The B Side

An acclaimed cultural historian--drawing on previously untapped archival sources and interviews with such voices as Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Linda Ronstadt, and Herb Alpert--presents a social history of the great American songwriting era.

There are the acknowledged classics of world literature: the canonical works assigned in schools, topping every must-read list . . . and then there are the B-Sides. These are the books that slipped through the cracks, went unread, missed their rightful appointment with posterity. They were ahead of their times or behind their times or on a whole different schedule than the rest of the universe. What do you do when a book that you love has been neglected or dismissed by everyone else? In B-Side Books, leading writers, critics, and scholars show why their favorite forgotten books deserve a new audience. From dusty westerns and far-out science fiction to obscure Czech novelists and romance-novel precursors, the contributors advocate for the unsung virtues of overlooked books. They write about unheralded novels, poetry collections, memoirs, and more with understanding, respect, passion, and love. In these thoughtful, often personal essays, contributors—including Stephanie Burt, Caleb Crain, Merve Emre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Carlo Rotella, and Namwali Serpell—read books by writers such as Helen DeWitt, Shirley Jackson, Stanislaw Lem, Dambudzo Marechera, Paule Marshall, and Charles Portis.

ChanceWhen I read the roommate wanted ad, I thought my sister was encouraging me to live with an insane person. As it turns out, he isn't insane, he's sexy and one hundred percent my type. Living with him will be the ultimate test of my self control. When the combination of our love of music and my overwhelming need to take care of him meets jealousy, sparks fly. His heart may be damaged, but nothing is beyond repair.Now all I have to do is convince him that I'm in this for the long haul, not just this moment.TylerI may look like the happy-go-lucky gay guy with a big smile and more punny tees than one person should probably own. But it's just a shield to protect my heart, the one that has been torn apart by the people who were meant to love me most. The last thing I'm willing to do is risk the tattered shreds on my new --straight--roommate. Sure, he's sexy as sin and has a love of music that rivals my own, but all that is just grounds for a new friendship. Nothing more. Right?Yet, every moment we spend together tests a little bit more of my self control. When it turns out my roommate is not as straight as I once thought, I have to decide if this is one playlist I should listen to. Will we have our own love song, or will this just be another broken-hearted ballad?

Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg's writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don't more wives kill their husbands?

The death of one of her teenage heroes serves as an long-overdue wake-up call causing Lisa to examine her life and how she's lived it, from her youth as a poet on the streets of the East Village to 10 years later, all grown up with a career and a fiance.--Cover.

If given another chance to write for the series, which albums would 33 1/3 authors focus on the second time around? This anthology features compact essays from past 33 1/3 authors on albums that consume them, but about which they did not write. It explores often overlooked and underrated albums that may not have inspired their 33 1/3 books, but have played a large part in their own musical cultivation. Questions central to the essays include: How has this album influenced your worldview? How does this album intersect with your other creative and critical pursuits? How does this album index a particular moment in cultural history? In your own personal history? Why is the album perhaps under-the-radar, or a buried treasure? Why can't you stop listening to it? Bringing together 33 1/3's rich array of writers, critics, and scholars, this collection probes our taste in albums, our longing for certain tunes, and our desire to hit repeat--all while creating an expansive "must-listen" list for readers in search of unexplored musical territories.

This explosive, award-winning novella of growing up in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), told in exquisite, imaginative prose, touches the readers nerve through the authors harrowing portrait of lives disrupted by white settlers, a young disillusioned black man, and individual suffering in the 1960s and 1970s. Marecheras raw, piercing writings secured his place in African literature as a stylistic innovator and rebel commentator of the ghetto condition. While The House of Hunger is the centerpiece of this collection, readers are also treated to a series of short sketches in which Marechera, with angry humor, further navigates themes of madness, violence, despair, and survival.

Making it in Hell, says Bruce Jackson, is the spirit behind the sixty-five work songs gathered in this eloquent dispatch from a brutal era of prison life in the Deep South. Through engagingly documented song arrangements and profiles of their singers, Jackson shows how such pieces as "Hammer Ring," "Ration Blues," "Yellow Gal," and "Jody's Got My Wife and Gone" are like no other folk music forms: they are distinctly African in heritage, diminished in power and meaning outside their prison context, and used exclusively by black convicts. The songs helped workers through the rigors of cane cutting, logging, and cotton picking. Perhaps most important, they helped resolve the men's hopes and longings and allowed them a subtle outlet for grievances they could never voice when face-to-face with their jailers.

B-Sides, by Brandon Leake, is a collection of poems created over the course of the past 5 years. Poems written with no intent to be performed or rehearsed, but for cathartic purposes. However, after seeing the need in his community for certain unreleased pieces, Brandon has elected to release some of these poems into a book. Brandon Leake, is a Spoken Word Poet and Artistic Educator from Stockton, CA. He is also the founder and CEO of Called To Move - CTM.