Steve Earle does everything he does with intelligence, creativity, passion, and integrity. In music, these strengths have earned him comparisons to Bruce Springsteen, the ardent devotion of his fans, and the admiration of the media. And Earle does a lot: he is singer, songwriter, producer, social activist, teacher. . . . He's not only someone who makes great music; he's someone to believe in. With the publication of his first collection of short stories, Doghouse Roses, he gives u...

" I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive is like a dream you can't shake, offering beauty and remorse, redemption in spades." —Patti Smith, singer-songwriter, poet, visual artist, and author of Just KidsDoc Ebersole lives with the ghost of Hank Williams—not just in the figurative sense, not just because he was one of the last people to see him alive, and not just because he is rumored to have given Hank the final morphine dose that killed him.

Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to b...

Doc Ebersole lives with the ghost of Hank Williams—not just in the figurative sense, not just because he was one of the last people to see him alive, and not just because he is rumored to have given Hank the final morphine dose that killed him.In 1963, ten years after Hank’s death, Doc himself is wracked by addiction. Since he lost his license to practice medicine, his morphine habit isn’t as easy to support, so Doc lives in a rented room in the red-light district on the south side...

**"Working On A Song is one of the best books about lyric writing for the theater I've read."—Lin-Manuel MirandaAnaïs Mitchell named to TIME's List of the 100 Most Influential People in the World of 2020An illuminating book of lyrics and stories from Hadestown—the winner of eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical—from its author, songwriter Anaïs Mitchell with a foreword by Steve Earle**On Broadway, this fresh take on the Greek myth of Orpheus an...

Part of BBC Radio 3's 'The Essay' strand, The Book That Changed Me features writers, academics and other eminent professionals discussing the literary works that have had the greatest impact on their lives.This fascinating selection contains some of the best episodes from the series, including legendary songwriter Steve Earle on Truman Capote's masterpiece In Cold Blood; academic Monica Siddiqui on Austen's Pride and Prejudice; and Tony Blair's onetime st...

Set against the backdrop of the early 1960s Chicago jazz scene, a highly ambitious and stylish literary debut that combines the atmosphere and period detail of Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility with the emotional depth and drama of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, about a talented but troubled singer, her precocious ten-year-old daughter, and their heartbreaking relationship.It is the early 1960s, and Chicago is a city of uneasy tensions—segregation, sexual experimentat...

The bestselling author of Kiss My Tiara returns with an original and entertaining memoir about childhood dreams, coming of age, ambition and family.Divided into three sections (Childhood, “Grape Juice and Humiliation”; Adolescence, “Not Just Horny but Obnoxious, Too”; and Adulthood, “Reality Says Hello”), the stories Susan tells are uniquely her own, but the themes she touches upon are universal. She reminisces about being the girl in school all the other girls were mean t...

A richly imagined and stunningly inventive literary masterpiece of love, art, and betrayal, exploring the genesis of evil, the unforeseen consequences of love, and the ultimate unreliability of storytelling itself.Paris in the 1920s shimmers with excitement, dissipation, and freedom. It is a place of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche jazz venues like the Chameleon Club draw expats, artists, libertines, and parvenus looking to indulge their true selve...

Jimmy Rabbitte is back.The man who invented the Commitments back in the eighties is now forty-seven, with a loving wife, four kids ... and bowel cancer. He isn’t dying, he thinks, but he might be.Jimmy still loves his music, and he still loves to hustle – his new thing is finding old bands and then finding the people who loved them enough to pay money for their resurrected singles and albums. On his path through Dublin he meets two of the Commitments – Outspan, whose own il...

Rachel, the mother of the aging professor Thomas Vanderlinden, shared her life with two men. Both went by the name of Rowland Vanderlinden. The first husband went abroad and never returned. The second, whom Rachel also unquestioningly accepted as her husband, was a mystery. In an attempt to understand his mother's adventurous decisions regarding love and marriage, Thomas sets out on a journey to the far reaches of the Pacific to find the first Rowland, and his real father. As the mystery o...

From her hospital bed in Dublin, the elderly Dilly awaits the visit of her daughter, Eleanora, from London. The epochs of her life pass before her; she also retraces Eleanora's precipitate marriage to a foreigner, which alienated mother and daughter, and Dilly's heart rending letters sent over the years in a determination to reclaim her daughter. But Eleanora's visit does not prove to be the glad reunion Dilly prayed for. And in her hasty departure, Eleanora leaves behind a secret journal ...