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The legendary autobiography of Jacques Mesrine, France's most infamous criminal France's Public Enemy Number One from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s--when he was killed by police in a sensational traffic shootout--Jacques Mesrine (1936-1979) is the best-known criminal in French history. Mesrine was notorious both for his violent exploits and for the media attention he attracted, and he remains very much a public media figure in France and Europe. In 2008 there were two feature-length films based on his life, one of them starring Vincent Cassel in the lead role. Mesrine wrote The Death Instinct while serving time in the high-security prison La Santé; the manuscript was smuggled out o...
Boris Vian is a rare phenomenon. Nothing short of a national treasure in France, he is hardly known overseas. In his lifetime, he divided literary opinion with masterpieces that failed to sell and best sellers that caused outrage, trials and even deaths, including his own. As an impresario, he became the figurehead of the jazz scene that marked the French left bank at the end of the Second World War and was responsible for bringing Duke Ellington and Miles Davis to France. As a musician, he played his trumpet against the advice of cardiologists, sang pacifist songs before audiences of outraged patriots and, in passing, created French rock ‘n’ roll. Posthumously, he became known for his theatre, film scripts and poetry as well as for his novels. And in May ’68 he became a revolutionary icon.
Sparks--the long-running duo of Ron and Russell Mael--are among the most respected songwriters of their generation, their songs ranking alongside those of Ray Davies (The Kinks having been a formative influence), George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim. Formed in Los Angeles in 1971, Sparks have issued over 20 albums and scored chart hits with songs such as "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us," "Cool Places" and "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth." While their musical style has changed dramatically over the course of 40 years--embracing the British Invasion sound of the 60s, glam rock, disco (they teamed up with Giorgio Moroder for 1979's "No. 1 in Heaven") and even techn...
This is a children’s book, written for children between the ages of 2 to 4 years old. It is about a cat called Tam-Tam, a bird called Lulu, and a man called Sam. The story is about Tam-Tam the cat befriending Lulu the bird, who she meets in her backyard. Tam-Tam and Lulu seems to like each other at the start, so much so that Lulu decides that she does not want to leave Tam-Tam and Sam when he tried to encourage the bird to leave. Sam welcomed the bird and named it Lulu. Tam-Tam and Lulu seemed very happy with this, by meowing and purring and tweeting, showing their approval.
The triumphs and tragedies of growing up as the son of a famous Beat artist. TOSH is a memoir of growing up as the son of an enigmatic, much-admired, hermetic, and ruthlessly bohemian artist during the waning years of the Beat Generation and the heyday of hippie counterculture. A critical figure in the history of postwar American culture, Tosh Berman's father, Wallace Berman, was known as the "father of assemblage art," and was the creator of the legendary mail-art publication Semina. Wallace Berman and his wife, famed beauty and artist's muse Shirley Berman, raised Tosh between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and their home life was a heady atmosphere of art, music, and literature, with loca...
Fiction. "In the tradition of Karl May and Franz Kafka, Boris Vian imagines an American even more amazing that the land he has never visited. "I Spit on Your Graves" is the first novel to put the quotation marks around the "hardboiled" thriller -- a vivid and startling performance" (J. Hoberman). The book is Boris Vian's (1920-1959) sex-and-violence-filled homage to American noir. Originally published in France as J'rai Cracher Sur Vos Tombes -- after allegedly being censored in the U.S. and "translated" into French -- the novel was no best seller, establishing Vian as one of the most famous writers of the mid-twentieth century.
Vian's second noir novel under the Vernon Sullivan pseudonym is a brutal tale of racism in postwar New York City, as protagonist Daniel Parker is blackmailed by a long lost brother. Also included is the short story "Dogs, Desire and Death," and Vian's account of the controversies surrounding his previous novel I Spit on your Graves.
Fiction. Translated from the French by Brian Harper. "FOAM OF THE DAZE is a novel like no other, a sexy, innocent, smart and sweet cartoon of a world which then begins, little by little, to bleed real blood until, in the end, the blood turns out to be our own. I read it nearly thirty years ago in its previous incarnation as Mood Indigo and I loved it then; it's still one of my favorite books in the whole world"--Jim Krusoe. "A kind of jazzy, cheerful, sexy, sci-fi mid-20th century Huysmans. Check it out. There is just no place like France"--Richard Hell.
Communities of Sense argues for a new understanding of the relation between politics and aesthetics in today’s globalized and image-saturated world. Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Rancière’s theorization of democratic politics to suggest that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the “science of the sensible,” is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but instead part of a historically specific organization of social roles and communality. Rather than formulating aesthetics as the Other to politics, the contributors show that aesthetics and politics are mutually implicated in the construction of communities of visibility and sensation th...
Book Description: Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes is an anthology of forty-three interviews with minds of all kinds. Spanning over seven years, Follow for Now includes interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky, Philip K. Dick, Aesop Rock, Erik Davis, Howard Bloom, David X. Cohen, Richard Saul Wurman, N. Katherine Hayles, Manuel De Landa, Rudy Rucker, Milemarker, Steve Aylett, Doug Stanhope, Paul Roberts, Shepard Fairey, Tod Swank, dalek, Eric Zimmerman, Steven Johnson, Mark Dery, Geert Lovink, Brenda Laurel, and many, many more. Follow for Now is an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It also includes an extensive bibliography, a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages.