A Long Slow Screw

Mixing equal parts Mickey Spillane and Quentin Tarantino, A Long Slow Screw, set during a week in the late 1970's New York City is a mean streets meander through a jewel heist gone from bad to worse, as sometimes crook Jake Paternostra tries to make a buck the hard way: one bullet at a time.

In this book, music scholar David Ensminger offers a collection of compelling interviews with legendary roots rock and indie artists who bucked mainstream trends and have remained resilient in the face of enormous shifts in the music world. Ensminger brings to light the highways and byways trod by these music icons over the course of their careers.

The Crosse triplets have had a hell of a year. To their shock, their grandfather Darkheart revealed that the sisters hail from a long line of vampire slayers. According to legend, one of them is the new slayer. One can heal vampires. And one will turn into a blood-sucking vamp. Professional vampire-hunter Jack Rawls believes sexy, cocktail-loving Kat is the vamp-to-be. Desperate not to turn fang, Kat enlists the wary Jack to help her find Maplesburg's "vamp zero," Cyrus Kane. With Kane dead—permanently—she might be able to stop the prophecy in its tracks. But Kat hadn't counted on her growing feelings for Jack, or the charisma and true evil of Kane….

Blending architecture, design, and technology, a visual tour through futures past via the objects we have replaced, left behind, and forgotten. So-called extinct objects are those that were imagined but were never in use, or that existed but are now unused—superseded, unfashionable, or simply forgotten. Extinct gathers together an exceptional range of artists, curators, architects, critics, and academics, including Hal Foster, Barry Bergdoll, Deyan Sudjic, Tacita Dean, Emily Orr, Richard Wentworth, and many more. In eighty-five essays, contributors nominate “extinct” objects and address them in a series of short, vivid, sometimes personal accounts, speaking not only of obsolete technologies, but of other ways of thinking, making, and interacting with the world. Extinct is filled with curious, half-remembered objects, each one evoking a future that never came to pass. It is also a visual treat, full of interest and delight.

DJ Screw, a.k.a. Robert Earl Davis Jr., changed rap and hip-hop forever. In the 1990s, in a spare room of his Houston home, he developed a revolutionary mixing technique known as chopped and screwed. Spinning two copies of a record, Screw would “chop” in new rhythms, bring in local rappers to freestyle over the tracks, and slow the recording down on tape. Soon Houstonians were lining up to buy his cassettes—he could sell thousands in a single day. Fans drove around town blasting his music, a sound that came to define the city’s burgeoning and innovative rap culture. June 27 has become an unofficial city holiday, inspired by a legendary mix Screw made on that date. Lance Scott Walker has interviewed nearly everyone who knew Screw, from childhood friends to collaborators to aficionados who evangelized Screw’s tapes—millions of which made their way around the globe—as well as the New York rap moguls who honored him. Walker brings these voices together with captivating details of Screw’s craft and his world. More than the story of one man, DJ Screw is a history of the Houston scene as it came of age, full of vibrant moments and characters. But none can top Screw himself, a pioneer whose mystique has only grown in the two decades since his death.