New Edition

Life After College: The Complete Guide to Getting What You Want

by Jenny Blake

(Running Press 2011, updated 2018)

“Jenny Blake is a rock star of her generation. The book is chock-full of tips, tricks, tweets, and the genuine empathy of someone who has been in the shoes of her readers. Recent grads will love her writing style and the book’s exercises, which encourage readers to personalize their own journeys.” —Lindsey Pollack, author of Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to Do Before You Join the Real World

“This book serves as a roadmap for navigating the various aspects of your life during your twenties. Jenny shares wonderful tips, practical advice, and stories to help inspire individuals to live their truest dreams.” —Christine Hassler, author of 20 Something, 20 Everything and 20 Something Manifesto

Need some straightforward guidance on how to maneuver the real world? Do you wish there was a roadmap that would help you figure out how to get where you want to do? Life After College is that guide. Jenny Blake offers you practical, actionable advice to achieve your goals.

Life After College is an essential manual for recent college graduates, with hundreds of tips and exercises, all newly updated for 2018, to get you inspired, focused, and ready to thrive in every area.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

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.

Continue reading →