2021 Freeman Book Awards Honorable Mention - Children's Literature The Best Children's Books of the Year 2022, Bank Street College STARRED REVIEW! "Hadley has created a remarkable debut that flows elegantly, interweaving the two tales in a way that is readable and fun...An exquisite choice for all collections."—School Library Journal starred review A multigenerational retelling of a Japanese legend. Tanabata Matsuri, the Star Festival, celebrates a popular folktale: The Emperor of the Heavens separates his daughter, Orihime, from her love, Hikoboshi, all year—but on this day the two stars finally reunite on a bridge across the Milky Way. For Keiko, her mama, and her grandmother, Tanabata is about making tanzaku wishes, taking in the colorful decorations, and eating delicious food like nagashi somen and shaved ice. But when Obasaan gets lost in the crowd, Keiko and Mama must make their own bridge to find her again—and see if their tanzaku comes true.
A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of 2021 “Thompson is a master showman . . . [Beeswing is] everything you’d hope a Richard Thompson autobiography would be . . . It’s both major and minor, dirge and ditty, light on its feet but packing a punch.” —The Wall Street Journal Now Featuring an Interview with Elvis Costello In this moving, immersive, and long-awaited memoir, beloved international music legend Richard Thompson recreates the spirit of his early years, where he found, and then lost, and then found his way again. Considered one of the top twenty guitarists of all time, Thompson also belongs in the songwriting pantheon alongside Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Randy Newman. Here the British folk musician takes us back to the late 1960s, a period of great change and creativity for both him and the world at large. During the pivotal years of 1967 to 1975, just as he was discovering his passion for music, he formed the band Fairport Convention with some schoolmates and helped establish the genre of British folk rock. It was a thrilling period of massive tours, where Thompson was on the road in both the UK and the US, crossing paths with the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix, as well as a time of heady and explosive creativity for Thompson, who wrote some of his most famous songs during this time. But as Thompson reveals, those eight years were also marked by upheaval and tragedy. Honest, moving, and compelling, Beeswing vividly captures the life of a remarkable man and musician during a period of artistic intensity, in a world on the cusp of change. “An absorbing, witty, often deliciously biting read, as all rock memoirs should be.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
FROM THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'Dazzlingly inventive' Sunday Times 'Gripping and powerful' Cara Hunter ********** FOUR WOMEN. Orly, Lenny, Mel and Thea have been best friends since school. But now it is 20 years later and inevitably they have drifted apart. ONE WEEKEND. It is Lenny's 40th birthday, plus Orly and Mel need cheering up, so Thea suggests a weekend away at a festival in their hometown. It's a chance for them all to reconnect. NOT ALL OF THEM WILL SURVIVE. But their holiday soon takes a sinister turn, and not all of the friends will leave the festival alive...
