Sympathy For The Devil

Kent Anderson's stunning debut novel is a modern classic, a harrowing, authentic picture of one American soldier's experience of the Vietnam War--"unlike anything else in war literature" (Los Angeles Review of Books). Hanson joins the Green Berets fresh out of college. Carrying a volume of Yeats's poems in his uniform pocket, he has no idea of what he's about to face in Vietnam--from the enemy, from his fellow soldiers, or within himself. In vivid, nightmarish, and finely etched prose, Kent Anderson takes us through Hanson's two tours of duty and a bitter, ill-fated return to civilian life in-between, capturing the day-to-day process of war like no writer before or since.

When Detective Catrin Price returns to Cardiff after 12 years of self-imposed exile she is determined to lay to rest the ghosts of her unhappy past. Then her ex-boyfriend Rhys, once a promising young policeman but now a washed-up junkie, is found dead on one of her first nights on patrol. The official verdict is an accidental overdose, but Cat is convinced that there is something more to his death, something that will explain why the man who saved her life was so unwilling to save his own. Rhys had always been haunted by the mysterious disappearance of Owen Face, the troubled lead singer of rock band Seerland, who was last seen at a notorious suicide spot. No body was ever found and when Cat joins forces with one of Rhys' former colleagues, now a wealthy business man obsessed with all things Seerland-related, they begin to wonder whether the rumours that Face is still alive may be true. But when Cat is stalked by a meancing figure with a striking resemblance to a serial rapist Rhys famously put away, she begins to realise her life may also be in danger.

In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates how mainstream rock of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced conservative evangelical Christianity through the development of Christian pop music. For an earlier

Catalogus bij een tentoonstelling over de relatie tussen rockmuziek en avantgardistische kunst sinds de zestiger jaren.

Poetry. "In Kyle McCord's new book Gabriel empathizes, the Devil sympathizes, and an exhausted God watches a televangelist. Moving, imaginative and full of surprising turns, McCord's poems are alive with both the world and the dead who 'have no word for intimate, and a thousand words for blind.' I love the abundance of these poems, their humor, the music that made my ears howl and purr. When I dream about McCord's poems dreaming of me, I ride an aging mechanical bull, werewolves take over the city, Abraham Lincoln begs to rip off my blouse, God's love vanishes into my body like bread. I wake up hungry, afraid, laughing."-Traci Brimhall "In Kyle McCord's mercurial and visionary new book, SYMPATHY FROM THE DEVIL, we see a bold refiguring of the moral imagination that, like a Dante without a Beatrice, wanders hell bereft of the traditional compass that would clarify the archetypes. Here the eye opens wide its compassion in the dark. Play transgresses and so, in opposition to the self-servitude of sublimity and rapture, sheds light on cruelties and exclusions suffered in the name of the ideal. Everywhere we look in this book, we find the generosity and precision of paradox. The pleasure of absurdity may distance heartbreak, but it likewise binds us to it, such that the poet's lightness of touch and ranginess of sensibility becomes indistinguishable from his vision, the sense that one half of sympathy is always the embrace, the other the letting go. A stunning collection."-Bruce Bond "'What do you want from any of us, reader?' asks the first poem in Kyle McCord's SYMPATHY FROM THE DEVIL, bristling a bit, cocking its chin, letting us know that what follows will never be exactly what we expect. The book brims with wily intelligence and unsettling humor that challenge and surprise and thrill and move us so that in the end what we want is everything this terrific book has to give."-Corey Marks 

Madeline Bean, caterer to the stars, is in the middle of the biggest job of her career. She and her partner Wesley have pulled off Hollywood's most outrageous A-list Halloween party for notorious producer Bruno Huntley, complete with an eerie fortuneteller who is astonishingly accurate, and exotic food that's to die for. Before long, Bruno is thrashing and writhing out on the dance floor. Just one problem: he's not standing up, And soon, he's not even breathing. The newly late Mr. Huntley was poisoned, that's certain. But the number of suspects with a yen to send Bruno to the devil could fill an audition for extras in the next Quentin Tarantino flick. When Wesley is arrested for the murder because of a long-standing dispute with the maniacal mogul, Madeline knows he couldn't be guilty. But to prove it, she has to wade through the muck of a mudslinging family, outrun a pair of crazed canines, dodge a pair of well-aimed bullets, and expose a slew of secrets that could put a soap opera to shame. Somebody's cooked up a murder, and it's up to Madeline to find out who--before she faces a fadeout of her own.

Details the 1895 arrest and trial of a medical student for the grisly murder of two young women inside San Francisco's Emmanuel Baptist Church in what the press of the day characterized as a reenactment of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Detached and ironic; a master of the pointed put-down, of the cutting quip; enigmatic, impossible to truly know: this is the calcified public image of Gore Vidal--one the man himself was fond of reinforcing. "I'm exactly as I appear," he once said of himself. "There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water." Michael Mewshaw's Sympathy for the Devil, a memoir of his friendship with the stubbornly iconoclastic public intellectual, is a welcome corrective to this tired received wisdom. A complex, nuanced portrait emerges in these pages--and while "Gore" can indeed be brusque, standoffish, even cruel, Mewshaw also catches him in more vulnerable moments. The Gore Vidal the reader comes to know here is generous and supportive to younger, less successful writers; he is also, especially toward the end of his life, disappointed, even lonely. Sparkling, often hilarious, and filled with spicy anecdotes about expat life in Italy, Sympathy for the Devil is an irresistible inside account of a man who was himself--faults and all--impossible to resist. As enlightening as it is entertaining, it offers a unique look at a figure many only think they know.