Most people dream of falling in love. But all I know of love is that it turns smart people into fools. So, I don't dream, I work. And put distance between myself and the stain of my father's betrayal.When I land a high powered job in London, it feels like I finally have everything I want. Then comes Simon, the gorgeous architect with a filthy mouth who sets my body and my mind on fire. I surrender to the pull of attraction and the promise of pleasure. But those smoldering ...

Bass player extraordinaire Charles Mingus, who died in 1979, is one of the essential composers in the history of jazz, and Beneath the Underdog, his celebrated, wild, funny, demonic, anguished, shocking and profoundly moving memoir, is the greatest autobiography ever written by a jazz musician.It tells of his God-haunted childhood in Watts during the 1920s and 1930s; his outcast adolescent years; his apprenticeship, not only with jazzmen but also with pimps, hookers, junki...