Stories, photos, and ephemera contributed by the Empty Bottle's community of fans, performers, and staff over it's 20+ year history.

"Jon Fine spent nearly thirty years performing and recording with bands that played various forms of aggressive and challenging underground rock music, and, as he writes in this memoir, at no point were any of those bands 'ever threatened, even distantly, by actual fame.' Yet when members of his first band, Bitch Magnet, reunited after twenty-one years to tour ... diehard longtime fans traveled from far and wide to attend those shows, despite creeping middle-age obligations of parenthood and 9-to-5 jobs, testament to the remarkable staying power of the indie culture that the bands predating the likes of Bitch Magnet--among them Black Flag, Mission of Burma, and Sonic Youth --willed into existence through sheer determination and a shared disdain for the mediocrity of contemporary popular music"--Amazon.com.

This cookbook features recipes for German-Jewish cuisine as it existed in Germany prior to World War II, and as refugees later adapted it in the United States and elsewhere. Because these dishes differ from more familiar Jewish food, they will be a discovery for many people. With a focus on fresh, seasonal ingredients, this indispensable collection of recipes includes numerous soups, both chilled and hot; vegetable dishes; meats, poultry, and fish; fruit desserts; cakes; and the German version of challah, Berches. These elegant and mostly easy-to-make recipes range from light summery fare to hearty winter foods. The Gropmans-a mother-daughter author pair-have honored the original recipes Gabrielle learned after arriving as a baby in Washington Heights from Germany in 1939, while updating their format to reflect contemporary standards of recipe writing. Six recipe chapters offer easy-to-follow instructions for weekday meals, Shabbos and holiday meals, sausage and cold cuts, vegetables, coffee and cake, and core recipes basic to the preparation of German-Jewish cuisine. Some of these recipes come from friends and family of the authors; others have been culled from interviews conducted by the authors, prewar German-Jewish cookbooks, nineteenth-century American cookbooks, community cookbooks, memoirs, or historical and archival material. The introduction explains the basics of Jewish diet (kosher law). The historical chapter that follows sets the stage by describing Jewish social customs in Germany and then offering a look at life in the vibrant _migr_ community of Washington Heights in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. Vividly illustrated with more than fifty drawings by Megan Piontkowski and photographs by Sonya Gropman that show the cooking process as well as the delicious finished dishes, this cookbook will appeal to readers curious about ethnic cooking and how it has evolved, and to anyone interested in exploring delicious new recipes.

In 2001, Brian Shimkovitz was on a Fulbright scholarship in Ghana studying ethnomusicology when he first discovered the region's thriving cassette culture. Since then, he has dedicated his time to sharing this previously unheard music for a global audience on a hugely popular website. Curated by Shimkovitz himself, Awesome Tapes from Africa brings together the website's most listenable finds to create a dazzling visual history of the amazing music that has emerged from West Africa in recent years. From hip-hop inflected pop to traditional local songs, house disco beats to classic soul ballards, this is an exuberantly diverse collection of genres, styles, and artists. Wonderfully combining Shimkovitz's infectious enthusiasm with his academic expertise and local knowledge, Awesome Tapes from Africa is a collection to revisit again and again.

Developed and refined by two successful pediatricians, the "Jassey Way" boasts more than a 90% success rate of getting children to sleep through the night in their first 4 weeks of life. A safe and proven technique, the Jassey Way uses a feeding schedule that allows newborns (and their parents) a full night's sleep at a younger age than other sleep training techniques.

Cult favorite Letters to Wendy's has sold thousands of copies through web, direct and special orders, and will appeal to a wide variety of readers at independent and chain stores.

The stolid landscape of Chicago suddenly turns dreamlike and otherworldly in Stuart Dybek's classic story collection. A child's collection of bottle caps becomes the tombstones of a graveyard. A lowly rightfielder's inexplicable death turns him into a martyr to baseball. Strains of Chopin floating down the tenement airshaft are transformed into a mysterious anthem of loss. Combining homely detail and heartbreakingly familiar voices with grand leaps of imagination, The Coast of Chicago is a masterpiece from one of America's most highly regarded writers.

Absorbing and compelling reading from beginning to end, AA -1025 Memoirs of the Communist Infiltration Into the Church is a must read for every Catholic today and for all who would understand just what has happened to the Catholic Church since the 1960's. In the 1960's, a French nurse, Marie Carre, attended an auto-crash victim who was brought into her hospital in a city she purposely does not name. The man lingered there near death for a few hours and then died. He had no identification on him, but he had a briefcase in which there was a set of quasi-autobiographical notes. She kept these notes and read them, and because of their extraordinary content, decided to publish them. The result is this little book, AA-1025 Memoirs of the Communist Infiltration Into the Church, a strange and fascinating account of a Communist who purposely entered the Catholic priesthood along with many others, with the intent to subvert and destroy the Church from within. His strange yet fascinating and illuminating set of biographical notes, tells of his commission to enter the priesthood, his experiences in the seminary, and the means and methods he used and promoted to help effect from within the auto-dissolution of the Catholic Church. No one will read this book without a profound assent that something just like what is describer here must surely have happened on a wide scale in order to have disrupted the life of the Catholic Church so dramatically.

A lyrical, intelligent, authentic and necessary look at the intersection of race and class in Chicago, a Great American City.Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel have touted Chicago as a "world-class city." The skyscrapers kissing the clouds, the billion-dollar Millennium Park, Michelin-rated restaurants, pristine lake views, fabulous shopping, vibrant theater scene, downtown flower beds and stellar architecture tell one story. Yet swept under the rug is another story: the stench of segregation that permeates and compromises Chicago. Though other cities - including Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Baltimore - can fight over that mantle, it's clear that segregation defines Chicago. And unlike many other major U.S. cities, no particular race dominates; Chicago is divided equally into black, white and Latino, each group clustered in its various turfs.In this intelligent and highly important narrative, Chicago native Natalie Moore shines a light on contemporary segregation in the city's South Side; her reported essays showcase the lives of these communities through the stories of her family and the people who reside there. The South Side highlights the impact of Chicago's historic segregation - and the ongoing policies that keep the system intact.

When most people hear "cable car" they think "San Francisco." Yet for almost one-quarter of a century Chicago boasted the largest cable car system the world has ever seen, transporting more than one billion riders. This gigantic public work filled residents with pride--and filled robber barons' pockets with money. It also sparked a cable car building boom that spread to twenty-six other U.S. cities. But after twenty-five years, the boom went bust, and Chicago abandoned its cable car system. Today, the fascinating story of the rise and fall of Chicago's cable cars is all but forgotten. Having already written the history of the "L," Greg Borzo guides readers through a stretch of Chicago's transit history that most people never knew existed--even though they have been walking past, riding over and even dining in remnants of it for years. . .