Download or read book Pet Shop Boys Literally written by Chris Heath and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pet Shop Boys are one of the most successful and unusual bands of the last five decades. They are the pop duo that proves pop music can be modern, ecstatic and playful as well as serious and intelligent, winning them legions of devoted fans throughout the world. In 1989, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe invited journalist Chris Heath and photographer Lawrence Watson to shadow them around Hong Kong, Japan and the UK as they embarked on their first-ever tour. This book is the result: an immersive portrait giving access into the duo’s inner sanctum, showing them in brilliantly observed detail as they work, relax, gossip, argue and occasionally try to make sense of what they do. ‘As clear a picture as could be wished for of the seething mass of elegant contradictions that is the Pet Shop Boys’ on-the-road experience.’ Independent on Sunday ‘This superbly reported book transcends tired rock journalism cliché. It’s about what it means to be a pop star, what it means to be a Pet Shop Boy... how to love pop, hold it to a higher standard and subvert its expectations.’ Laura Snapes

Download or read book Pet Shop Boys Catalogue written by Philip Hoare and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over 20 years, the Pet Shop Boys have been at the cutting edge of popular music. This book is a lavish visual retrospective of the duo's career, featuring behind-the-scenes shots from every video, concert and theatre show.

Download or read book Pet Shop Boys Versus America written by Chris Heath and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem written by Neil Tennant and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everything I've ever doneEverything I ever doEvery place I've ever beenEverywhere I'm going toOver a career that spans four decades and thirteen studio albums with Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant has consistently proved himself to be one of the most elegant and stylish of contemporary lyricists. Arranged alphabetically, One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem presents an overview of Neil Tennant's considerable achievement as a chronicler of modern life: the romance, the break-ups, the aspirations, the changing attitudes, the history, the politics, the pain. The landscape of Tennant's lyrics is recognisably British in character - restrained and preoccupied with the mundane, occasionally satirical, yet also yearning for escape and theatrical release. Often surprisingly revealing, this volume is contextualised by a personal commentary on each lyric and a fascinating introduction by the author which gives an insight into the process and genesis of writing. Flamboyant, understated, celebratory and elegiac, Neil Tennant's lyrics are a document of our times.

Download or read book Pet Shop Boys written by Michael Cowton and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Hotels of North America written by Rick Moody and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed Rick Moody, a darkly comic portrait of a man who comes to life in the most unexpected of ways: through his online reviews. Reginald Edward Morse is one of the top reviewers on RateYourLodging.com, where his many reviews reveal more than just details of hotels around the globe -- they tell his life story. The puzzle of Reginald's life comes together through reviews that comment upon his motivational speaking career, the dissolution of his marriage, the separation from his beloved daughter, and his devotion to an amour known only as "K." But when Reginald disappears, we are left with the fragments of a life -- or at least the life he has carefully constructed -- which writer Rick Moody must make sense of. An inventive blurring of the lines between the real and the fabricated, Hotels of North America demonstrates Moody's masterly ability to push the bounds of the novel.

Download or read book War Porn written by Roy Scranton and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of the best and most disturbing war novels in years." —The Wall Street Journal “War porn,” n. Videos, images, and narratives featuring graphic violence, often brought back from combat zones, viewed voyeuristically or for emotional gratification. Such media are often presented and circulated without context, though they may be used as evidence of war crimes. War porn is also, in Roy Scranton’s searing debut novel, a metaphor for the experience of war in the age of the War on Terror, the fracturing and fragmentation of perspective, time, and self that afflicts soldiers and civilians alike, the global networks and face-to-face moments that suture our fragmented lives together. In War Porn three lives fit inside one another like nesting dolls: a restless young woman at an end-of-summer barbecue in Utah; an American soldier in occupied Baghdad; and Qasim al-Zabadi, an Iraqi math professor, who faces the US invasion of his country with fear, denial, and perseverance. As War Porn cuts from America to Iraq and back again, as home and hell merge, we come to see America through the eyes of the occupied, even as we see Qasim become a prisoner of the occupation. Through the looking glass of War Porn, Scranton reveals the fragile humanity that connects Americans and Iraqis, torturers and the tortured, victors and their victims.

Download or read book Pet Shop Boys versus America written by Chris Heath and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other pop group in recent history has faced fame with such intelligence, humour and shrewdness as the Pet Shop Boys. In 1991, the band toured North America for the first time shadowed by journalist Chris Heath and legendary rock photographer Pennie Smith. They visited fourteen cities in one month, confronting the American music industry and colliding with the likes of Liza Minnelli, Steven Spielberg and Axl Rose. This is more than a documentary of a tour; it is an unusually intimate portrait of two maverick British musicians always reluctant to compromise. ‘There was a time when the Pet Shop Boys seemed to exist entirely on radio, television and in magazines. This is the other world of the Pet Shop Boys in concert, travel and backstage, as they bring their art and glamour to America. It’s funny too.’ Johnny Marr ‘A brilliant book, to be read over and over again. How could anyone not love these men?’ NME

Download or read book Performing Rites written by Simon Frith and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-02-06 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who's better? Billie Holiday or P. J. Harvey? Blur or Oasis? Dylan or Keats? And how many friendships have ridden on the answer? Such questions aren't merely the stuff of fanzines and idle talk; they inform our most passionate arguments, distill our most deeply held values, make meaning of our ever-changing culture. In Performing Rites, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks what we talk about when we talk about music. What's good, what's bad? What's high, what's low? Why do such distinctions matter? Instead of dismissing emotional response and personal taste as inaccessible to the academic critic, Simon Frith takes these forms of engagement as his subject--and discloses their place at the very center of the aesthetics that structure our culture and color our lives. Taking up hundreds of songs and writers, Frith insists on acts of evaluation of popular music as music. Ranging through and beyond the twentieth century, Performing Rites puts the Pet Shop Boys and Puccini, rhythm and lyric, voice and technology, into a dialogue about the undeniable impact of popular aesthetics on our lives. How we nod our heads or tap our feet, grin or grimace or flip the dial; how we determine what's sublime and what's "for real"--these are part of the way we construct our social identities, and an essential response to the performance of all music. Frith argues that listening itself is a performance, both social gesture and bodily response. From how they are made to how they are received, popular songs appear here as not only meriting aesthetic judgments but also demanding them, and shaping our understanding of what all music means.

