A collection of interviews—some vintage, some recent, and some brand-new—Conversations with the Dead is the first (and only) book in which the Grateful Dead speak in their own words about their music and their lives. David Gans, a self-professed Deadhead and host of "The Grateful Dead Hour," asked Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and the rest of the band the questions their fans would have asked if given the chance. And Gans reaches far beyond the musicians, talking with such often-overlooked key players as the recording engineer, sound man, and road crew—those who have had the coveted opportunity to witness the Dead's decades of music-making. This updated and expanded edition includes a rare, never-before-published interview with Seastones composer Ned Lagin and a new introduction by the author. With a readable combination of intensity, inquisitiveness, and candor, Gans has created an unprecedented portrait of a band who, after more than thirty years of music-making, has earned a unique place in American culture.

A digitally remastered facsimile edition of Danny Lyon's seminal 1971 photobook, highly influential in the history of documentary photography. Conversations with the Dead provides an extraordinary photographic record of life inside six Texas prisons and the relationships Lyon built with the inmates. Revolutionary at the time of publication, it was one of the first photobooks to include ephemera. This new edition has been updated with an afterward by Lyon himself detailing what happened to the inmates in the 40 years since the book was first published. It also offers new, unseen material including outtake images, audio recordings and newly commissioned texts on a specially created microsite as a free ibook edition of this landmark publication. Features: - A new afterward by Danny Lyon

Fifty years after the Grateful Dead was formed, the band still exerts a powerful influence over hundreds of thousands of fans around the world. Today, an entire generation of Deadheads who have never experienced a live Dead show are still drawn to the music and the complex and colorful subculture that has grown up around it. In This Is All a Dream We Dreamed, Blair Jackson and David Gans, two of the most well-respected chroniclers of the Dead, reveal the band's story through the words of its members and their creative collaborators, as well as a number of diverse fans, stitching together a multitude of voices into a seamless oral tapestry. Woven into this musical saga is an examination of the subculture that developed into its own economy, touching fans from all walks of life, from penniless hippies to celebrities, and at least one U.S. vice president. The book traces the band's evolution from its folk/bluegrass beginnings through the Jug Band craze, an early incarnation as Rolling Stones wannabes, feral psychedelic warriors, the Americana jam band that blazed through the '70s, to the shockingly popular but still iconoclastic stadium-filling band of later years. The Dead broke every rule of the music business along the way, taking risks and venturing into new territory as they fused inspired ideas and techniques with intuition and fearlessness to create a sound-and a business model-unlike anything heard and seen before.

As a poet and citizen deeply concerned by the Oka Crisis, the Idle No More protests, and Canada’s ongoing failure to resolve First Nations issues, Montreal author Mark Abley has long been haunted by the figure of Duncan Campbell Scott, known both as the architect of Canada’s most destructive Aboriginal policies and as one of the nation’s major poets. Who was this enigmatic figure who could compose a sonnet to an “Onondaga Madonna” one moment and promote a “final solution” to the “Indian problem” the next? In this passionate, intelligent and highly readable inquiry into the state of Canada’s troubled Aboriginal relations, Abley alternates between analysis of current events and an imagined debate with the spirit of Duncan Campbell Scott, whose defense of the Indian Residential School and belief in assimilation illuminate the historical roots underlying today’s First Nations’ struggles.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR Amy Poehler, Mel Brooks, Adam McKay, George Saunders, Bill Hader, Patton Oswalt, and many more take us deep inside the mysterious world of comedy in this fascinating, laugh-out-loud-funny book. Packed with behind-the-scenes stories—from a day in the writers’ room at The Onion to why a sketch does or doesn’t make it onto Saturday Night Live to how the BBC nearly erased the entire first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus—Poking a Dead Frog is a must-read for comedy buffs, writers and pop culture junkies alike.

Edward Nunzio shares a lifetime of conversations with those who have crossed over, and the loved ones they've left behind. "The Messenger" is a provocative look at the life of a medium whose experience with the spirit world began at age seven. Edward Nunzio pulls back the veil between this world and the next to prove, particularly to the grief-stricken, that there is more to life than what we see.