Not Since Carrie is Ken Mandelbaum's brilliant survey of Broadway's biggest flops. This highly readable and entertaining book highlights almost 200 musicals created between 1950 and 1990, framed around the notorious musical adaptation of Carrie, and examines the reasons for their failure. "Essential and hilarious," raves The New Yorker, and The New York Times calls the book "A must-read."

“Brilliant . . . The dean of American comic writers showcases his varied talents mocking the public and private lives of politicians, average citizens and himself.”—The Star-Ledger Calvin Trillin has committed blatant acts of funniness all over the place—in The New Yorker, in one-man off-Broadway shows, in his “deadline poetry” for The Nation, in comic novels, and in what USA Today called “simply the funniest regular column in journalism.” Now Trillin selects the best of his funny stuff and organizes it into topics like high finance (“My long-term investment strategy has been criticized as being entirely too dependent on Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes”) and the literary life (“The average shelf life of a book is somewhere between milk and yogurt”). He addresses the horrors of witnessing a voodoo economics ceremony and the mystery of how his mother managed for thirty years to feed her family nothing but leftovers (“We have a team of anthropologists in there now looking for the original meal”). He even skewers deserving political figures in poetry. In this, the definitive collection of his humor, Calvin Trillin is prescient, insightful, and invariably hilarious. “A literary treasure . . . There is only one Calvin Trillin, and if he didn’t exist we would have to invent him.”—The Washington Times “Funny is to Trillin what drinking is to Uncle Jed in Annie Get Your Gun—it’s what he does ‘natur’lly.’ He’s also a lot more than funny. Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin is the twenty-eighth book he’s published over not far short of a half-century, and their range of subjects is remarkable.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “Trillin made his reputation over four decades as the author of ‘U.S. Journal’ in the New Yorker [but he] is incapable of resisting the temptation of comedy. The jokes kept on welling up and Mr. Trillin made a parallel reputation as a writer of funny stuff.”—The Economist “Wry, whip-smart, understated, and entertaining.”—The Miami Herald

This collection assembles the best interviews from Steve Cushing's long-running radio program Blues Before Sunrise, the nationally syndicated, award-winning program focusing on vintage blues and R&B. As both an observer and performer, Cushing has been involved with the blues scene in Chicago for decades. His candid, colorful interviews with prominent blues players, producers, and deejays reveal the behind-the-scenes world of the formative years of recorded blues. Many of these oral histories detail the careers of lesser-known but greatly influential blues performers and promoters. The book focuses in particular on pre–World War II blues singers, performers active in 1950s Chicago, and nonperformers who contributed to the early blues world. Interviewees include Alberta Hunter, one of the earliest African American singers to transition from Chicago's Bronzeville nightlife to the international spotlight, and Ralph Bass, one of the greatest R&B producers of his era. Blues expert, writer, record producer, and cofounder of Living Blues Magazine Jim O'Neal provides the book's foreword.

All Gates Open presents the definitive story of arguably the most influential and revered avant-garde band of the late twentieth century: CAN. It consists of two books. In Book One, Rob Young gives us the full biography of a band that emerged at the vanguard of what would come to be called the Krautrock scene in late sixties Cologne. With Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay - two classically trained students of Stockhausen - at the heart of the band, CAN's studio and live performances burned an incendiary trail through the decade that followed: and left a legacy that is still reverberating today in hip hop, post rock, ambient, and countless other genres. Rob Young's account draws on unique interviews with all founding members of CAN, as well as their vocalists, friends and music industry associates. And he revisits the music, which is still deliriously innovative and unclassifiable more than four decades on. All Gates Open is a portrait of a group who worked with visionary intensity and belief, outside the system and inside their own inner space. Book Two, Can Kiosk, has been assembled by Irmin Schmidt, founding member and guiding spirit of the band, as a 'collage - a technique long associated with CAN's approach to recording. There is an oral history of the band drawing on interviews that Irmin made with musicians who see CAN as an influence - such as Bobby Gillespie, Geoff Barrow, Daniel Miller, and many others. There are also interviews with artists and filmmakers like Wim Wenders and John Malkovitch, where Schmidt reflects on more personal matters and his work with film. Extracts of Schmidt's notebook and diaries from 2013-14 are also reproduced as a reflection on the creative process, and the memories, dreams, and epiphanies it entails. Can Kiosk offers further perspectives on a band that have inspired several generations of musicians and filmmakers in the voices of the artists themselves. CAN were unique, and their legacy is articulated in two books in this volume with the depth, rigour, originality, and intensity associated with the band itself. It is illustrated throughout with previously unseen art, photographs, and ephemera from the band's archive.