You Can't Always Get What You Want
"The Rolling Stones free concert is finally going to happen tomorrow at the Altamont Speedway... Apparently it's one of the most difficult things in the world to give a free concert." You can hear the smarmy radio guy being smarmy about this San Francisco show in the trailer to the Maysles brothers' Gimme Shelter.
When You Are Engulfed In Flames, David Sedaris
Reading David Sedaris is like sharing those rare moments with friends; when you laugh so hard at someone's self-deprecating recollection of their misfortune that your eyes bleed. It's also like you've been reborn in a world where you're wearing an external catheter designed for sports fans because you like to accessorise.
True Norwegian Black Metal
We feel pretty dubious about all this hipster anthropology shit, but this book has some serious credentials. Photographer Peter Beste apparently spent eight years getting unrivaled access to the most insular and hostile music scene in the world: True Norwegian Black Metal. Think Burzum. Emperor. Immortal.
Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness)
First editions are like virgins in a brothel: sought after, rarely fondled and destined to live out their days in a basement somewhere. Thankfully, these beauties can still be found in second-handbook stores, or if you're lucky enough (hint), will come to you from a dear friend...
BONJOUR TRISTESSE takes the reader to the South of France through the scheming eyes of Cécile, a 17-year-old hedonist on vacation with her father Raymond, the sensual and fetching widower, and his conservative mistress, Elsa.
The Abstinence Teacher
Teacher says oral sex OK!
In ThHE ABSTINENCE TEACHER, Tom Perrotta (ELECTION, LITTLE CHILDREN) takes an average North American town and adds an evangelical congregation called the Tabernacle, whose fearless leader believes Lara Croft is an "abomination" and deems "hot [marital] Christian sex" the only sex acceptable.
Arcade Publications
Edward Cole, creator of COLE'S FUNNY PICTURE BOOK, was not a conventional Victorian fellow. An entrepreneur and idealist, he took it upon himself to spread love and rhetoric to all who might pass through the doors of his Melbourne Book Arcade. In line with its proprietor’s progressive attitude to living, Cole’s was several floors worth of whimsy and readables, complemented by an in-house brass band, a hall of mirrors, a tea salon and reading chairs that would put the modern-day book barn to
shame.
Snapshots by Allen Robbe-Grillet
Think of a manuscript cut into pieces, thrown in the air and put back together in a random order, and that is a Robbe-Grillet story.
This book is like a treasure trove of beautiful small gems, a collection of short stories by the important French author. Each story is an exquisite description of a single scene, a glimpse of a captured moment.
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