Books by Gary Giddins
After the Fireworks: Three Novellas
by Aldous Huxley, Gary Giddins
"After the Fireworks is a major work and a turning point for Huxley, leading directly to Brave New World.” —Gary Giddins
In After the Fireworks, three lost classic pieces of short fiction by Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, are collected for the first time, with an original foreword by National Book Critics Circle Award winner Gary Giddins.
In the title novella, Rome is the stunning backdrop for a renowned novelist’s dangerous affair. “Uncle Spencer” is the “exquisite” (New Statesman) tale of an aging World War I veteran’s quest for the lost love he met in a prison during the war, and “Two or Three Graces,” “probably the thing nearest perfection of all that [Huxley] has done” (New Statesman), recounts a destructive writer’s abusive relationship with an impressionable housewife. Now brought back in print for the first time in seventy-five years, the novellas newly collected in After the Fireworks reveal Aldous Huxley at the height of his powers.
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After the Fireworks: Three Novellas (Olive Editions)
by Aldous Huxley, Gary Giddins
"After the Fireworks is a major work and a turning point for Huxley, leading directly to Brave New World.” —Gary Giddins
A striking collection of three lost classic pieces of short fiction by Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, now available as a Harper Perennial Olive Edition.
In the title novella, set in Rome, a renowned novelist sets out on a walk down Via Condotti toward the Spanish Steps when he encounters a mysterious and beautiful young American admirer of his work. He discovers she shares a name, in addition to conspicuous personality traits, with a character from his most celebrated book. Both are irresistibly drawn into a dangerous affair set against the backdrop of the Italian capital. "Uncle Spencer" is the story of an aging World War I veteran’s quest for his lost love he met in a prison during the war, and "Two or Three Graces"isthe tale of a passionate and destructive writer’s abusive relationship with an impressionable, bourgeois housewife. This extraordinary story collection reveals Huxley at the height of his literary powers.
This book part of a special series from Harper Perennial called Olive Editions—exclusive small-format editions of some of our bestselling and celebrated titles, featuring beautiful and unique hand-drawn cover illustrations. All Olive Editions are available for a limited time only
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Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century
by Gary Giddins
Gary Giddins's magnificent book Visions of Jazz has been hailed as a landmark in music criticism. Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post called it "the definitive compendium by the most interesting jazz critic now at work." And Alfred Appel, Jr., in The New York Times Book Review, said it was "the finest unconventional history of jazz ever written." It was the first work on jazz ever to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Now comes Weather Bird, a brilliant companion volume to Visions of Jazz. In this superb collection of essays, reviews and articles, Giddins brings together, for the first time, more than 140 pieces written over a 14-year period, most of them for his column in the Village Voice (also called "Weather Bird"). The book is first and foremost a celebration of jazz, with illuminating commentary on contemporary jazz events, on today's top musicians, on the best records of the year, and on leading figures from jazz's past. Readers will find extended pieces on Louis Armstrong, Erroll Garner, Benny Carter, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Billie Holiday, Cassandra Wilson, Tony Bennett, and many others. Giddins includes a series of articles on the annual JVC Jazz Festival, which taken together offer a splendid overview of jazz in the 1990s. Other highlights include an astute look at avant-garde music ("Parajazz") and his challenging essay, "How Come Jazz Isn't Dead?" which advances a theory about the way art is born, exploited, celebrated, and sidelined to the museum.
A radiant compendium by America's leading music critic, Weather Bird offers an unforgettable look at the modern jazz scene.
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Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century
by Gary Giddins
Gary Giddins's Weather Bird is a brilliant companion volume to his landmark in music criticism, Visions of Jazz, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. More then 140 pieces, written over a 14-year period, are brought together for the first time in this superb collection of essays, reviews, and articles. Weather Bird is a celebration of jazz, with illuminating commentaryon contemporary jazz events, today's top muscicians, the best records of the year, and on leading figures from jazz's past. Readers will find extended pieces on Louis Armstrong, Erroll Garner, Benny Carter, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Billie Holiday, Cassandra Wilson, Tony Bennett, and many others. Giddins includes a series of articles on the annual JVC Jazz Festival, which offers a splendid overview of jazz in the 1990s. Other highlights include an astute look at avant-garde music ("Parajazz") and his challenging essay, "How Come Jazz Isn't Dead?" which advances a theory about the way art is born, exploited, celebrated, and sidelined to the museum.
A radiant compendium by America's leading music critic, Weather Bird offers an unforgettable look at the modern jazz scene.
