Product Description
Announcing the third annual collection of the year's best essays and articles on music. It's "music-geek rapture."- Entertainment Weekly

It's here: the third and latest volume in the series that you have come to rely upon for your music-reading fix. The 2002 volume will celebrate the year's best writing about music and its culture, as selected by Jonathan Lethem, best-selling novelist, music hound, and self-confessed closet rock-writer. With pieces on a dazzling array of topics from more than a hundred sources, the collection brings you remarkable essays by journalists and authors who are as serious about writing as they are about music. It's required reading for anyone who loves either art.

Past contributors have included:
David Rakoff
Mike Doughty
Lorraine Ali
Greil Marcus
Richard Meltzer
Robert Gordon
Sarah Vowell
Nick Tosches
Anthony DeCurtis
William Gay
Whitney Balliett
Lester Bangs
Rosanne Cash
Susan Orlean
Eddie Dean
Selwyn Seyfu Hinds
Alec Wilkinson
David Hajdu ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

worth it for the Rosanne Cash essay
brilliant writing by a brilliant under-appreciated artist/writer/ songwriter who transcends the limits of many genres, boundaries, expectations

Francisco Franco is still dead...
...and Frank Zappa is still wrong:rock music journalism does not have to be people who can't write interviewing people who can't speak for people who can't read.This installment of the Da Capo "Best Music Writing" series features a wide range of pieces both stylistically and in terms of subject matter.Nik Cohn's article "Soljas" on the New Orleans rap scene, originally published in Granta, is an astonishing piece of writing and would deserve to be in a collection of "Best Writing of 2002," music-oriented or not.Three other contributions are striking for their biographical writing, illuminating broader, non-musical themes:RJ Smith on the LA enigma Korla Pandit, Michael Hall on Texas psychedelic rocker Roky Ericson, and Matthew C. Duersten on jazz diva Anita O'Day.There are more traditional musicological contributions (David Cantwell "Help Me Make It Through the Night") and humorous satire from the Onion.A very enjoyable volume.Would make a good gift for anyone interested in popular music or just good writing.

A series which hand-picks the year's best music writing
Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002 is the third volume in a series which hand-picks the year's best writing about music, covering all genres and providing a host of literary articles reflecting on music's personalities, evolution, and content. From a survey of the underground New Orleans rap scene from an insider's stand to a composer of haiku for Eminem and details on Bob Dylan and Louie Armstrong, Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002 holds something for everyone. ... Read more

Product Description
The enduring cultural phenomenon of comic book heroes was invented in the late 1930s by a talented and hungry group of artists and writers barely out of their teens, flying by the seat of their pants to create something new, exciting, and above all profitable. The iconography and mythology they created flourishes to this day in comic books, video, movies, fine art, advertising, and practically all other media. Supermen! collects the best and the brightest of this first generation, including Jack Cole, Will Eisner, Bill Everett, Lou Fine, Fletcher Hanks, Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and Basil Wolverton. If the reader is expecting to find an All-American group of altruistic do-gooders, he in for quite a jolt. As Jonathan Lethem writes in his Foreword, “A collection like Supermen! works like a reverse-neutron bomb to assumptions about the birth of the superhero image: it tears down the orderly structures of theory and history and leaves the figures standing in full view, staring back at us in all their defiant disorienting particularity, their blazing strangeness.” Beautifully designed and produced in full color, Supermen! contains twenty full-length stories, ten full-sized covers, and a generous selection of vintage promotional ads, and is indispensable to anyone interested in the origins of superheroes and the history of the comic book form. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

for the BIG comic book fan...
This book reprints early comic book stories that have most definitely have not seen the light ofday since their original publication. Some really great stuff! And some very bizarre neanderthal level crude but wonderful artwork too. Anybody interested in comic book history simply has to get this book-- your sense of where and how the industry evolved will not be complete without it.

