The Virginity of Famous Men, award-winning story writer Christine Sneed's deeply perceptive collection on the human condition, features protagonists attempting to make peace with the choices--both personal and professional--they have so far made. In “The Prettiest Girls,” a location scout for a Hollywood film studio falls in love with a young Mexican woman who is more in love with the idea of stardom than with this older American man who takes her with him back to California. “Clear Conscience” focuses on the themes of family loyalty, divorce, motherhood, and whether “doing the right thing” is, in fact, always the right thing to do. In “Beach Vacation,” a mother realizes that her popular and coddled teenage son has become someone she has difficulty relating to, let alone loving with the same maternal fervor that once was second nature to her. The title story, “The Virginity of Famous Men,” explores family and fortune. Long intrigued by love and loneliness, Sneed leads readers through emotional landscapes both familiar and uncharted. These probing stories are explorations of the compassionate and passionate impulses that are inherent in--and often the source of--both abiding joy and serious distress in every human life.

'The NME mattered to all those generations who grew up with music at the centre of their universe. The NME never had a truer chronicler than Pat Long.' Tony Parsons Since it was founded in 1952, the New Musical Express has played a central part in the British love affair with pop music. Snotty, confrontational, enthusiastic, sarcastic: the NME landing on the doormat every Wednesday was the high point of any music fan’s week, whether they were listening to The Beatles, Bowie or Blur. The Sex Pistols sang about it, Nick Hornby claims he regrets not working for it and a whole host of household names – Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, Nick Kent and Mick Farren, Steve Lamacq and Stuart Maconie – started their career writing for it. This authoritative history, written by former assistant editor, Pat Long, is an insider's account of the high times and low lives of the world's most famous, and most influential, music magazine. The fights, the bands, the brawls, the haircuts, the egos and much more. This is the definitive – and first – book about the infamous NME.

The first full study of the role of 'little magazines' and their contribution to the making of artistic modernism. A major scholarly achievement of immense value to teachers, researchers and students interested in the material culture of the first half of the 20th century and the relation of the arts to social modernity.

Praise for Lincoln Michel: "Lincoln Michel is one of contemporary literary culture's greatest natural resources."—Justin Taylor, Vice Time passes unexpectedly or, perhaps, inexactly at the school. It's hard to remember what semester we are supposed to be in. Several of the clocks still operate, but they don't show the same time. The red bells, affixed in every room, erupt several times each day, yet the intervals between the disruptions wax and wane with an unknown algorithm. The windows are obscured by construction paper murals. Consequently, the sun rises and falls in complete ignorance of those of us attending the school. Many of us participated in the decorations in some lost point of childhood. A few of us still have dried glue under our fingernails. In the room I sit in now, the windows are covered with a glitter and glue reenactment of the colonization of Roanoke by Sir Walter Raleigh. Outside of the window, who knows? Children go to school long after all the teachers have disappeared, a man manages an apartment complex of attempted suicides, and a couple navigates their relationship in the midst of a zombie attack. In these short stories, we are the upright beasts, doing battle with our darker, weirder impulses as the world collapses around us. Lincoln Michel's work has appeared in BOMB, Oxford American, Tin House, the Believer, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. A founding editor of the literary magazine Gigantic, Michel also serves as an online editor for Electric Literature.