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Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years, 1940-1946
by Gary Giddins
"The best thing to happen to Bing Crosby since Bob Hope," (WSJ) Gary Giddins presents the second volume of his masterful multi-part biography.
Bing Crosby dominated American popular culture in a way that few artists ever have. From the dizzy era of Prohibition through the dark days of the Second World War, he was a desperate nation's most beloved entertainer. But he was more than just a charismatic crooner: Bing Crosby redefined the very foundations of modern music, from the way it was recorded to the way it was orchestrated and performed.
In this much-anticipated follow-up to the universally acclaimed first volume, NBCC Winner and preeminent cultural critic Gary Giddins now focuses on Crosby's most memorable period, the war years and the origin story of White Christmas. Set against the backdrop of a Europe on the brink of collapse, this groundbreaking work traces Crosby's skyrocketing career as he fully inhabits a new era of American entertainment and culture. While he would go on to reshape both popular music and cinema more comprehensively than any other artist, Crosby's legacy would be forever intertwined with his impact on the home front, a unifying voice for a nation at war. Over a decade in the making and drawing on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to numerous archives, Giddins brings Bing Crosby, his work, and his world to vivid life -- firmly reclaiming Crosby's central role in American cultural history.
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Jazz
by Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Gary Giddins, Scott DeVeaux, Herman Leonard
Set in Harlem in the 1920s, this novel chronicles a bittersweet triangle involving a middle-aged door-to-door salesman, his mentally unstable wife, and his eighteen-year-old girlfriend. By the author of Beloved. Reprint. 150,000 first printing.
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Jazz
by Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Gary Giddins, Scott DeVeaux, Herman Leonard
From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author.
“As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” —Glamour
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This novel “transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious” (People).
"The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to Black women.” —The New York Times Book Review
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Jazz
by Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Gary Giddins, Scott DeVeaux, Herman Leonard
The story of jazz for the general reader as it has never been told before, from the inside out: a comprehensive, eloquent, scrupulously researched page-turner. In this vivid history of jazz, a respected critic and a leading scholar capture the excitement of America’s unique music with intellectual bite, unprecedented insight, and the passion of unabashed fans. They explain what jazz is, where it came from, and who created it and why, all within the broader context of American life and culture. Emphasizing its African American roots, Jazz traces the history of the music over the last hundred years. From ragtime and blues to the international craze for swing, from the heated protests of the avant-garde to the radical diversity of today’s artists, Jazz describes the travails and triumphs of musical innovators struggling for work, respect, and cultural acceptance set against the backdrop of American history, commerce, and politics. With vibrant photographs by legendary jazz chronicler Herman Leonard, Jazz is also an arresting visual history of a century of music. 38 photos
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Jazz
by Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Gary Giddins, Scott DeVeaux, Herman Leonard
There's a crazy syncopation /and it's tearing through the nation / and it's bringing sweet elation / to every single tune./ It's Jazz
One of TIME's 100 Best Children's Books of All Time
Fifteen poems, infused with the rhythm and wordplay of jazz music, are paired with bold, stylized illustrations of performers and dancers to convey the history and breadth of this unique musical style. From bebop to New Orleans, from ragtime to boogie, and every style in between, Jazz takes readers on a musical journey from jazz's beginnings to the present day.
Created by a celebrated father-son team, Jazz is a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and a Kirkus Best Children's Books Editor's Choice.
In addition to its colorful and lyrical celebration, the book includes a brief introductory essay about the history and form of jazz, as well as a timeline and glossary of jazz terms.
Coretta Scott King Award Honor for illustration
ALA Notable Children's Book
Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award
Publishers Weekly's 100 Best Books of the Year
Kirkus Reviews Editor's Choice
Booklist Editor's Choice
Booklist Top Ten in Black History
Book Link's Best New Books for the Classroom
Golden Kite Award: Picture Book Text
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No copies available.
Jazz
by Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Gary Giddins, Scott DeVeaux, Herman Leonard
There's a crazy syncopation /and it's tearing through the nation / and it's bringing sweet elation / to every single tune./ It's Jazz
One of TIME's 100 Best Children's Books of All Time
Fifteen poems, infused with the rhythm and wordplay of jazz music, are paired with bold, stylized illustrations of performers and dancers to convey the history and breadth of this unique musical style. From bebop to New Orleans, from ragtime to boogie, and every style in between, Jazz takes readers on a musical journey from jazz's beginnings to the present day.
Created by a celebrated father-son team, Jazz is a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and a Kirkus Best Children's Books Editor's Choice.
In addition to its colorful and lyrical celebration, the book includes a brief introductory essay about the history and form of jazz, as well as a timeline and glossary of jazz terms.
