British writers

Sample

Gary Lachman

"This definitive work on the occult's 'great beast' traces the arc of his controversial life and influence on rock-and-roll giants, from the Rolling Stones to Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath. When Aleister Crowley died in 1947, he was not an obvious contender for the most enduring pop-culture figure of the next century. But twenty years later, Crowley's name and image were everywhere. The Beatles put him on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Rolling Stones were briefly serious devotees. Today, his visage hangs in goth clubs, occult temples, and college dorm rooms, and his methods of ceremonial magick animate the passions of myriad occultists and spiritual seekers. Aleister Crowley is more than just a biography of this compelling, controversial, and divisive figure--it's also a portrait of his unparalleled influence on modern pop culture"--

Sample

Alan Hager

Alphabetically arranged entries provide information on the lives and works of more than seventy-five seventeenth-century British and American writers.

Sample

Michael De-la-Noy

**From Amazon.com:** In the last eight years of his life - and he died when he was only thirty-three - Denton Welch wrote three novels, umpteen short stories, hundreds of poems, and - between 1942 and 1948, a profoundly personal and moving journal that recorded his swift maturity into a writer of genius. Therein he wrote of his battle with ill-health, his life lived in claustrophobic rooms, and (in frank, erotic terms) his frustrated pursuit of the 'ideal friend.' And yet he encountered some of the foremost writers of his time - Edith Sitwell, Herbert Read, Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville West - and recorded every aspect of life with a fresh and arresting sensitivity.

Sample

Francis Davis

Jazz is more popular than it has been since the early sixties. Every major record label is bringing out jazz reissues and new releases, and dating couples are turning up in the jazz clubs alongside the usual middle-aged male fans. But this popularity comes at a cost: Jazz has become identified with its past, and especially with bebop, the style that first dominated the jazz scene in the forties and fifties. Bebop started out as a daring departure from the conventions of swing, but ironically, many listeners and musicians now experience this style as a comfortable orthodoxy that defines the limits of jazz. In his third collection of essays, Francis Davis shares his insights into this new jazz mainstream: the greatness of its sources, the sterility of performance that follows those sources too closely. He also conveys his listening experiences beyond the mainstream - from the futuristic jazz of the avant-garde to the pre-forties styles that some performers continue to develop, at the risk of being labeled old hat. Finally, Davis leaves behind the boundaries of jazz altogether, pursuing its adventurous spirit into a broader musical territory that includes musical theatre, rock, and rap.