It's hard to grow up normally when Grandfather rides a white horse and wields a scythe - especially when you have to take over the family business, and everyone mistakes you for the Tooth Fairy. And especially when you have to face the new and addictive music that has entered Discworld.

For 6,557 miles, from New York to Mississippi to Seattle, Chuck Klosterman decided to chase rock 'n' roll and death across a continent. 21 days later, after three relationships, an encounter with various snakes, and a night spent snorting cocaine in a graveyard, he started to order his thoughts on American culture and the meaning of celebrity.

Ever since the piano was invented, people have longed to own one. In the nineteenth century, an age without recorded music or television, this craze reached its apex. When Thad Carhart discovered Luc and his hidden cache of pianos in the dusty repair shop on his street in Paris, his life changed.

Takes a critical approach to the spectrum of postmodern America: reality TV, Internet porn, breakfast cereal, serial killers, Pamela Anderson, literary Jesus freaks, and the real difference between apples and oranges.

I'm Annabel. My 'best friend' Sophie is spreading rumours about me. My family is slowly falling apart. It's turning into a long, lonely summer, full of secrets and silence. But I've met this guy who won't let me hide away. Will I ever find courage to tell him what really happened the night Sophie and I stopped being friends?

The definitive biography of Elvis and an excellent slice of social history.

In this remarkable study, now an established classic which has remained in print since its first publication in 1971, Charles Rosen surveys the language of the music of the classical period. He concentrates on the three major figures of the time - Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven - because 'it is in terms of their achievements that the musical vernacular can best be defined'. He follows the ...

This new edition of The Oxford Companion to Music is a comprehensive and authoritative reference work, which, like its famous predecessors, will be invaluable to both professional and amateur musicians, and general music lovers. A distinguished and international team of contributors covers a broad sweep of musical subjects, ranging from composers and performers to instruments and genres.

A frank autobiography of the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. This book records his life - the music, the women and the drugs. It talks about the white promotors and producers who exploited black musicians as well as the critics.

An autobiography of Woody Guthrie, founder of modern American folk music. This book presents a cynical, earthy and tragic account of his life in an Oklahoma oil-boom town, of the Depression that followed, and of his subsequent travels in, on, and under trains, in stolen cars and on his feet, round an America going rotten from the top downwards.

Jon Savage's Ralph Gleason Award-winning England's Dreaming is the ultimate book on punk, its progenitors, the Sex Pistols, and their time: the late 1970s. Full of anedcote, insight, and exclusive interviews, it tells the sensational story of the meteoric rise and rapid decline of the last great rock'n'roll band and the cultural moment they came to define. The critical reputation of England's ...

Provides an introduction of the players who came up with the ideas that form the basic elements of the hip-hop culture. It describes how it all began with social upheavals in Jamaica, the Bronx, the Black Belt of Long Island and South Central LA. It is intended for DJs, B-Boys, MCs and those with an interest in the history of America.

The legendary Frank Zappa, one of the most influential, innovative and controversial musical artists for the past 20 years, takes us on a wild, funny trip through his life and times. Along the way, Zappa offers his inimitable views on many things such as art, politics and beer.

Explains the basic principles of 'natural learning' that make up the Inner Game methodology, and shows how to apply them to reach a new level in the learning and performing of music. This book features ensemble playing, improvisation and listening skills, and exercises that help intonation, artistic phrasing and technique.

Through his musical taste which defined a culture and his wildly popular Radio 4 show, Home Truths , John Peel reached out to an audience that was as diverse as his record collection. This book, completed by the woman who knew him best, his wife, Shiela, presents an intimate portrait of his life, marriage and his family.

Argues that there can be found in American folk a community as deep, as electric, as perverse and as conflicted as all America, and that the songs Bob Dylan recorded out of the public eye, in a basement in Woodstock with the group who would later become The Band, are where that community as a whole gets to speak.

Best single-volume guide to composers now on the market.