Books by Ben Greenman
The Slippage: A Novel
by Ben Greenman
The Slippage is a wry, wistful tale of marriage, lust, and disconnection from Ben Greenman, the critically acclaimed author of What He’s Poised to Do.
William Day must confront some uncomfortable truths about his life and his future when his wife Louisa asks him to build her house. The take-it-or-leave-it demand becomes all the more difficult to swallow when he finds himself grappling with a past recklessness, an ex-girlfirend’s son he considers his own, and his own wants for what lies ahead.
Sure to appeal to everyone who has ever been in love and had their heart broken, The Slippage shares uncanny truths about intimacy and modern relationships.
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What He's Poised to Do: Stories
by Ben Greenman
“Ben Greenman seems incapable of writing anything dry or familiar or expected. He is one of the most versatile, consistently surprising writers at work today.” —Dave Eggers
A diverse and moving collection of witty, fabular, haunting stories about love, infidelity, and the vanishing art of letter writing—from the acclaimed novelist and New Yorker editor Ben Greenman. Fans of the works of Keith Gessen, Ben Kunkel, Nathaniel Rich, and John Wray will find much to love in the beautiful, poignant stories of What He’s Poised to Do.
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something to food about: Exploring Creativity with Innovative Chefs
In somethingtofoodabout, drummer, producer, musical director, culinary entrepreneur, and New York Times bestselling author, Questlove, applies his boundless curiosity to the world of food.
In conversations with ten innovative chefs in America, Questlove explores what makes their creativity tick, how they see the world through their cooking and how their cooking teaches them to see the world. The conversations begin with food but they end wherever food takes them.
Food is fuel. Food is culture. Food is history. And food is food for thought.
Featuring conversations with: Nathan Myhrvold, Modernist Cuisine Lab, Seattle; Daniel Humm, Eleven Madison Park, and NoMad, NYC; Michael Solomonov, Zahav, Philadelphia; Ludo Lefebvre, Trois Mec, L.A.; Dave Beran, Next, Chicago; Donald Link, Cochon, New Orleans; Dominque Crenn, Atelier Crenn, San Francisco; Daniel Patterson, Coi and Loco'l, San Francisco; Jesse Griffiths, Dai Due, Austin; and Ryan Roadhouse, Nodoguro, Portland
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$32.50
Dig If You Will The Picture: Funk, Sex and God in the Music of Prince
by Ben Greenman
Ben Greenman's monumental yet intimate book on Prince comes a year after the star's death at the age of 57 in an elevator at the legendary Paisley Park complex. With the release of a string of critically acclaimed albums and a new solo tour, the Minneapolis Genius looked set for a renaissance after a quiet-ish (by his standards) decade or so. And then: the silence, forever.
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Dig If You Will the Picture: Funk, Sex, God and Genius in the Music of Prince
by Ben Greenman
Named one of the best music books of 2017 by The Wall Street Journal
A unique and kaleidoscopic look into the life, legacy, and electricity of the pop legend Prince and his wideranging impact on our culture
Ben Greenman, New York Times bestselling author, contributing writer to the New Yorker, and owner of thousands of recordings of Prince and Prince-related songs, knows intimately that there has never been a rock star as vibrant, mercurial, willfully contrary, experimental, or prolific as Prince. Uniting a diverse audience while remaining singularly himself, Prince was a tireless artist, a musical virtuoso and chameleon, and a pop-culture prophet who shattered traditional ideas of race and gender, rewrote the rules of identity, and redefined the role of sex in pop music.
A polymath in his own right who collaborated with George Clinton and Questlove on their celebrated memoirs, Greenman has been listening to and writing about Prince since the mid-eighties. Here, with the passion of an obsessive fan and the skills of a critic, journalist, and novelist, he mines his encyclopedic knowledge of Prince’s music to tell both his story and the story of the paradigm-shifting ideas that he communicated to his millions of fans around the world. Greenman's take on Prince is the autobiography of a generation and its ideas. Asking a series of questions―not only “Who was Prince?” but “Who wasn’t he?” and “Who are we?”―Dig if You Will the Picture is a fitting tribute to an extraordinary talent.
