The first-ever biography of the highly respected arranger in the history of American popular music. Base on more than 200 interviews with his closest friends, family, and colleagues.

A baton twirler fights the rain to save her neighborhood parade

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins comes a twelfth collection of poetry offering over fifty new poems that showcase the generosity, wit, and imaginative play that prompted The Wall Street Journal to call him “America’s favorite poet.” The Rain in Portugal—a title that admits he’s not much of a rhymer—sheds Collins’s ironic light on such subjects as travel and art, cats and dogs, loneliness and love, beauty and death. His tones range from the whimsical—“the dogs of Minneapolis . . . / have no idea they’re in Minneapolis”—to the elegiac in a reaction to the death of Seamus Heaney. A student of the everyday, Collins here contemplates a weather vane, a still life painting, the calendar, and a child lost at a beach. His imaginative fabrications have Shakespeare flying comfortably in first class and Keith Richards supporting the globe on his head. By turns entertaining, engaging, and enlightening, The Rain in Portugal amounts to another chorus of poems from one of the most respected and familiar voices in the world of American poetry. Praise for The Rain in Portugal “Nothing in Billy Collins’s twelfth book . . . is exactly what readers might expect, and that’s the charm of this collection.”—The Washington Post “This new collection shows [Collins] at his finest. . . . Certain to please his large readership and a good place for readers new to Collins to begin.”—Library Journal “Disarmingly playful and wistfully candid.”—Booklist

These poems came through the pen of a once unhappy man, who now has found joy in his life. Peter has been writing for over forty years and writes with simplicity about Joy, love, spirituality, and nature, with an occasional hint of sadness. He writes what flows from his heart and never spends too much time thinking about what he is going to write about. He has a wonderful muse that never deserts him or blocks his words. He is always in hope that some of his words will inspire others to live a life of sweetness, love and joy. He feels truly blessed by the power above, and often thinks that his words just come out of nowhere.

A comprehensive anthology bringing together more than one thousand of the best American and English song lyrics of the twentieth century; an extraordinary celebration of a unique art form and an indispensable reference work and history that celebrates one of the twentieth century’s most enduring and cherished legacies. Reading Lyrics begins with the first masters of the colloquial phrase, including George M. Cohan (“Give My Regards to Broadway”), P. G. Wodehouse (“Till the Clouds Roll By”), and Irving Berlin, whose versatility and career span the period from “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to “Annie Get Your Gun” and beyond. The Broadway musical emerges as a distinct dramatic form in the 1920s and 1930s, its evolution propelled by a trio of lyricists—Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Lorenz Hart—whose explorations of the psychological and emotional nuances of falling in and out of love have lost none of their wit and sophistication. Their songs, including “Night and Day,” “The Man I Love,” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” have become standards performed and recorded by generation after generation of singers. The lure of Broadway and Hollywood and the performing genius of such artists as Al Jolson, Fred Astaire, Ethel Waters, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Ethel Merman inspired a remarkable array of talented writers, including Dorothy Fields (“A Fine Romance,” “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love”), Frank Loesser (“Guys and Dolls”), Oscar Hammerstein II (from the groundbreaking “Show Boat” of 1927 through his extraordinary collaboration with Richard Rodgers), Johnny Mercer, Yip Harburg, Andy Razaf, Noël Coward, and Stephen Sondheim. Reading Lyrics also celebrates the work of dozens of superb craftsmen whose songs remain known, but who today are themselves less known—writers like Haven Gillespie (whose “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” may be the most widely recorded song of its era); Herman Hupfeld (not only the composer/lyricist of “As Time Goes By” but also of “Are You Makin’ Any Money?” and “When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba”); the great light versifier Ogden Nash (“Speak Low,” “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” and, yes, “The Sea-Gull and the Ea-Gull”); Don Raye (“Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” “Mister Five by Five,” and, of course, “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet”); Bobby Troup (“Route 66”); Billy Strayhorn (not only for the omnipresent “Lush Life” but for “Something to Live For” and “A Lonely Coed”); Peggy Lee (not only a superb singer but also an original and appealing lyricist); and the unique Dave Frishberg (“I’m Hip,” “Peel Me a Grape,” “Van Lingo Mungo”). The lyricists are presented chronologically, each introduced by a succinct biography and the incisive commentary of Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball.

Ernest McCarty, Jr. is a native of Chicago, who has authored and co-authored more than 27 produced plays and musicals, and has been associated with ETA in Chicago and Quaigh Theatre in New York City before becoming Artistic Director of New Horizon Theatre in 1994. His first production, I Dreamt I Dwelt In Bloomingdales was presented at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City in 1970. Other theatrical works produced in New York City include Dinah! Queen of the Blues, presented at the Westside Arts Theatre starring Sasha Dalton and When the Spirit Moves, starring Tony Award-winner Trazana Beverly, The Exchange and The Separate Vacation. Among his plays and musicals produced in Chicago are Madame Hortense, the tone poem A Cosmic Night, Recollection Rag, Love Spirit! And Brazilian Rendezvous. Eleven of his plays and musicals have been produced in Pittsburgh, including Madame Hortense, The Exchange, A Window To Home, Closing Notice, The Hex, A Cosmic Night, Life After Coma, Give Us Another Tune, The Region (An American Opera), Outrun the Rain, Journey of the Spirits as well as his musical review Love Spirit! His play Recollection Rag aired on WQED-TV and his score The Martin Luther King Suite, which aired on NBC-TV, received an Emmy. Ernest’s directing credits include Humbug Man, Brazilian Rendezvous, A Cosmic Night, The Separate Vacation, Madame Hortense, Recollection Rag, The Exchange, Samm-Art Williams’ Home, A Window to Home, Life After Coma, The Tap Dance Kid, GIve Us Another Time, The Region, Rain and Rivers, Outrun the Rain, Kim El’s and KL’s The Poet’s Corner, Deadwood Dick and Cheryl West’s Jar The Floor. Ernest is a member of the Dramatists Guild. He was named Prolific Playwright of 1998 by In Pittsburgh. His play Recollection Rag (The Exchange) received the Hoyt W. Fuller Once-Act Play Festival Award and his play Madame Hortense received a Joseph Jefferson Award.