There is – and could only ever be – one Billy Bob Thornton: actor, musician, Academy Award-winning screenwriter, and accidental Hollywood badass. In The Billy Bob Tapes, he spins colourful tales of his dirt-poor Southern upbringing, his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (fear of komodo dragons and antiques), his life, his loves (including his marriage to fellow Oscar winner Angelina Jolie), and, of course, his movie career. The Billy Bob Tapes is full of incredible stories and righteous philosophical rants, told with the help of his close friend, legendary country music star and bestselling author, Kinky Friedman. Put these two iconoclasts together and you get a story that’s not just a celebrity memoir, but a unique, hilarious and insightful pop culture manifesto.

Sling Blade, winner of the 1996 Academy Award for best screenplay, is the powerful story of Karl, who returns to his hometown after serving 25 years in a mental hospital for committing a gruesome crime. There he befriends a young boy and develops a close relationship with the boy and his widowed mother. These relationships evolve quickly and, ultimately, Karl's feelings for the mother and son lead him to a selfless act. Writer Billy Bob Thornton demonstrates a searing insight into the lives of ordinary people, portraying with equal skill both the good and bad who inhabit the small Arkansas town. Sling Blade is both the tale of one man's struggle to reconcile his life and of love's ultimate redemptive power.

*** 'Lots of great stories... A fascinating insight.' -JOHN MAHER, Buzzcocks 'Perfectly executed, highly detailed, incredibly interesting.' -HENRY ROLLINS, Black Flag 'Pete and Buzzcocks were there right from the beginning.' -BERNARD SUMNER, Joy Division, New Order When Pete Shelley, lead singer of legendary punk band Buzzcocks, passed away in 2018 we lost the chance to hear one of music's brightest stars tell his story. Or so it seemed. Now, recordings have surfaced of a series of remarkable interviews in which Pete tells the story of his life, his band and his place at the beating heart of the punk explosion in fascinating detail. Recorded over a series of late-night calls with a close friend, the tapes hear Pete talk song-by-song through Buzzcocks releases to reveal the personal memories behind the music and the inspiration for masterpieces such as 'Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)' and 'What Do I Get?'. Published for the first time and with the blessing of Pete's estate, Ever Fallen In Love: The Lost Buzzcocks Tapes is a tribute to a founding member of punk and a chance to hear one of music's true visionaries tell his own story at last. 'A true gentleman and a great artist and songwriter.' -PETER HOOK, Joy Division, New Order 'Shot through with self-doubt and mild regret, Pete Shelley's lovesick pop classics have a bittersweet charm that will forever speak to the young romantic' -JOHN COOPER CLARKE 'Buzzcocks were the blue touchpaper for my love of music. Pure pop met punk and the result was perfection.' -TIM BURGESS, The Charlatans

Tells for the first time the whole story of the Basement Tapes, recorded in summer 1967, when Bob Dylan's career was at a crossroads. Dylan gathered together a few musician friends in Woodstock, New York, and informally recorded a bunch of songs intended to be heard by no one but themselves. Instead, they change music forever.

“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

Contains primary source material.

Raised in small-town Arkansas, Billy Bob Thornton grew up amid a rich storytelling tradition. See, the South is just different than other places. . . . You can feel the ghosts there. As a kid, he would sit on the porch listening to his family or some old man down the road spinning yarns about colorful neighbors. These stories didn't have to be made up. The characters were already there, so the stories just came out of the characters we knew. Thus was borne his Oscar®-winning masterpiece Sling Blade and now The Billy Bob Tapes—a narrative based on late-night conversations with Kinky Friedman and other friends who gathered 'round to hear Billy mine a cave full of ghosts. Billy grew up shooting squirrels, playing drums in VFW clubs, and dreaming of rock 'n' roll stardom or pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals. Then at sixteen he took a drama class to meet chicks—and met Mrs. Treadway, who noticed the young man's talent and encouraged him as an actor and writer. "You don't know what it's like to be a drama teacher in a small town in Arkansas where nobody really cares," she said, "but let me tell you something. You can do this." These stories didn't have to be made up. The Everything I've accomplished since, I can trace back to this woman, Maudie Treadway. The colorful characters, stories, and experiences of his youth would find their way into Billy's work, in his films and music, and in his perspective and attitude. It's like the old saying goes: you can take the boy out of the hills, but you can't take the hills out of the boy. That boy did leave the hills—for Hollywood Hills. A true fish out of water, he recalls stories of miserable jobs, the cheapest accommodations, and physical hunger—but also a devoted writing partner Tom Epperson, a life-changing acting teacher in L.A., and a compassionate nurse who snuck him milk shakes when he was near starvation. But there was always the dream of being an actor, and his fortunes turned when he served hors d'oeuvres as a catering waiter to legendary director Billy Wilder, who advised him, "Write about your interesting life." Billy's long career in Hollywood yields stories of inspired collaborations and failed ones, true friendships with other actors and musicians, and good friends gone too soon. In The Billy Bob Tapes, he reflects on the critics, the culture around fame, and the challenges of conveying an artistic vision in film. Most striking is Billy's clear-eyed perspective about the magic of entertainment, and how we perceive it in a rapidly changing world. With passion, unvarnished honesty, wry humor, and a little help from friends Angelina Jolie, Robert Duvall, Dwight Yoakam, Tom Epperson, and Daniel Lanois, Billy Bob finally talks.