As with most great bands, it is difficult to remember a time when Blur weren’t a part of Britain’s rich musical landscape. From art-rock origins they went on to make four multi-platinum number one albums and produced some of the finest songs of the modern era: End of A Century, Girls And Boys, Parklife, Song 2, Beetlebum... And it might not be over yet! The Life Of Blur charts their story from shaky beginnings through to the full-blown superstardom of Parklife, The Great Escape and beyond. At the heart of this tale is the complex, sometimes explosive relationship between Blur’s four founding members: Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Dave Rowntree and Alex James. A rich soup of relentless ambition, dogged persistence, fraying tempers and a million clanging champagne bottles, the emotional chemistry that makes up Blur has been just as interesting to watch as the songs the band have produced. Author Martin Power has talked with band’s former managers, fellow musicians, old school teachers and close friends to shed new light on a group once called “the most intelligent, enduring and credible band to emerge from the Nineties”. With a concise critical commentary on their music, rare photographs and a complete discography, as well as shedding new light on the group's various solo activities - including Damon Albarn's Gorillaz and Graham Coxon's one-man assault on the indie charts - this is the definitive account of Blur’s epic journey.

Fans of Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee and Louis Sachar's Holes will enjoy this story about a boy and the ancient secrets that hide deep in the heart of the Florida everglades near a place called Muck City. When Charlie moves to the small town of Taper, Florida, he discovers a different world. Pinned between the everglades and the swampy banks of Lake Okeechobee, the small town produces sugar cane . . . and the fastest runners in the country. Kids chase muck rabbits in the fields while the cane is being burned and harvested. Dodging flames and blades and breathing smoke, they run down the rabbits for three dollars a skin. And when they can do that, running a football is easy. But there are things in the swamp, roaming the cane at night, that cannot be explained, and they seem connected to sprawling mounds older than the swamps. Together with his step-second cousin "Cotton" Mack, the fastest boy on the muck, Charlie hunts secrets in the glades and on the muck flats where the cane grows secrets as old as the soft earth, secrets that haunted, tripped, and trapped the original native tribes, ensnared conquistadors, and buried runaway slaves. Secrets only the muck knows.

The official story of the most significant British band of the 90s. Now updated with fresh interviews including insights into lead singer Damon's new act, Gorillaz, that is sweeping awards on both sides of the Atlantic. This is the story of bitter rows with record companies, farcical feuds with Oasis, fist fights with each other, struggles with the bottle, foundering romances and a love-hate relationship with America. Drawing on the hours of exclusive interviews he has done with the band since their early days, Stuart Maconie offers a gripping insight into this intense, hedonistic quartet. Updated with fresh interviews including insights into Damon's award-winning new act Gorillaz. The official story of Blur, told through exclusive interviews.

Two journalists provide a guide for navigating through the Internet Age's viral and opinion-based news sources, explaining how to discern what sources or facts are reliable and how to think like a journalist and unearth the truth.

I was the Fool-king of Soho and the number-one slag in the Groucho Club, the second drunkest member of the world's drunkest band. This was no disaster, though. It was a dream coming true.' For Alex James, music had always been a door to a more eventful life. But as bass player of Blur - one of the most successful British bands of all time - his journey was more exciting and extreme than he could ever have predicted. In Bit of a Blur he chronicles his journey from a slug-infested flat in Camberwell to a world of screaming fans and private jets - and his eventual search to find meaning and happiness (and, perhaps most importantly, the perfect cheese), in an increasingly surreal world.

Damon Albarn is the frontman of Blur and the face of Britpop. While his peers have gradually fallen by the wayside, Albarn has reinvented himself as the mastermind behind Gorillaz. With his eclectic solo projects--such as the much-revered The Good, the Bad & the Queen--and his work with legends like Bobby Womack, he has proven that he is one of British music's most innovative and important personalities. With the 2015 release of Blur's first album for more than a decade, Damon Albarn took his place once more as an iconic jewel in the crown of the British music scene. This updated book covers his multiple musical personas in depth, with first-hand interviews by those close to Albarn in his formative years, as well as social and musical context that covers the Britpop era and Albarn's reemergence as the Godfather to the iPod generation.

Meet a child with superhero-like abilities . . . and the parents who are racing to keep up with her in this sweetly funny picture book about the blur of childhood, from the award-winning creators of Drawn Together. A perfect gift to celebrate all of our special milestones--from graduations to birthdays and beyond! From the very beginning, there was something different about this child... An ultrasonic voice. Fantastically elastic limbs. Super-magnetic powers. But it wasn’t until the child took her first steps that she became: THE BLUR! Nothing can stand in her way as she takes the world by storm: always on the move and darting into danger! All too soon, she is zipping through the days, and zooming over the years… Framed as an origin story, here is a fun superhero romp for kids, filled with bold and bright illustrations, that will pull at the hearstrings of every parent.

"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination In Black and Blur—the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and José Esteban Muñoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.

A 2017 study by the Boston College Center for Work & Family found that all working dads across generations would like to spend more time with their children. But it's much easier said than done. Irreverent corporate author James Sudakow aims to detangle entrepreneurship and parenthood and demystify what it means to manage that much needed balance in his new book, Out of the Blur: A Delirious Dad's Search for The Holy Grail of Work-Life Balance (Purple Squirrel Media, September 2018). Sudakow, author of the humorous illustrated corporate glossary Picking the Low-Hanging Fruit... and Other Stupid Stuff We Say in the Corporate World (Purple Squirrel Media, 2016), brings his signature irreverent tone to the much discussed topic of work-life balance in Work-Life Blur. With illustrations from Todd Kale, Sudakow tells his story of building and running a small business while raising a family, and aims to help readers figure out how to define what they want their work-life balance to look like while identifying and solving the traps and habits many fall into that get in the way of truly reaching balance. Despite being told from an entrepreneurial dad's point of view, Out of the Blur seeks to discuss the challenges all parents face while trying to be everything they need and want to be for their families while achieving the successes they need and want to at work - whether their job be entrepreneurial or traditional.

What happens when we blur time and allow ourselves to haunt or to become haunted by ghosts of the past? Drawing on archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data, Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure demonstrates the value of conceiving of ghosts not just as metaphors, but as mechanisms for making the past more concrete and allowing the negative specters of enduring historical legacies, such as colonialism and capitalism, to be exorcised.