New Release

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece

by Michael Benson

Space Odyssey is the definitive history of the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to be released in April 2018 in celebration of film’s 50th anniversary. Created by noted filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, then fresh off the success of his brilliant Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, and Arthur C. Clarke, one of the century’s most important science fiction writers, 2001 is one of the most original and influential films ever made.

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Featured Author: Ann Powers

powers Ann Powers (@annkpowers) is NPR’s music critic and correspondent and one of the nation’s leading music writers. Throughout her storied career, Ann has held positions at San Francisco Weekly, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, Blender, and the and the Experience Music Project. Since 2011 she’s written for NPR’s music news blog, The Record, covering music through the lenses of culture, gender, sexuality, and race. Most recently, she spearheaded Turning the Tables, a collaboration between NPR and Lincoln Center that highlights the contributions of female artists. Turning the Tables has curated a list of the 150 greatest albums by women that aims to start a new conversation about women’s place in music history, and to make a much-needed intervention in the canon of music writing.

“[The list] stands for music history, touching upon every significant trend, social issue, set of sonic innovations, and new avenue for self-expression that popular music has intersected in the past fifty years,” Powers writes. The same might be said for Powers’s own career: through her five books and countless articles she has redefined the parameters of music criticism, making sure women are given their proper due, not at the margins, but at the center of the story.

Ann Powers’s influence on contemporary music criticism is indelible. In honor of the August 15^th publication of Good Booty, we hope you enjoy this look back at all the books she has published with Sarah Lazin Books.

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New Release

To Funk and Die in L.A.: A D Hunter Mystery

by Nelson George

To Funk and Die in LA, the fourth book in the D Hunter crime-fiction series, brings the ex-bodyguard to the City of Angels on a very dark mission when his grandfather, businessman Daniel “Big Danny” Hunter, is shot dead in a drive-by. Why would someone execute a grocery store owner? D soon finds there was more to Big Danny’s life than selling loaves of bread. The old man, it turns out, was deeply involved with Dr. Funk, a legendary musical innovator who has become a mysterious recluse.

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New Release

LOU REED: A Life

by Anthony DeCurtis

The essential biography of one of music’s most influential icons: Lou Reed

As lead singer and songwriter for the Velvet Underground and a renowned solo artist, Lou Reed invented alternative rock. His music, at once a source of transcendent beauty and coruscating noise, violated all definitions of genre while speaking to millions of fans and inspiring generations of musicians.

But while his iconic status may be fixed, the man himself was anything but. Lou Reed’s life was a transformer’s odyssey. Eternally restless and endlessly hungry for new experiences, Reed reinvented his persona, his sound, even his sexuality time and again. A man of contradictions and extremes, he was fiercely independent yet afraid of being alone, artistically fearless yet deeply paranoid, eager for commercial success yet disdainful of his own triumphs. Channeling his jagged energy and literary sensibility into classic songs – like “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Sweet Jane” – and radically experimental albums alike, Reed remained desperately true to his artistic vision, wherever it led him.

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New Edition

When Chickenheads Come Home To Roost: A Hip Hop Feminist Breaks It Down

by Joan Morgan

with a foreword by Brittney Cooper

(Simon & Schuster 2000)

“Morgan has given an entire generation of black feminists space and language to center their pleasures alongside their politics.” —Janet Mock, New York Times bestselling author of Redefining Realness

“All that and then some, Chickenheads informs and educates, confronts and charms, raises the bar high by getting down low, and, to steal my favorite Joan Morgan phrase, bounced me out of the room.” —Marlon James, Man Booker Prize–winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings

Still fresh, funny, and irreverent after eighteen years, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost gives voice to the most intimate thoughts of the post-Civil Rights, post-feminist, post-soul generation.

Joan Morgan offers a provocative and powerful look into the life of the modern black woman: a complex world in which feminists often have not-so-clandestine affairs with the most sexist of men, where women who treasure their independence frequently prefer men who pick up the tab, where the deluge of babymothers and babyfathers reminds black women who long for marriage that traditional nuclear families are a reality for less than forty percent of the population, and where black women are forced to make sense of a world where truth is no longer black and white but subtle, intriguing shades of gray.

