Pretty Boy Blues

Pretty Boy Blues is the story of Barbara, a child who experiences abandonment, neglect, and abuse in a motherless home with a distant and disturbed father. She spends her childhood lonely and isolated, becoming a juvenile delinquent at eleven. Desperately looking for love, she drifts from one boy to the next, becoming pregnant and quitting school at the age of seventeen. She struggles through multiple relationships and several divorces before eventually going to college to become a psychologist. Plagued with insecurity, shame, and a shattered sense of self-worth, can she find gratification internally -- and not externally -- to fill the hole left in her from her childhood? Sadly, Barbara's story is not a unique one. Through her compelling memoir, victims of abuse will understand that they are as worthy of love and true happiness as anyone else.

After dating several good-looking men with serious deficiencies, Sherry Johnson, the Executive Director of a transitional housing program, vows to leave the pretty-boys alone. That is until she encounters generous, kind hearted Keith Blair, whose family owns a chain of sporting goods stores. Keith admittedly has no interest in serious, long-term relationships and only wants a long-term fling with Sherry who rejects his advances. However, after several futile attempts to resist each other, the couple marries. Initially, they seem blissfully in love with a fairytale life until Keith's deficiencies are revealed and they separate, leaving stubborn and proud Sherry almost as helpless as the people she serves. Upon discovering Sherry's pregnancy, Keith threatens to fight her for custody unless she moves back in with him until she gives birth; all the while insisting that it was for the sake of his child. Can this pretty-boy overcome his issues in time to salvage his family? Or should Sherry opt for the ordinary fellows?

For Malcolm Jones, his parents’ disintegrating marriage was at the center of life in North Carolina in the 1950s and 60s. His father, charming but careless, was often drunk and away from home; his mother, a schoolteacher and faded Southern belle, clung to the past and hungered for respectability. In Little Boy Lost, Jones—one of our most admired cultural observers—recalls a childhood in which this relationship played out against the larger cracks of society: the convulsions of desegregation and a popular culture that threatens the church-centered life of his family. He richly evokes a time and place with rare depth and candor, giving us the fundamental stories of a life—where he comes from, who he was, who he has become.

In the third Camilla MacPhee Mystery, Camilla’s looking forward to cutting loose at Ottawa’s Bluesfest, the huge open-air extravaganza, and to seeing the tail end of her annoying office assistant, Alvin, who is finally quitting. Then the news comes from the East Coast. Alvin’s younger brother Jimmy has vanished from the midst of a Canada Day crowd in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Is he dead? Has he been abducted? Sleuthing irritably about Sydney on Alvin’s behalf, Camilla manages to make the usual quota of people froth at the mouth, including Jimmy’s frantic family, forlorn friends and puzzled teachers. She doesn’t spare the parish priest or even the guy at the chip stand. Before Camilla knows it, all roads lead back to Ottawa, where a killer with everything to lose waits to create havoc among the tents, guitar-pickers and happy, swaying crowds. If Camilla doesn’t sort out this whole mess, how many other people are going to die?

The brilliant and bracing debut collection of poetry from Declan Ryan: a writer, critic, and fierce new literary voice. Declan Ryan's Crisis Actor chronicles various kinds of failures and farewells. It is peopled by faded heroes and deferential devotees, a hanged donkey and a bloated rat, solitary bachelors and disillusioned youths—these are the watchers, not the players. The poems are awash in rueful self-accusation and laconic skepticism. There are touching elegies, reportage, and bruised, wary replayings. A blistering sequence about boxers and their fates weaves through the collection. The overwhelming sense is of life going on elsewhere, the halcyon days and brightness of years long past. This is the aftermath of being one who—in Matthew Arnold’s words—"has reached his utmost limits and finds . . . himself far less than he had imagined himself." But there are still flashes of camaraderie, of stars aligning: lunchtimes in sunlit garden squares, languorous afternoons in pubs cheering for hard-won triumphs. These precious, precarious moments point to how we might reclaim potential, discover human connection in times of defeat or despair, and reach toward grace and redemption.

Popular music studies is a rapidly expanding field with changing emphases and agendas. The music industry has changed in recent years, as has governmental involvement in popular music schemes as part of the culture industry. The distinction between the major record labels and the outsider independents has become blurred over time. Popular music, as part of this umbrella of the culture industry, has been progressively globalized and globalizing. The tensions within popular music are now no longer between national cultural identity and popular music, but between the local and the global. This four volume collection examines the changing status of popular music against this background. Simon Frith examines the heritage of popular music, and how technology has changed not only the production but the reception of this brand of sound. The collection examines how the traditional genres of rock, pop and soul have broken down and what has replaced them, as well as showing how this proliferation of musical styles has also splintered the audience of popular music.

This professional biography of Ramblin' Jack Elliott (1931- ) examines the music and milestones of the American folksinger's half-century career, detailing his role in the preservation of the music of Woody Guthrie and his mentoring of and influence on Bob Dylan. The book also provides a comprehensive discography of recordings, as well as a bibliography, index, and over 30 photographs.

With its appeal predicated upon what civilized society rejects, there has always been something hidden in plain sight when it comes to the outlaw figure as cultural myth. Damian A. Carpenter traverses the unsettled outlaw territory that is simultaneously a part of and apart from settled American society by examining outlaw myth, performance, and perception over time. Since the late nineteenth century, the outlaw voice has been most prominent in folk performance, the result being a cultural persona invested in an outlaw tradition that conflates the historic, folkloric, and social in a cultural act. Focusing on the works and guises of Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan, Carpenter goes beyond the outlaw figure’s heroic associations and expands on its historical (Jesse James, Billy the Kid), folk (John Henry, Stagolee), and social (tramps, hoboes) forms. He argues that all three performers represent a culturally disruptive force, whether it be the bad outlaw that Lead Belly represented to an urban bourgeoisie audience, the good outlaw that Guthrie shaped to reflect the social concerns of marginalized people, or the honest outlaw that Dylan offered audiences who responded to him as a promoter of clear-sighted self-evaluation. As Carpenter shows, the outlaw and the law as located in society are interdependent in terms of definition. His study provides an in-depth look at the outlaw figure’s self-reflexive commentary and critique of both performer and society that reflects the times in which they played their outlaw roles.