many discussions with producers in the past few years. If I can see a movie when I read someone’s story then there’s a great chance other people will see the same thing. I am always creating new worlds inside my mind, new stories to write, and new paths to take.
This book sucked me into the author’s world. I think this was the author’s first novel, so I was unsure how it would read, but it’s gripping & well-written. I’m glad the author has written a sequel to this book. The style of writing is different from what I’m used to, but the author has a way of making the story believable.
Welcome to Sacrificale Grove. The place that no one ever plans on comin' to, and the place that no one ever leaves. You'll see some right peculiar folk round here, that's for sure. I can see by the look on your face that you're a bit confused. Never mind about that old path you're lookin' at; you don't want to cut through those woods north of here that's out by Clyde's old shack. You might think it's a short cut, but it ain't. Yep, there is a trail that leads into the woods. You can't see too much in there;…
Pioneer Paddles of the Colonial South
by
William D. Auman,
Award-winning novelist William Auman, author of If Trees Could Testify..., takes the reader on a time-traveling odyssey featuring 345 bodies of water in six states within the historical context through which they unfold.
Journey into remaining Colonial-era wilderness with stories of pirate treasure, epic frontiersmen, Indigenous Peoples, and Revolutionary…
When I read, I’m not just seeing the words on a page; I’m escaping into the world crafted by the author. Since I was a child, I’ve always been a lover of fantasy – it was an escape for me to slip between the pages and be a part of the world inside them. Especially if they were beautiful and filled with hidden danger. I wanted to have my heart pound out of my chest, to have the thrill of magic, wonder, and fear. Now, I try to write those types of worlds; because of the books which inspired me. I only hope you love them as much as I do.
A Tale of Stars and Shadowexceeded my expectations; mainly because it was one of the first fantasy stories that I’d read which wasn’t exclusively aimed at young adults.
This is a book for grown-ups, dealing with adult themes (although not sex, perse) and political intrigue. It follows Tallyn, a grief-torn warrior who accepts a posting to protect the spoiled prince of the Winged folk in an exotic country; with beautiful and deadly scenery. I wanted to be in Mithranar – to swim in the clear waters of Feather Bay.
A broken warrior. A notorious thief. A mission that could change the world.
Talyn Dynan was the finest fighter of her generation. But after a combat mission goes tragically wrong, she is left broken and wracked with guilt. When Talyn is sent on a twofold mission to Mithranar—protect a winged folk prince while secretly hunting a criminal who is a key to a much greater mystery—she’s immersed in a tangle of ruthless political games. There’s far more at stake than she realised, and a single mistake could mean her death.
The Shadowhawk thrives in the darkest of nights. Desperate to…