A pioneering hip-hop journalist and award-winning feminist author, Joan Morgan coined the term “hip-hop feminism” in 1999 with the publication of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, which is now used at colleges across the country. Morgan has taught at Duke University, Stanford University, and The New School.

Shake It Up

Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay-Z
edited by Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar

(Library of America)

THE ESSENTIAL PLAYLIST OF GREAT WRITING ABOUT THE MUSIC THAT ROCKED AMERICA

Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar’s Shake It Up invites the reader into the tumult and excitement of the rock revolution through fifty landmark pieces by a supergroup of writers on rock in all its variety, from heavy metal to disco, punk to hip-hop. Stanley Booth describes a recording session with Otis Redding; Ellen Willis traces the meteoric career of Janis Joplin; Ellen Sander recalls the chaotic world of Led Zeppelin on tour; Nick Tosches etches a portrait of the young Jerry Lee Lewis; Eve Babitz remembers Jim Morrison. Alongside are Lenny Kaye on acapella and Greg Tate on hip-hop, Vince Aletti on disco and Gerald Early on Motown; Robert Christgau on Prince, Nelson George on Marvin Gaye, Luc Sante on Bob Dylan, Hilton Als on Michael Jackson, Anthony DeCurtis on the Rolling Stones, Kelefa Sanneh on Jay Z. The story this anthology tells is a ongoing one: “it’s too early,” editors Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar note, “for canon formation in a field so marvelously volatile—a volatility that mirrors, still, that of pop music itself, which remains smokestack lightning. The writing here attempts to catch some in a bottle.”

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I’m Just Dead, I’m Not Gone

I’m Just Dead, I’m Not Gone
by Jim Dickinson
(University of Mississippi Press)

I’m Just Dead, I’m Not Gone chronicles Jim Dickinson’s extraordinary life in the Memphis music scene of the fifties and sixties and how he went on to play with and produce a rich array of artists, including Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Ry Cooder, Duane Allman, Arlo Guthrie, and Albert King. With verve and wit, Dickinson (1941–2009) describes his trip to Blind Lemon’s grave on the Texas flatlands as a college student and how that encounter inspired his return to Memphis. Back home, he looked up Gus Cannon and Furry Lewis, began staging plays, cofounded what would become the annual Memphis Blues Festival, and started recording.

The blues, Elvis, and early rock ’n’ roll compelled Dickinson to reject racial barriers and spurred his contributions to the Memphis music and experimental art scene. He explains how the family yardman, WDIA, Dewey Phillips, Furry Lewis, Will Shade, and Howlin’ Wolf shaped him and recounts how he went on to learn his craft at Sun, Ardent, American, Muscle Shoals, and Criteria studios from master producers Sam Phillips, John Fry, Chips Moman, and Jerry Wexler.

Dickinson is a member of the Mississippi Music Hall of Fame and an inaugural inductee of the Memphis Music Hall of Fame. He has received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Engineering and Production from the Americana Music Association, a Brass Note on the Beale Street Walk of Fame in Memphis, and a Heritage Marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail. This memoir recounts a love affair with Memphis, the blues, and rock ’n’ roll through Dickinson’s captivating blend of intelligence, humor, and candor.

Jim Dickinson (1941–2009) worked with the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Alex Chilton, the Replacements, and T-Model Ford, among others. His sons, Luther and Cody, are the founding members of the North Mississippi Allstars.

Good Booty

Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music

by Ann Powers

Dey Street Books

In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR’s acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate difficult emotions and truths about our most fraught social issues, most notably sex and race.

In Good Booty, Ann Powers explores how popular music became America’s primary erotic art form. Powers takes us from nineteenth-century New Orleans through dance-crazed Jazz Age New York to the teen scream years of mid-twentieth century rock-and-roll to the cutting-edge adventures of today’s web-based pop stars. Drawing on her deep knowledge and insights on gender and sexuality, Powers recounts stories of forbidden lovers, wild shimmy-shakers, orgasmic gospel singers, countercultural perverts, soft-rock sensitivos, punk Puritans, and the cyborg known as Britney Spears to illuminate how eroticism—not merely sex, but love, bodily freedom, and liberating joy—became entwined within the rhythms and melodies of American song. This cohesion, she reveals, touches the heart of America’s anxieties and hopes about race, feminism, marriage, youth, and freedom.

