Collected here are selections from Patti Smith's writings over the decade in which she made a lasting impact on America's underground literary and rock scene. Smith's work evokes the experimentation and the desire to break boundaries of those pre-punk days. Over one-quarter of the works selected are unpublished pieces from journals, performances, and Smith's personal papers. Heavily illustrated with photographs by Judy Linn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edward Maxey, and others, Early Work brings together all sides of Patti Smith, from the thoughtful intellectual to the explosive performer.

A collection of Smith's early poems and prose, which is both meditative and explosive, and evokes the desire to break boundaries in the pre-punk era.

American Literature in Transition, 1970–1980 examines the literary developments of the twentieth-century's gaudiest decade. For a quarter century, filmmakers, musicians, and historians have returned to the era to explore the legacy of Watergate, stagflation, and Saturday Night Fever, uncovering the unique confluence of political and economic phenomena that make the period such a baffling time. Literary historians have never shown much interest in the era, however - a remarkable omission considering writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Marilyn French, Adrienne Rich, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Alice Walker, and Octavia E. Butler were active. Over the course of twenty-one essays, contributors explore a range of controversial themes these writers tackled, from 1960s' nostalgia to feminism and the redefinition of masculinity to sexual liberation and rock 'n' roll. Other essays address New Journalism, the rise of blockbuster culture, memoir and self-help, and crime fiction - all demonstrating that the Me Decade was nothing short of mesmerizing.

Singing for Themselves: Essays on Women in Popular Music is a fresh look at a topic that has attracted increasing interest in recent years. In this collection, scholars from a number of disciplines look at various artists and movements and come to some new conclusions about the ways in which female artists have contributed to the past four decades of pop, rock, blues and punk. From new looks at major artists Etta James, Laura Nyro and Patti Smith to later figures Ferron, Bjørk, and Melissa Etheridge, these chapters suggest new ways to view—and hear—music that is already part of our culture. Essays on the Indigo Girls, Dixie Chicks and Destiny’s Child prove that the girl-groups tradition is alive and well, but with additional new dimensions, and a three-essay section on Joan Jett and the Riot Grrrls phenomenon sheds new light on their implications for feminist artistic expression. The final piece, an annotated bibliography of academic writing on women in rock, helps make this collection a useful addition to the library of students of popular music, while the solid research and accessibility of the text make this a good choice for the general reader as well as the seasoned scholar. "If you think that adoration of certain pop music is a guilty pleasure, not worthy of higher intellectual aspirations, then Singing For Themselves offers absolution. It's far from trivial to ponder the Tao of Canadian singer Ferron, the classical allusions of Laura Nyro's lyrics, the postfeminist booty-shaking of Destiny's Child, or the historical milieu that turned Jamesetta Hawkins into blues great Etta James. Reading these essays made me want to go right back to the music - feeling wiser, yes, but also validated in the desire to go as deep as any song or singer can take me." Michele Kort, author of Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro, and senior editor at Ms. magazine "I've read Singing for Themselves: Essays on Women in Popular Music, and am happy to provide an endorsement. Singing for Themselves is a consistently interesting collection of new essays on women and popular music. The collection is all the more welcome for being so current. It mixes essays on recent phenomena (such as electronic/punk group Le Tigre and the Dixie Chicks' stirring of political controversy) with new perspectives on canonical figures like Patti Smith or Etta James. The essays gathered here are written with clear commitments, but all are marked by care and scholarly rigour. I found the interdisciplinary breadth of Singing for Themselves refreshing; new avenues for research are opened up here, and new theoretical paradigms are explored." Will Straw, PhD, Acting Director, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies "Opening this book was like opening the door onto a surprise party. Everyone I've ever wanted to meet was in there, including myself!" Ferron

This is the story of the books punks read and why they read them. The Year's Work in the Punk Bookshelf challenges the stereotype that punk rock is a bastion of violent, drug-addicted, uneducated drop outs. Brian James Schill explores how, for decades, punk and postpunk subculture has absorbed, debated, and reintroduced into popular culture, philosophy, classic literature, poetry, and avant-garde theatre. Connecting punk to not only Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, but Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Henry Miller, Kafka, and Philip K. Dick, this work documents and interprets the subculture's literary history. In detailing the punk bookshelf, Schill contends that punk's literary and intellectual interests can be traced to the sense of shame (whether physical, socioeconomic, cultural, or sexual) its advocates feel in the face of a shameless market economy that not only preoccupied many of punks' favorite writers but generated the entire punk polemic.

The early works of Paul Auster convey the loneliness of the individual fully committed to the work of writing, as if he were confined within the book that dominates his life. All through Auster’s poetry, essays and fiction, the work of writing is an actual physical effort, an effective construction, as if the words aligned in the poem-text were stones to place in a row when building a wall or some other structure in stone. This book studies the symbolism of the genetic substance of the world (re)built through the work of writing, inside the walls of the room, closed in space and time, though open to an unlimited mental expansion. Paul Auster’s work is an aesthetic-literary self-reflection about the mission of writing. The writer-character is like an inexperienced God, whose hands may originate either cosmos or chaos, life or death, hence Auster’s recurring meditation on the work and the power of writing, at the same time an autobiography and a self-criticism. The stones, the wall, and the room – the words, the page, and the book – are the ontological structure of the imaginary cosmos generated in Paul Auster’s mind, like a real world born of the magma of words lost in another, interior world.