Download or read book America s Boy written by Wade Rouse and published by Dutton Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journalist remembers his childhood struggles to gain acceptance from the jeans-wearing set, his envy of his admired older brother, his parent's atypical personalities, and the Fourth of July accident that ended his brother's life.

Download or read book Parrot and Olivier in America written by Peter Carey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-04-20 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parrot and Olivier in America has been shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. From the two-time Booker Prize–winning author comes an irrepressibly funny new novel set in early nineteenth-century America. Olivier—an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville—is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected by an enigmatic one-armed marquis. When Olivier sets sail for the nascent United States—ostensibly to make a study of the penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from one more revolution—Parrot will be there, too: as spy for the marquis, and as protector, foe, and foil for Olivier. As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, between their picaresque adventures apart and together—in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands—a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold. And with their story, Peter Carey explores the experiment of American democracy with dazzling inventiveness and with all the richness and surprise of characterization, imagery, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer.

Download or read book The Pet Shop Boys and the Political written by Bodie A. Ashton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-25 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pet Shop Boys came of age at a time of deep socio-political tension. From the rise of sexual politics and awareness to Thatcherite neoliberalism and the Cold War, this book explores the cultural and political impact of the band and offers a fascinating window into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An archetypal 'gay band', it shows how their overt queerness influenced generations of LGBTQIA+ music lovers and artists alike. Covering the full oeuvre of The Pet Shop boys; their albums, films, stage productions and collaborations, chapters in this collection show how their work is suffused with political commentary on the past and present covering themes as broad as queer identity, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, globalization and Brexit. It also places them within the context of their times and considers them as activists, authors, social commentators, political actors and personalities to better understand what influenced them. Bringing together a range of perspectives and disciplines, The Pet Shop Boys and the Political provides a unique and untapped insight into a formative pop band of the modern era that has mirrored and shaped society over the past forty years.

Download or read book Beautiful Disaster Signed Limited Edition written by Jamie McGuire and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abby Abernathy is re-inventing herself as the good girl as she begins her freshman year at college, which is why she must resist lean, cut, and tattooed Travis Maddox, a classic bad boy.

Download or read book Devil in the Grove written by Gilbert King and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction * Nominated for a 2013 Edgar Award * Book of the Year (Non-fiction, 2012) The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor From acclaimed, prize-winning author Gilbert King comes this gripping true story of racism, murder, rape, and the law—a stirring account that brings to light one of the most dramatic court cases in American history, and offers a rare and revealing portrait of Thurgood Marshall that the world has never seen before—now available in a limited Olive Edition. Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life. In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor with the help of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old girl cried rape, McCall pursued four young blacks who dared envision a future for themselves beyond the groves. The Ku Klux Klan joined the hunt, hell-bent on lynching the men who came to be known as "the Groveland Boys." Associates thought it was suicidal for Marshall to wade into the "Florida Terror," but the young lawyer would not shrink from the fight despite continuous death threats against him. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI's unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund files, Gilbert King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader.

Download or read book Mark Twain s Book for Bad Boys and Girls written by Mark Twain and published by M J F Books. This book was released on 2002-07 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first-ever compilation of Twain's wise and witty essays, sketches, and stories on the joys and rewards of misbehavior. With themes including "honesty is not always the best policy, ""the wicked are not always punished," and "virtue is often its only reward," this is a charming treasury that will warm the hearts of bad boys and girls (of any age)everywhere

Download or read book Father of the Rain written by Lily King and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2010-07-06 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Editors’ Choice—“a gripping epic about a father and daughter that plumbs the dark side of a family riven by addiction and mental illness” (Entertainment Weekly). Gardiner Amory’s life is reeling—Nixon is being impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life negotiating her parents’ conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother and the conservative, liquor-soaked life of her father. But when the pair divorces, Gardiner’s basest impulses are unleashed in a deluge, the chasm between all of them widens, and Daley is stretched thinly across it. As she reaches adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world of her father’s prejudices and embarks on her own life—until Gardiner hits rock bottom. Returning home to help her father get sober, Daley risks everything she’s found beyond him, including a chance at love, in an attempt to repair a trust that was broken long ago . . . In this Winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction, Lily King pulls readers into “a brilliant exploration of the attraction of martyrdom, the intoxication of playing savior. . . . An absorbing, insightful story written in cool, polished prose right to the last conflicted line” (Washington Post).

Download or read book Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl written by Andrea Lawlor and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In these irreverent pages, a shapeshifter gets a crash course in gender and sexuality by inhabiting both sides of the binary and arriving precisely somewhere in the middle." —O, The Oprah Magazine “HOT” (Maggie Nelson) • “TIGHT” (Eileen Myles) • “DEEP” (Michelle Tea) It's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flaneur with a rich dating life. But Paul's also got a secret: he's a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Paul transforms his body and his gender at will as he crossed the country––a journey and adventure through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his/her way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.