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Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
by Ben Greenman, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson
"You have to bear in mind that [Questlove] is one of the smartest motherf*****s on the planet. His musical knowledge, for all practical purposes, is limitless." --Robert Christgau
A punch-drunk memoir in which Everyone's Favorite Questlove tells his own story while tackling some of the lates, the greats, the fakes, the philosophers, the heavyweights, and the true originals of the music world. He digs deep into the album cuts of his life and unearths some pivotal moments in black art, hip hop, and pop culture.
Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson is many things: virtuoso drummer, producer, arranger, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon bandleader, DJ, composer, and tireless Tweeter. He is one of our most ubiquitous cultural tastemakers, and in this, his first book, he reveals his own formative experiences--from growing up in 1970s West Philly as the son of a 1950s doo-wop singer, to finding his own way through the music world and ultimately co-founding and rising up with the Roots, a.k.a., the last hip hop band on Earth. Mo' Meta Blues also has some (many) random (or not) musings about the state of hip hop, the state of music criticism, the state of statements, as well as a plethora of run-ins with celebrities, idols, and fellow artists, from Stevie Wonder to KISS to D'Angelo to Jay-Z to Dave Chappelle to...you ever seen Prince roller-skate?!?
But Mo' Meta Blues isn't just a memoir. It's a dialogue about the nature of memory and the idea of a post-modern black man saddled with some post-modern blues. It's a book that questions what a book like Mo' Meta Bluesreally is. It's the side wind of a one-of-a-kind mind.
It's a rare gift that gives as well as takes.
It's a record that keeps going around and around.
Copies
No copies available.
Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
by Ben Greenman, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson
MO' META BLUES
The World According to Questlove
Mo' Meta Blues is a punch-drunk memoir in which Everyone's Favorite Questlove tells his own story while tackling some of the lates, the greats, the fakes, the philosophers, the heavyweights, and the true originals of the music world. He digs deep into the album cuts of his life and unearths some pivotal moments in black art, hip hop, and pop culture.
Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson is many things: virtuoso drummer, producer, arranger, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon bandleader, DJ, composer, and tireless Tweeter. He is one of our most ubiquitous cultural tastemakers, and in this, his first book, he reveals his own formative experiences--from growing up in 1970s West Philly as the son of a 1950s doo-wop singer, to finding his own way through the music world and ultimately co-founding and rising up with the Roots, a.k.a., the last hip hop band on Earth. Mo' Meta Blues also has some (many) random (or not) musings about the state of hip hop, the state of music criticism, the state of statements, as well as a plethora of run-ins with celebrities, idols, and fellow artists, from Stevie Wonder to KISS to D'Angelo to Jay-Z to Dave Chappelle to...you ever seen Prince roller-skate?!?
But Mo' Meta Blues isn't just a memoir. It's a dialogue about the nature of memory and the idea of a post-modern black man saddled with some post-modern blues. It's a book that questions what a book like Mo' Meta Bluesreally is. It's the side wind of a one-of-a-kind mind.
It's a rare gift that gives as well as takes.
It's a record that keeps going around and around.
Copies
No copies available.
Superworse - The Novel: A Remix of Superbad: Stories and Pieces
by Ben Greenman
"Greenman’s mind may contain 'a Russian short story writer, a slap-stick gag writer, an art critic, a literary critic, a cultural commentator, a cowboy, a satirist, a scientist . . . a surrealist, a nut, and genius . . . a child prodigy . . . and a poet' (Susan Minot).
The original McSweeney’s, Superbad comprised more than two dozen pieces in various genres from serious fiction to post-modern satire to lyric. This Soft Skull edition will reconceive Superbad with an eye toward its overall architecture, emphasizing that the individual pieces are intricately related to one another, as movements in a symphony or gears in a clockwork. Onge, the [fictitious] editor who introduced Superbad, will oversee the paperback, allowing a clear set of themes and characters to emerge from the welter of styles. The book is tightly constructed, with a mirror-image arrangement and many characters, not all human, threaded throughout. Rather than conceiving this project simply as a paperback edition, the release is more like a remix, in the fashion of popular music. Superbad was a humor collection in the finest McSweeney’s tradition; Superworse is a novel in the spirit of Borges and Barthelme.