It's great to be able to read golden age comics inexpensively
There's alot of great stuff here and it's all in color. The main thing that I can't handle about alot of non marvel and d.c. reprints is that they won't reprint them in color.They are out there in various forms but here we get them in color and they don't look bad either. You get great artists like Lou Fine, Jack Kirby, Bill Everet, Hank Fletcher and others too in some early superhero tales.This is a book too so it's going to last longer.You may not have heard of these heroes but they were enjoyable then and remain so now.I like Alex Ross too by the way. He's the modern artist that the first reviewer can't stand but that's niether here nor there.He's right about that we need to have MORE golden age heroes reprinted in COLOR and done with as good a editor as this book. The editor gives us the backstory on the heroes featured in here like the Flame, Blue Bolt, Fantomah, and others.This is a enjoyable book to have on your shelves and you can afford to read these stories!The original comics are just too expensive for most of us these days. And comics , film and books are art forms that are interrelated and these days the art of the form is not denied. This stuff still entertains a reader even though we live in a more sophisticated age as far as comic books are concerned.However we must never forget that these stories are art, comics are art and some of these people are as inventive as many acclaimed artists out there today.

Great book
this is a really amazing book, so if you like old comics this would be a great one.

Not Only Reverent, but Exciting and Fun as Well
Considering how much tribute the current comics industry pays to the Golden Age of its past, it's amazing how much is overlooked and how often we forget the real glut of comics being produced at the time. Redressing the issue somewhat is Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Superheroes 1936-1941, which compiles some of the lesser-known lights of the time. The biggest surprise might be how good these stories are, even if they failed to take off in the way that, say, Superman did.

Speaking of Superman, his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, kick off this collection with a story about their mysterious "occult detective" Dr. Mystic. The rest of the stories run the gamut from fun to frivolous and include some of the biggest luminaries comics has to offer: Will Eisner, Gardner Fox, Jack Kirby, Jack Cole, Basil Wolverton, and a host of others, some of whom never attained the recognition they deserved. The styles incorporate the building blocks of comic art today, and the stories represent the superheroes, aliens and monsters, and mystic forces that drove the marketplace.

Bestselling author Jonathan Lethem provides a foreword to the book, properly cataloguing the scope and impact these stories had. Putting the works into context is helpful, but it's the Notes section at the end, written by editor Greg Sadowski, that is truly fantastic. He documents each story included in this collection and provides the history, background, and explanations needed to understand the stories in the proper context. His studious efforts are worth the price of the book alone. Tucked away in the back, they are missed until you reach the end of the book, at which time it's difficult to avoid reading the notes and backtracking to read the stories again, now armed with new information to better your enjoyment of them.

These stories deserved another look and more attention. Sadowski has done an admirable job of making Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941 not only reverent, but exciting and fun as well.

-- John Hogan

Would you like to come to my private star for awhile?
This book reprints rare comic book stories from 1936 to 1941.The stories feature heroes, but they are not all superheroes; there are also detectives, space heroes and jungle heroes.Most of these stories were created by the top comic book creators of the period.They are all well drawn, but some of the plots are rather ridiculous.Despite the silliness, these comics are a lot of fun, not to mention historically important. ... Read more

Product Description
CRANK! premier issue, an anthology of eight stories SCI-FI and fantasy short stories. ... Read more

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BOMB 103, Spring 2008, featuring: Interviews with Harmony Korine by Richard Bishop, Jonathan Lethem & Lydia Millet, Steve DiBenedetto by David Humphrey, Zachary Lazar by Christopher Sorrentino, Philip Seymour Hoffman by June Stein, Raja Alem by Tom McDonough, Joseph Bartscherer by James Welling, Tav Falco by Erik Morse, and Indran Amirthanyagam & Adam Zameenzad. Essays on Chris Martin by James Siena, Paulina Otowska by Elka Krajewska, and Rachel Foullon on Betsy Sussler. Fiction and poetry by Martin Wilner, Peter Orner, Bradford Gray Telford, Patrick McGrath, Elena Georgiou, Paul Maliszewski, Hannah Pittard, Linda Bamber, and Nick Flynn. Artwork by Martin Wilner. ... Read more

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SIGNED Publishers Advertising Poster. ... Read more

Product Description
Preview sampler of short selections from books recently published or soon to be published by Dave Eggers' McSweeney's Books, including a sample from an untitled unreleased Eggers book ... Read more