"Kim has created sumptuous images. DiCamillo's text leaves room for children to fill in the silences with their own boundless imaginations" New York Times"La la la..." A little girl stands alone and sings, but hears no response. Gathering her courage and her curiosity, she skips further out into the world, singing away to the trees and the pond and the reeds - but no song comes back to her. Day passes into night, and the girl dares to venture into the darkness towards the light of the moon, climbing as high as she can... Now, will she be heard? With an enchanting palette and captivating expressiveness, Jaime Kim brings to life Kate DiCamillo's endearing character in a transcendent landscape that invites readers along on an emotionally satisfying journey.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The critically acclaimed singer-songwriter, producer, and six-time Grammy winner opens up about faith, sexuality, parenthood, and a life shaped by music in “one of the great memoirs of our time” (Glennon Doyle, author of Untamed). NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND AUTOSTRADDLE • “The best-written, most engaging rock autobiography since her childhood hero, Elton John, published Me.”—Variety Brandi Carlile was born into a musically gifted, impoverished family on the outskirts of Seattle and grew up in a constant state of change, moving from house to house, trailer to trailer, fourteen times in as many years. Though imperfect in every way, her dysfunctional childhood was as beautiful as it was strange, and as nurturing as it was difficult. At the age of five, Brandi contracted bacterial meningitis, which almost took her life, leaving an indelible mark on her formative years and altering her journey into young adulthood. As an openly gay teenager, Brandi grappled with the tension between her sexuality and her faith when her pastor publicly refused to baptize her on the day of the ceremony. Shockingly, her small town rallied around Brandi in support and set her on a path to salvation where the rest of the misfits and rejects find it: through twisted, joyful, weird, and wonderful music. In Broken Horses, Brandi Carlile takes readers through the events of her life that shaped her very raw art—from her start at a local singing competition where she performed Elton John’s “Honky Cat” in a bedazzled white polyester suit, to her first break opening for Dave Matthews Band, to many sleepless tours over fifteen years and six studio albums, all while raising two children with her wife, Catherine Shepherd. This hard-won success led her to collaborations with personal heroes like Elton John, Dolly Parton, Mavis Staples, Pearl Jam, Tanya Tucker, and Joni Mitchell, as well as her peers in the supergroup The Highwomen, and ultimately to the Grammy stage, where she converted millions of viewers into instant fans. Evocative and piercingly honest, Broken Horses is at once an examination of faith through the eyes of a person rejected by the church’s basic tenets and a meditation on the moments and lyrics that have shaped the life of a creative mind, a brilliant artist, and a genuine empath on a mission to give back.
Thirty thousand hardbacks sold On Mexico's Day of the Dead, the skeletons jump for sheer joy. And no wonder: they've been cooped up the whole year and now they're ready to party. Watch the calaveras shake, rattle, and roll as they celebrate the biggest event of the graveyard's social calendar
Long remembered chiefly for its modernist exhibitions on the South Bank in London, the 1951 Festival of Britain also showcased British artistic creativity in all its forms. In Tonic to the Nation, Nathaniel G. Lew tells the story of the English classical music and opera composed and revived for the Festival, and explores how these long-overlooked components of the Festival helped define English music in the post-war period. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Lew looks closely at the work of the newly chartered Arts Council of Great Britain, for whom the Festival of Britain provided the first chance to assert its authority over British culture. The Arts Council devised many musical programs for the Festival, including commissions of new concert works, a vast London Season of almost 200 concerts highlighting seven centuries of English musical creativity, and several schemes to commission and perform new operas. These projects were not merely directed at bringing audiences to hear new and old national music, but to share broader goals of framing the national repertory, negotiating between the conflicting demands of conservative and progressive tastes, and using music to forge new national definitions in a changed post-war world.
The book focusses on the origin and transformation of the priestly festival calendar. Since the epoch-making work of Julius Wellhausen at the end of the 19th century the differences between the various ancient Israelite festival calendars have often been explained in terms of a gradual evolution, which shows an increasing historicisation, denaturalisation and ritualisation. The festivals were in Wellhausen's view gradually detached from agricultural conditions and celebrated more and more at fixed points in the year. This study tries to show that the changes in the priestly festival calendar reflect a conscious effort to adapt the ancient Israelite festival calendar to the semi-annual layout of the Babylonian festival year. The ramifications of the change only come to the fore after a careful study of the agricultural conditions of ancient Israel - and Mesopotamia - makes clear that passover and the festival of unleavened bread were originally celebrated in the second month of the year. The first month of the year envisaged by the priestly festival calendar for the celebration of passover and the festival of unleavened bread in turn mirrors the date of one of the two semi-annual Babylonian New Year festivals. The two Babylonian New Year festivals were celebrated exactly six months apart at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. In order to adapt the ancient Israelite festival calendar to the Babylonian scheme with two New Year festivals a year, the date of passover and the festival of unleavened bread had to be moved up by one month. The consequences for the origin of passover, the festival of unleavened bread, the festival of weeks and the festival of huts are charted and the relations between the various ancient Israelite festival calendars are determined anew.
