"The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic", Gertrude Stein wrote in 1926. Unlike male modernists such as T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, the modernist women poets Edith Sitwell, Amy Lowell, Stein and H. D. never became "high" modernist models but remained "artistic outlaws". The present study shows how these women were present on the modernist scene but followed their own concepts and struggled to establish their position as modernist women poets. Defying definition, the four poets not only richly contributed to modernism, but were indeed its developers.
A “compulsively readable” history of how Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson redefined country music (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Outlaw delves into the country music scene of the late ’60s and early ’70s, when three rebels—Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson found themselves in Music City writing songs and vying for record deals. Channeling the unrest of the times, all three Country Music Hall of Famers resisted the music business’s unwritten rules and emerged as leaders of the outlaw movement that ultimately changed the recording industry. This account offers a broad portrait of the outlaw movement in Nashville that includes a diverse secondary cast of characters, such as Johnny Cash, Rodney Crowell, Kinky Friedman, and Billy Joe Shaver, among others. With archival photographs throughout, Outlaw is a comprehensive examination of a fascinating shift in country music, and the three unbelievably talented musicians who forged the way. “[An] engaging cultural history . . . a fascinating chronicle.” —The Washington Post “Riveting.” —The Wall Street Journal
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A riveting, adrenaline-fueled tour of a vast, lawless, and rampantly criminal world that few have ever seen: the high seas. There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world's oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to rampant criminality and exploitation. Traffickers and smugglers, pirates and mercenaries, wreck thieves and repo men, vigilante conservationists and elusive poachers, seabound abortion providers, clandestine oil-dumpers, shackled slaves and cast-adrift stowaways—drawing on five years of perilous and intrepid reporting, often hundreds of miles from shore, Ian Urbina introduces us to the inhabitants of this hidden world. Through their stories of astonishing courage and brutality, survival and tragedy, he uncovers a globe-spanning network of crime and exploitation that emanates from the fishing, oil, and shipping industries, and on which the world's economies rely. Both a gripping adventure story and a stunning exposé, this unique work of reportage brings fully into view for the first time the disturbing reality of a floating world that connects us all, a place where anyone can do anything because no one is watching.
The first-ever book to cover the history of the renegade Outlaw country music movement from its beginnings in the 1970s to its resurgence today, "Outlaws Still At Large " draws from the author's interviews with current artists to reveal a rich, vibrant music scene beneath the mainstream Nashville gloss, while it shows the trials and adventures of life on the road. Hamilton traveled more than 20,000 miles with the Outlaws to get his story, and in the end, the music changed his life. One of the Outlaws, Shooter Jennings, who is the son of 1970s Outlaws Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, says about Hamilton and this book: "Besides his insanely neurotic attention to detail, or his relentless obsession with perfection, Neil is someone who cares very deeply for music and art. He cares so deeply that he's willing to spend as much time as he finds necessary to do this right, to do it true, and do justice to the thing he loves and protects with such grace and dignity. He is, like us, a warrior." Hamilton begins with a historical background to the rise of country music and the Outlaw movement, before offering five chapter profiles on prominent Outlaws from the 1970s: Waylon, Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver, Johnny Paycheck, and David Allan Coe. He then shows how the 1970s Outlaw movement faded, how Nashville pop regained its crown, and how the current Outlaw movement has emerged. From there he presents chapter profiles on 15 current artists, including Shooter, Blackberry Smoke, Elizabeth Cook, Dallas Moore, Jackson Taylor, Jason Boland, Lydia Loveless, Whitey Morgan, Wayne Mills, Joey Allcorn, and Hellbound Glory. The book concludes with a look at the promoters behind the Outlaw scene and the emergence of Outlaw music on SiriusXM radio. Hamilton found that there's really no one Outlaw musical form. Some of the artists are most heavily influenced by Hank Williams, others by Elvis Presley, or by the 1970s Outlaws, or by Southern rock, or even punk rock. Yet, beneath this diversity and creativity, there remains a central attachment to country's roots and to the belief that music should be created primarily for the heart and not the wallet-even if it means many a hungry night in a low-pay honky tonk. If readers bathed in music history get a feeling that Hamilton formatted the book in word similar to the way that Willie Nelson formatted his path breaking album "Red Headed Stanger" in music, they will be right on the mark. That structure is meant to convey the continuing link between country roots past and present and the continuing belief that country music based on sincerity still has something to say in a society awash with shallow forms and fleeting moments.
Analyzes the culural and social effects of the increasing digital distribution of movies, discussing the ways in which it has impacted the making of motion pictures and altered the behavior and habits of the film audience.
Davis makes extensive use of untapped literary archives to weave a fascinating portrait of six Texas writers, calling themselves the Mad Dogs, who came of age during a period of rapid social change: Bud Shrake, Larry L. King, Billy Lee Brammer, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, and Peter Gent.
This “standard text of the defining era of gay literati” tells the cultural history of the interconnected lives of the 20th century's most influential gay writers (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the years following World War II a group of gay writers established themselves as major cultural figures in American life. Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation's imagination. Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and history. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater. James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic. Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who became a thoroughly American novelist. And the exuberant Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry defied censorship and exploded minds. Together, their writing introduced America to gay experience and sensibility, and changed our literary culture. But the change was only beginning. A new generation of gay writers followed, taking more risks and writing about their sexuality more openly. Edward Albee brought his prickly iconoclasm to the American theater. Edmund White laid bare his own life in stylized, autobiographical works. Armistead Maupin wove a rich tapestry of the counterculture, queer and straight. Mart Crowley brought gay men's lives out of the closet and onto the stage. And Tony Kushner took them beyond the stage, to the center of American ideas. With authority and humor, Christopher Bram weaves these men's ambitions, affairs, feuds, loves, and appetites into a single sweeping narrative. Chronicling over fifty years of momentous change-from civil rights to Stonewall to AIDS and beyond. Eminent Outlaws is an inspiring, illuminating tale: one that reveals how the lives of these men are crucial to understanding the social and cultural history of the American twentieth century.
