Courtney Love

A multi-textual memoir chronicling the life of one of our most potent pop iconsGroundbreaking rock musician. Award-winning actress. Perceptive songwriter and author. Mother. Wife of a rock god. Fashionista and trendsetter. Provocateur. In each and every one of these roles Courtney Love has demonstrated a wholehearted commitment to her art, and an intense drive and a lust for life that have made her a star and a celebrity icon—but have also led her into some unwise, uncharted, and even dangerous territory. Simultaneously candid and enigmatic, Love has a mordant wit and vivid intelligence matched in intensity only by the extraordinary life she has led, from a bleak early childhood through great fame and terrible heartbreak to the present day. By turns exhilarating and unsettling, this is a story told for the first time in Dirty Blonde. Composed of an astonishing and eclectic collection of deeply personal artifacts including personal letters, childhood records, poetry, diary entries, song lyrics, fanzines, show flyers, other original writings, and never-before-seen photographs, Dirty Blonde leads us through the unimaginable highs and the despairing lows of one of the most compelling and creative figures in the world of popular culture. Through these diaries we see Love’s accomplishments, her mistakes, her history, and her bright future in a whole new light. From her upbringing in Oregon through her years living in Japan, New Zealand, and London, from her career highs with Hole and as a Hollywood leading lady to her personal heartbreak and struggle, Dirty Blonde is Love laid bare—a wholly fascinating portrait of a fierce and insightful woman with an unblinking worldview and a determination to express herself no matter the cost.

The incredible story of one of rock's most controversial stars, featuring excerpts from her letters and journals, interviews with friends speaking openly for the first time, and dozens of revealing, candid photos.

Features quotes gathered over the years from family, friends, and the artists themselves, giving the reader a personal insight into their music and world.

“A gem of adolescent disaffection featuring a Holden Caulfield-like heroine.” — Vogue.com “Once I started reading it, I didn’t want to stop. . . . If your all-time favorite books include works of young-adult fiction (like Catcher), I strongly urge you to take a look." — USA Today/Pop Candy A riveting coming-of-age story, Chocolates for Breakfast became an international sensation upon its initial publication in 1956, and still stands out as a shocking and moving account of the way teenagers collide, often disastrously, against love and sex for the first time. This edition includes an introduction by author Emma Straub. Courtney Farrell is a disaffected, sexually precocious fifteen-year-old. She splits her time between Manhattan, where her father works in publishing, and Los Angeles, where her mother is a still-beautiful Hollywood actress. After a boarding-school crush on a female teacher ends badly, Courtney sets out to learn everything fast. Her first drink is a very dry martini, and her first kiss the beginning of a full-blown love affair with an older man.

Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane has always stood at the intersection of fashion, art and music. Over the past 10 years, his slick, sexy designs and signature cut have revolutionized menswear. Several bodies of his photographic work--2005's London Birth of a Cult and his ongoing "Rock Diary" series for V magazine--have documented underground rock culture at its loudest and most extreme. In this latest project, Slimane teams up with the editors of Visionaire and V to deliver Portrait of a Performer, an exclusive photojournal devoted to the provocative musician and muse, Courtney Love. Shot in New York in August of 2006, just before the release of Love's latest record, the intimate black-and-white studies capture the American pop icon, semi-nude, just before her return to the Billboard charts--defiant, mesmerizing, flawed and vulnerable. Portrait of a Performer documents a highly charged encounter between two creative forces who have influenced rock and fashion, each on their own terms.

The daughter of esteemed writer Paula Fox and the mother of Courtney Love relates “the curse of the first-born daughter” that has haunted four generations of her family As an adopted child, Linda Carroll created a magical world of her own, made up of dramatic adventures and the abiding fantasy that her real mother would come and take her away. When she finds herself pregnant at the age of eighteen, she is determined to have the perfect understanding with her child that she lacked with her adoptive mother. But readers will know better, for that baby grows up to be Courtney Love, desperately attention-seeking, deeply troubled, and one of the most talented women in rock. Even as a baby, Courtney is beset by mood swings that no doctor can explain or cure. Her dark moods and paranoia escalate as she grows up, driving mother and daughter apart. When Courtney has a daughter of her own, Linda finally decides to find her own biological mother, and end the estrangement of generations of first-born daughters. Her Mother’s Daughter is Linda Carroll’s story of self-discovery as an adopted daughter, a childlike hippie mother, and a woman determined to find herself before finding her roots. Set apart from the typical celebrity memoir by Carroll’s gifted storytelling, Her Mother’s Daughter gives a fresh perspective on the elusive yet enduring connections between mothers and daughters, and reveals the true history of the wildly confabulatory Courtney Love.

Was Kurt Cobain's Death Murder or Suicide? Hank Harrison, author of the best sellers, The Dead Vol I and II, several books on King Arthur and the Holy Grail and two novels, presents an exciting and in depth study of the movement founded by Nirvana Superstar Kurt Cobain. Was Cobain¿s Death an assassination? If so why was he killed? This highly acclaimed author allows each reader to decide this controversial cas.

The founder of the Preemptive Love Coalition (PLC), an international development organization based in Iraq that provides lifesaving heart surgeries to Iraqi children and trains local doctors and nurses, presents a firsthand account of lifesaving and peacemaking in the world's most notorious war-torn country.