Coretta Scott King Award Honor for illustration
ALA Notable Children's Book
Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award
Publishers Weekly's 100 Best Books of the Year
Kirkus Reviews Editor's Choice
Booklist Editor's Choice
Booklist Top Ten in Black History
Book Link's Best New Books for the Classroom
Golden Kite Award: Picture Book Text
Copies
No copies available.
Jazz
by Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Gary Giddins, Scott DeVeaux, Herman Leonard
Since the 1950s, Herman Leonard's photographs of jazz musicians have been crucial in shaping the image of the music and the world in which it was created. Leonard's friendships with jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis gave him rare access to the innovators who made modern jazz and the places in which they made it. Leonard took his camera into the smoky clubs and after-hours sessions, to backstage parties and musicians' apartments, to build an incomparable visual record of one of the twentieth century's most significant art forms. His luminous images of Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and many others, both in performance and "off duty," are at once supreme examples of the photographer's art and a unique record of a musical revolution. For this definitive collection of his work, Leonard has retrieved scores of previously unseen photographs, published here for the first time, alongside his most famous and widely recognized images. Accompanied by an essay exploring the stories behind the pictures, and an interview with Leonard revealing his techniques, Jazz captures and preserves the glory days of the music that has been called "the sound of surprise."
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Visions of Jazz: The First Century
by Gary Giddins
Poised to become a classic of jazz literature, Visions of Jazz: The First Century offers seventy-nine chapters illuminating the lives of virtually all the major figures in jazz history. From Louis Armstrong's renegade-style trumpet playing to Sarah Vaughan's operatic crooning, and from the swinging elegance of Duke Ellington to the pioneering experiments of Ornette Coleman, jazz critic Gary Giddins continually astonishes the reader with his unparalleled insight. Writing with the grace and wit that have endeared his prose to Village Voice readers for decades, Giddins also widens the scope of jazz to include such crucial American musicians as Irving Berlin, Rosemary Clooney, and Frank Sinatra, all primarily pop performers who are often dismissed by fans and critics as mere derivatives of the true jazz idiom. And he devotes an entire quarter of this landmark volume to young, still-active jazz artists, boldly expanding the horizons of jazz--and charting and exploring the music's influences as no other book has done.
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Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema
by Gary Giddins
A brilliantly insightful and witty examination of beloved and little-known films, directors, and stars by one of America’s most esteemed critics. In his illuminating new work, Gary Giddins explores the evolution of film, from the first moving pictures and peepshows to the digital era of DVDs and online video-streaming. New technologies have changed our experience of cinema forever; we have peeled away from the crowded theater to be home alone with classic cinema. Recounting the technological developments that films have undergone, Warning Shadows travels through time and across genres to explore the impact of the industry’s most famous classics and forgotten gems. Essays such as “Houdini Escapes! From the Vaults! Of the Past!,” “Edward G. Robinson, See,” and “Prestige and Pretension (Pride and Prejudice)” capture the wit and magic of classic cinema. Each chapter―ranging from the horror films of Hitchcock to the fantastical frames of Disney―provides readers with engaging analyses of influential films and the directors and actors who made them possible.
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Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker
by Gary Giddins
Within days of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s death at the age of thirty-four, a scrawled legend began appearing on walls around New York City: Bird Lives. Gone was one of the most outstanding jazz musicians of any era, the troubled genius who brought modernism to jazz and became a defining cultural force for musicians, writers, and artists of every stripe. Arguably the most significant musician in the country at the time of his death, Parker set the standard many musicians strove to reach—though he never enjoyed the same popular success that greeted many of his imitators. Today, the power of Parker’s inventions resonates undiminished; and his influence continues to expand.
Celebrating Bird is the groundbreaking and award-winning account of the life and legend of Charlie Parker from renowned biographer and critic Gary Giddins, whom Esquire called “the best jazz writer in America today.” Richly illustrated and drawing primarily from original sources, Giddins overturns many of the myths that have grown up around Parker. He cuts a fascinating portrait of the period, from Parker’s apprentice days in the 1930s in his hometown of Kansas City to the often difficult years playing clubs in New York and Los Angeles, and reveals how Parker came to embody not only musical innovation and brilliance but the rage and exhilaration of an entire generation.
Fully revised and with a new introduction by the author, Celebrating Bird is a classic of jazz writing that the Village Voice heralded as “a celebration of the highest order”—a portrayal of a jazz virtuoso whose gargantuan talent was haunted by his excesses and a view into the ravishing art of one of jazz’s most commanding and remarkable figures.
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