Shares insights into the iconic rock-and-roll performer's life, from his substance abuse challenges and his bisexual history to his connections to the British royal family and the secret attempt on his life.

Together with the Olympics, world's fairs are one of the few regular international events of sufficient scale to showcase a spectrum of sights, wonders, learning opportunities, technological advances, and new (or renewed) urban districts, and to present them all to a mass audience. Meet Me at the Fair: A World's Fair Reader breaks new ground in scholarship on world's fairs by incorporating a number of short new texts that investigate world's fairs in their multiple aspects: political, urban/architectural, anthropological/ sociological, technological, commercial, popular, and representational. Contributors come from eight different countries and represent affiliations in academia, museums and libraries, professional and architectural firms, non-profit organizations, and government regulatory agencies. In taking the measure of both the material artifacts and the larger cultural production of world's fairs, the volume presents its own phantasmagoria of disciplinary perspectives, historical periods, geographical locales, media, and messages, mirroring the microcosmic form of the world's fair itself.

The Radical Novel and the Classless Society analyzes utopian and proletarian novels as a single socialist tradition in U.S. literature. Utopian novels by such writers as Edward Bellamy, William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Sutton E. Griggs and proletarian novels by such writers as Robert Cantwell, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Meridel Le Sueur, Claude McKay, and Ralph Ellison can help us conceive of a unity of utopian and Marxist socialisms. We can combine the imagination of the future classless society with present-day socialist strategy. Utopian and proletarian novels help us to imagine—and realize—the classless society as achieving the utopian goal of recognizing race and gender and the Marxist goal of overcoming social class.

Fiction. LGBT Studies. Army sharpshooter and deserter Cooper Chance is trapped. Recruited from Iraq to fight in an African country ravaged by a chronic civil war, Cooper wants nothing more than to go home. Unfortunately, the only thing awaiting him in America is jail, and Cooper is acutely claustrophobic. Whether he likes it or not, he now leads the life of a mercenary, in a gritty world filled with thugs, prostitutes, and corrupt cops. To survive his desperate circumstances, Cooper trades diamonds. One day he wanders into a diamond shop, where he meets Sadiq, a young merchant as lost in the world as he is. As they fall in love, Cooper has no idea Sadiq has ulterior motives. Meanwhile huge oil reserves are discovered nearby, and the CIA offers Cooper a way home without jail time if he agrees to carry out a risky, high-stakes mission. Cooper will do anything to get home—except sell his soul to the devil. But when a teenage prostitute he has promised to save suddenly disappears, Cooper finally relents. Unfortunately, he has no idea that unexpected consequences await.

Edited by Joanne Asala, the stories are vividly and dramatically interpreted and portrayed in the paper-cuts (wycinaki) by Alice Wadowski-Bak, noted paper-cut and folkore artist.¶The work of Alice Wadowski-Bak, native of Niagara Falls, New York, is found in private collections and galleries worldwide. The art of wycinanki appeared in Poland in the middle of the 1800s, especially in rural areas where sheep shears were readily available. The method of folding, layering, coloring, and overlay is related to the ancient Chinese art of the block print. Artist Wadowski-Bak explores both wycinanki and oriental stencil cutting. Her origianl designs for this book attest to her exquisite artistry.¶This is a treasure of folk art and lore. A very special gift for personal collections.This book of engaging folk stories includes such tales as "The Violin," "The Headache Cure," "Midsummer's Eve," "The Flower Queen's Daughter," "The Legend of the North Wind," "The Flaming Castle," "The Village Dance," and "The Unfinished Tune."The stories were collected by Joanne Asala, with wycinanki (paper-cutting) illustrations by Polish-American artist Alice Wadowski-Bak.