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A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories About Human Love
by Ben Greenman
From the author of Superbad and Superworse, a new collection of stories about giving, wanting, and the wonders of love. A Circle Is a Compass and a Balloon Both is a collection of stories about love, the most elusive and problematic of all phenomena. With a mix of traditional, literary prose and bold some might even say irresponsible experimentation, Ben Greenman explores the ins and outs of modern romance. Expect tears, nudity, and recrimination. Both familiar in their humanness and wholly original, these imaginative stories take us all over the map in time, place, and circumstance. From the halfhearted summer affair between a part-time bartender and a married doctor in a Miami hotel to the cryptic pseudo-erotic love letters to a friend who is more than a friend, we experience the love of pop songs, the love of cohabitation in Chicago, and love that is so transporting it takes us to the moon literally.
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Please Step Back
by Ben Greenman
The rise and fall of a true American icon: A rock star, inspired by genre-busting musicians of the sixties like Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye.
A swirling sixties saga of the rise and fall of a true American icon: A rock star. But not just any rock star: Rock Foxx is an outrageous showman whose unprecedented mixed-race, mixed-gender band made a new kind of socially conscious music that was infectious and tribal and scaled the heights of sixties rock stardom, all the way to Woodstock and beyond. But Foxx seemed to disappear at the height of his fame, his contagious, upbeat music darkening, then ending ubruptly amidst rumors of drugs and violence, as the culture itself exploded into massive riots and assassinations.
In the hands of New Yorker editor Ben Greenman, it's a story that is both highly literary and simply entertaining, a tale about rock and roll and about a complicated but key moment in our history. Exciting, funny, disturbing and uplifting, with some of the most deft and absorbing writing about music ever to appear in American fiction, this pseudo-bio of a fascinating character is an amazing creation in itself, and sure to be one of the most talked-about books of the year.
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Out Came the Sun: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide in My Family
by Mariel Hemingway, Ben Greenman
A moving, compelling memoir about growing up and escaping the tragic legacy of mental illness, suicide, addiction, and depression in one of America’s most famous families: the Hemingways.
She opens her eyes. The room is dark. She hears yelling, smashed plates, and wishes it was all a terrible dream. But it isn’t. This is what it was like growing up as a Hemingway. In this deeply moving, searingly honest new memoir, actress and mental health icon Mariel Hemingway shares in candid detail the story of her troubled childhood in a famous family haunted by depression, alcoholism, illness, and suicide.
Born just a few months after her grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, shot himself, it was Mariel’s mission as a girl to escape the desperate cycles of severe mental health issues that had plagued generations of her family. Surrounded by a family tortured by alcoholism (both parents), depression (her sister Margaux), suicide (her grandfather and four other members of her family), schizophrenia (her sister Muffet), and cancer (mother), it was all the young Mariel could do to keep her head.
In a compassionate voice she reveals her painful struggle to stay sane as the youngest child in her family, and how she coped with the chaos by becoming OCD and obsessive about her food, schedule, and organization. The twisted legacy of her family has never quite let go of Mariel, but now in this memoir she opens up about her claustrophobic marriage, her acting career, and turning to spiritual healers and charlatans for solace.
Ultimately Mariel has written a story of triumph about learning to overcome her family’s demons and developing love and deep compassion for them. At last, in this memoir she can finally tell the true story of the tragedies and troubles of the Hemingway family, and she delivers a book that beckons comparisons to Mary Karr and Jeanette Walls.
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A Brief History of Authoterrorism
by Andrei Codrescu, Ben Greenman, Terry Southern, David Rees, Nile Southern, Mark Jay Mirsky, Jeffrey Dorchen, Whitney Anne Trettien
In this collection of new short fiction, eight contemporary authors take aim against the hyperbole of the death of print by exploring just how far writers and artists will go to promote themselves in an evolving world where the laws of decorum no longer apply. Prophetic, harrowing, and at times laugh-out-loud humorous, these stories walk the fine line between fiction and fact, art and apocalypse, to chronicle a trend that cannot be ignored. The book includes a long-lost story by Terry Southern.
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