Is This the Real Life?

Is This the Real Life?

Author: Mark Blake

Publisher: Da Capo Press, Incorporated

Published: 2011-03-22

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0306819597

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Draws on interviews with producers, managers and ex-girlfriends and boyfriends to provide a history of the band, including how lead singer Freddie Mercury's untimely death from AIDs challenged the band to reinvent itself.


Is This the Real Life?

Is This the Real Life?

Author: Mark Blake

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 2011-03-22

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0306819732

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Queen's success in the 1970s was accompanied by a taste for musical and non-musical excess. Is This the Real Life? draws on eyewitness testimonies -- former producers and managers, ex-girlfriends and boyfriends -- to create a complete picture of one of the world's most ambitiously driven rock bands at work and at play. Revealing Queen's complex dynamic, Blake also explores how Freddie Mercury's sexuality alienated some of the band's fan base, how they reinvented themselves by morphing from hard rock to pop, and how they saw out their final years as Mercury became one of the most successful rock stars in the world. Is This the Real Life? looks beyond Queen's public persona to shed light on the legendary band's four wildly divergent personalities, particularly lead singer Freddie Mercury's.


Real Life

Real Life

Author: Brandon Taylor

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-02-18

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0525538887

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A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award “A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Financial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, Vulture, Thrillist, Vice, Self, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice. Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community. Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.


Freddie Mercury: A Kind of Magic

Freddie Mercury: A Kind of Magic

Author: Mark Blake

Publisher: Omnibus Press

Published: 2016-09-12

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1783237783

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Freddie Mercury was rock’s most dazzling showman, a legendary entertainer who in 1991, at the age of just forty-five, became the first major music star to die of AIDS. Mercury’s soaring four-octave voice was a defining element in Queen’s unique sound, crucial to the success of the band’s fifteen studio albums, from Queen (1973) to Made in Heaven (1995). He was also a supremely talented songwriter and musician who wrote many of the band’s greatest hits, including ‘Killer Queen’, ‘We Are the Champions’ and their biggest triumph, the epic anthem ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. As a solo artist he released two acclaimed albums: Mr. Bad Guy in 1985 and the operatic 'Barcelona' with Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé in 1988. Mercury’s extraordinary charisma was perhaps best seen in his imperious live performances, in which he’d hold vast stadium crowds to rapturous attention. His outrageous theatrics, physicality and over-the-top costumes led one commentator to describe him as ‘a performer out to tease, shock, and ultimately charm his audience with various extravagant versions of himself’. He pushed the limits of camp in everything he did. His extreme behaviour, in a society in which being gay was only starting to be accepted, just added to Freddie Mercury’s allure. With expert understanding, Mark Blake traces Mercury’s life from his childhood in Zanzibar and India to his untimely death, and charts his astonishing achievements including in Queen’s world-conquering performance at Live Aid in 1985. In the year that marks what would have been his seventieth birthday, Freddie Mercury: A Life celebrates a remarkable life, lived to the fullest. Featuring revealing interviews with fellow musicians, producers and collaborators, and a detailed discography and timeline, this is a memorable tribute to a unique recording artist and an irreplaceable performer who rocked the world.


In Real Life

In Real Life

Author: Cory Doctorow

Publisher: First Second

Published: 2014-10-14

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1466858613

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Anda loves Coarsegold Online, the massively-multiplayer role playing game that she spends most of her free time on. It's a place where she can be a leader, a fighter, a hero. It's a place where she can meet people from all over the world, and make friends. Gaming is, for Anda, entirely a good thing. But things become a lot more complicated when Anda befriends a gold farmer -- a poor Chinese kid whose avatar in the game illegally collects valuable objects and then sells them to players from developed countries with money to burn. This behavior is strictly against the rules in Coarsegold, but Anda soon comes to realize that questions of right and wrong are a lot less straightforward when a real person's real livelihood is at stake. From acclaimed teen author Cory Doctorow and rising star cartoonist Jen Wang, In Real Life is a sensitive, thoughtful look at adolescence, gaming, poverty, and culture-clash. This title has common Core connections. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.


Real Life Rock

Real Life Rock

Author: Greil Marcus

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 599

ISBN-13: 0300196644

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The Washington Post hails Greil Marcus as our greatest cultural critic. Writing in the London Review of Books, D. D. Guttenplan calls him probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson. For nearly thirty years, he has written a remarkable column that has migrated from the Village Voice to Artforum, Salon, City Pages, Interview, and The Believer and currently appears in the Barnes & Noble Review. It has been a laboratory where Marcus has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements, teasing out from the welter of everyday objects what amounts to a de facto theory of cultural transmission. Published to complement the paperback edition of The History of Rock & Roll in Ten Songs, Real Life Rock reveals the critic in full: direct, erudite, funny, fierce, vivid, astute, uninhibited, and possessing an unerring instinct for art and fraud. The result is an indispensable volume packed with startling arguments and casual brilliance.


Tight

Tight

Author: Torrey Maldonado

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1524740551

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Tight: Lately, Bryan's been feeling it in all kinds of ways . . . Bryan knows what's tight for him--reading comics, drawing superheroes, and hanging out with no drama. But drama is every day where he's from, and that gets him tight, wound up. And now Bryan's friend Mike pressures him with ideas of fun that are crazy risky. At first, it's a rush following Mike, hopping turnstiles, subway surfing, and getting into all kinds of trouble. But Bryan never really feels right acting so wrong, and drama really isn't him. So which way will he go, especially when his dad tells him it's better to be hard and feared than liked? But if there's one thing Bryan's gotten from his comic heroes, it's that he has power--to stand up for what he feels . . . Torrey Maldonado delivers a fast-paced, insightful, dynamic story capturing urban community life. Readers will connect with Bryan's journey as he navigates a tough world with a heartfelt desire for a different life.


In Real Life

In Real Life

Author: Joey Graceffa

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-05-19

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1925184412

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A confessional, uplifting memoir from the beloved YouTube personality. It’s not where you begin that matters. It's where you end up. Twenty-three year old Joey Graceffa has captured the hearts of millions of teens and young adults through his playful, sweet, and inspirational YouTube presence (not to mention his sparkling eyes and perfect hair). Yet, Joey wasn’t always comfortable in his skin, and in this candid memoir, he thoughtfully looks back on his journey from pain to pride, self-doubt to self-acceptance. To his fans, Joey is that best friend who always captures the brighter side of life but also isn’t afraid to get real. In the pages of his first book, he opens up about his years of struggling with family hardships and troubles at school, with cruel bullying and the sting of rejection. He tells of first loves and losses, embarrassing moments and surprising discoveries, loneliness, laughter, and life-changing forks in the road, showing us the incalculable value of finally finding and following your true passion in this world. Funny, warm-hearted, and inspiring, Joey Graceffa’s story is a welcome reminder that it’s not where you begin that matters, but where you end up.