"If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."–P.G. Wodehouse The first novel in the Flashman series Fraser revives Flashman, a caddish bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, and relates Flashman’s adventures after he is expelled in drunken disgrace from Rugby school in the late 1830s. Flashy enlists in the Eleventh Light Dragoons and is promptly sent to India and Afghanistan, where despite his consistently cowardly behavior he always manages to come out on top. Flashman is an incorrigible anti-hero for the ages. This humorous adventure book will appeal to fans of historical fiction, military fiction, and British history as well as to fans of Clive Cussler, James Bond, and The Three Musketeers.

The best, most provocative reviews, interviews, columns, and essays written by the entertaining, idiosyncratic, and influential music writer Chuck Eddy over the past twenty-five years.

A profusely illustrated guide to every aspect of decorating provides ideas and techniques for increasing the beauty and comfort of homes of all styles and sizes

Unexpected change can be like a breath of fresh air--a little brisk at first, but magic for body and soul, in the latest work from the author who paints the details of human relationships with the finesse of a master (Jodi Picoult).

This delightful 1974 classic is replete with new images, updates on favorite artists, and a thoughtful afterword by the author that reflects on what was at the heart of the '60s counterculture. Native Funk and Flash sits alongside treasured costume and fashion bibles on the shelves of the great designers of our times. Many artists, now in their prime, credit their early encounter with it for their own choice of career and inspiration. Within these pages hand-embroidered and hand-painted imagery enhance dear old shirts and jeans, serving the dual purpose of extending their usefulness and emblazoning the wearer with messages of love, psychedelic daydreams, and mysticism for all to see. The ethos of a generation is captured here: the scenes, sound, smell, look, politics, spirit, and most of all, the love is expressed in this moment in time when people cared so deeply for one another and the future that they wore it on their sleeves. Carved wooden doors, chairs, handmade fanciful shoes, beads, leather, incredible jewelry, a playground, patched upholstery-everything was fair game for inventive self-expression, whether one was a skilled adept or a beginner with a dream. No craft or design collection should be without this book.

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”—the politics and social practices associated with handmaking—Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s—including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet’s torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much “in the fray” of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.