Gelbard's autobiographical account of her affair with the legendary jazz musician.

The story of the final recordings of one of the greatest jazz musicians of the twentieth century

"A beautifully written, evocative tribute to an elusive art... Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Teddy Wilson, Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Gato Barbieri." - Performing Arts

Presents an in-depth exploration of the musician's controversial electric period and the impact it had on the jazz community, as drawn from firsthand recollections about his artistic and personal life. Reprint.

“A remarkable guided tour through the field—a kind of nonfiction companion to Among Others. It’s very good. It’s great.” —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing As any reader of Jo Walton’s Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic re-reader of books. In 2008, then-new science-fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her re-reading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor.com. Now this volumes presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field’s most ambitious series. Among Walton’s many subjects here are the Zones of Thought novels of Vernor Vinge; the question of what genre readers mean by “mainstream”; the underappreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh; the field’s many approaches to time travel; the masterful science fiction of Samuel R. Delany; Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin; and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read. Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely readable, engaging collection of provocative, opinionated thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from one of our best writers. “For readers unschooled in the history of SF/F, this book is a treasure trove.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

It is 1851. Miles is a house slave on the Tilery Plantation, but when he is caught looking at an open book, he is sent to the breaking ground where he learns what it really means to be a slave. 12-year-old Miles is allowed to work in the great house on the Tillery Plantation, where he is training to be a house servant, rather than labor in the fields. But after he is caught looking at an open book while dusting the library, Miles is banished from the mansion and sent to the breaking ground. There, he learns what it truly means to feel like a slave. But it is also at the breaking ground that he meets Elijah, an older slave who teaches Miles to read and tells him of the land of freedom up north. Armed with his new knowledge, Miles tells himself that he does not feel like a slave and he no longer believes working in the great house is a privlege.