In a survey that spans more than a century of music, Powers both heralds little known artists such as Florence Mills, a contemporary of Josephine Baker, and gospel queen Dorothy Love Coates, and sheds new light on artists we think we know well, from the Beatles and Jim Morrison to Madonna and Beyoncé. In telling the history of how American popular music and sexuality intersect—a magnum opus over two decades in the making—Powers offers new insights into our nation psyche and our soul.

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There’s Always Room for Chocolate

The pure fun of classic American chocolate treats. The Chocolate Room has become a place of pilgrimage for chocolate lovers from near and far, thanks to its simple mission: to create treats that bring back those original childhood memories of the pure joy of chocolate. Its chefs have a knack for reconstructing a classic American recipe in ways that improve on the original. Their showstopping Chocolate Layer Cake, for instance, is the cake all other chocolate cakes dream of being; it’s made with a blackout pudding filling, three different kinds of chocolate, and a custardy ganache frosting. The book is filled with similar new twists that express the slightly irreverent and creatively whimsical spirit for which Brooklyn has become known: Chocolate Caramel Matzo, Chocolate Cuatro Leches Cake, and Chocolate Stout Gingerbread. Recipes reveal the secret tips behind signature favorites in every category from cakes and puddings to pies and cookies. Confections are geared to be achievable in the home: S’mores bars, Rocky Road mounds, and Cookie Chip Chocolates. The book also features informative primers on important techniques—including tempering chocolate, whipping cream and eggs, and assembling a cake. There’s Always Room for Chocolate is set to become the new essential cookbook for all things chocolate.

Naomi Josepher and Jon Payson founded The Chocolate Room, a sophisticated dessert café and retail shop. The couple operates two locations in Brooklyn that have become destinations for chocolate lovers from all over the world.

“…Full of exciting, delectable-sounding recipes, one more tempting than the next.”
—Kane County Chronicle

Georgia Freedman, a contributing editor at Saveur, also writes for the Wall Street Journal, Afar, Imbibe, Gilt Taste, and Art of Eating.

Snatched: From Drug-Queen to Informer to Hostage–A Harrowing True Story

Raised an aristocrat in Colombia and educated in European schools, Pilar transfixes everyone with her charm and her guile. She also falls for dangerous men and finds herself drawn into the highest levels of the cocaine trade.

After two failed marriages and a harrowing escape from the drug life, she settles down to a quiet existence in Florida with her children–until her second husband tries to cut short his prison term by giving her name over to members of a new task force being formed by the DEA. They induce Pilar, now a middle-aged woman, to infiltrate the Cali cartel as the head of a vast money laundering sting.

Named “Operation Princess,” the scheme leads to the seizure of tens of millions of dollars, along with some $500 million worth of cocaine and the exposure of hundreds of high-level traffickers, becoming one of the most daring and successful stings in DEA history.

But Pilar plays her part too well. Her success as a money launderer gets her kidnapped and then ransomed by a band of guerrillas in South America–and the US government refuses to negotiate. It’s left to her low-level handlers in the DEA to get her back, before it’s too late and her kidnappers discover they have a federal agent in their clutches.

Snatched is the electric tale, by the New York Times bestselling author of Blow, Bruce Porter, that tells the true story of a woman caught between two worlds, with her life dangling in the balance.

“Fascinating look at the international drug trade. . . . In Porter’s hands, Pilar’s story will easily hook readers from start to finish; the book reads like an action-packed movie script.” – Publishers Weekly

“An engaging, improbable true-crime tale that underscores the grandiose futility of the drug war.” – Kirkus Reviews

“This amazing true story could have been written for the big screen. . . . the narrative races along like a film script. . . . this entertaining and sad story of a woman doing what she has to in order to protect her family will satisfy fans of Blow, Donnie Brasco, and true crime stories.” – Library Journal

Bruce Porter is a former writer for Newsweek and a professor at the Columbia Journalism School who has written for the Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, Playboy, and Rolling Stone, as well as dozens of other magazines and newspapers. His first book, Blow, was a bestselling New York Times Notable Book and was made into a major motion picture. Bruce lives in New York City.