Americana And The Art Of Getting Over It

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The Pacific Crest Trail runs 2660 miles, from California's border with Mexico to Washington's border with Canada. To walk it is to undertake a grueling test of body and spirit. In Americana, cartoonist Luke Healy accepts the challenge. This intimate, engaging autobiographical work from an Irish visitor to the United States recounts the author's own attempt to walk the length of the USA's west coast. Healy's life-changing journey weaves in and out of often humorous reflections on his experiences in America and his development as an artist, navigating both the trail itself and the unique culture of the people who attempt to complete it. For fans of Cheryl Strayed's Wild.

In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the twenty-first century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes. Where the Devil Don’t Stay tells the band’s unlikely story not chronologically but geographically. Seeing the Truckers’ albums as roadmaps through a landscape that is half-real, half-imagined, their fellow Southerner Stephen Deusner travels to the places the band’s members have lived in and written about. Tracking the band from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to the author’s hometown in McNairy County, Tennessee, Deusner explores the Truckers’ complex relationship to the South and the issues of class, race, history, and religion that run through their music. Drawing on new interviews with past and present band members, including Jason Isbell, Where the Devil Don’t Stay is more than the story of a great American band; it’s a reflection on the power of music and how it can frame and shape a larger culture.

In Godless Americana, author Sikivu Hutchinson challenges the myths behind Americana images of Mom, Apple pie, white picket fences, and racially segregated god-fearing Main Street USA. In this timely essay collection, Hutchinson argues that the Christian evangelical backlash against Women's rights, social justice, LGBT equality, and science threatens to turn back the clock on civil rights. As a result of this climate, more people of color are exploring atheism, agnosticism, and freethought. Godless Americana examines these trends, providing a groundbreaking analysis of faith and radical humanist politics in an era of racial, sexual, and religious warfare.

As the assassination of the U.S. president leads to political intrigue, interpersonal drama, and astrophysical wonder, the truth behind the crime and those involved will blow your mind! Writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely investigate the conspiracy on Earth-4!

Newsweek calls him “exhilarating and deeply engaging.” Time Out New York calls him “smart, provocative, and a great writer.” Critic Peter Schjeldahl, meanwhile, simply calls him “My hero.” There’s no one in the art world quite like Dave Hickey—and a new book of his writing is an event. 25 Women will not disappoint. The book collects Hickey’s best and most important writing about female artists from the past twenty years. But this is far more than a compilation: Hickey has revised each essay, bringing them up to date and drawing out common themes. Written in Hickey’s trademark style—accessible, witty, and powerfully illuminating—25 Women analyzes the work of Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley, Fiona Rae, Lynda Benglis, Karen Carson, and many others. Hickey discusses their work as work, bringing politics and gender into the discussion only where it seems warranted by the art itself. The resulting book is not only a deep engagement with some of the most influential and innovative contemporary artists, but also a reflection on the life and role of the critic: the decisions, judgments, politics, and ethics that critics negotiate throughout their careers in the art world. Always engaging, often controversial, and never dull, Dave Hickey is a writer who gets people excited—and talking—about art. 25 Women will thrill his many fans, and make him plenty of new ones.

Do-it-yourself décor inspired by iconic patterns, classic fabrics, sentimental items, and the Americana style. Designer Max Humphrey gives every reader confidence to create their own stylish digs using things they collect, buy, inherit, or dumpster-dive for. Americana design elements that can fuel personal decorating styles from classic American country to urban lofts and everything in between. Photos and personal anecdotes highlight collectibles and DIY-ables from Max’s design and styling portfolio—such as such as bandana wallpaper, botanical prints, bunk beds, clocks, old maps, gingham and plaid everything, Pendleton blankets, camp vibes, and vintage signs. The book features casual to custom and higher end furnishings and includes design elements from a range of Humphrey’s interior design projects from East to West Coast.

In a brilliant mix of magic, history, and romance, M. K. Hobson moves her feisty young Witch, Emily Edwards, from the Old West of 1876 to turn-of-the-nineteenth-century New York City, whose polished surfaces conceal as much danger as anything west of the Rockies. Like it or not, Emily has fallen in love with Dreadnought Stanton, a New York Warlock as irresistible as he is insufferable. Newly engaged, she now must brave Dreadnought’s family and the magical elite of the nation’s wealthiest city. Not everyone is pleased with the impending nuptials, especially Emily’s future mother-in-law, a sociopathic socialite. But there are greater challenges still: confining couture, sinister Russian scientists, and a deathless Aztec goddess who dreams of plunging the world into apocalypse. With all they must confront, do Emily and Dreadnought have any hope of a happily-ever-after?