Tag: LITERATURE
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Tricky Business By Ruby Dee Phillipa (Earth Island Books)
Ruby Dee Philippa’s Tricky Business is a brilliant, unfiltered continuation of her vivid portrayal of San Francisco’s early 1980s punk scene. Picking up where Bag of Tricks left off, the book once again places the reader inside a moment in time when chaos, art, rebellion, and self-destruction collided in ways that shaped an entire generation.…
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“Heavy Sounds In The West” By Hans Verbeke And Onno Hesselink (Earth Island Books)
Heavy Sounds in the West is one of those rare instances where music history insists on dragging a place into its rightful spotlight. With a detailed, almost obsessive devotion to detail, Hans Verbeke and Onno Hesselink have constructed a monumental document of how heavy metal and crossover hardcore culture detonated in the unlikely soil of…
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Paddy Shennan Celebrates The Unsung Heroes Of Music In “Not JUST About The Fall”
Sunday Times bestselling ghostwriter Paddy Shennan turns his focus to the lifeblood of music: the fans. In his new book Not JUST About The Fall, out via Earth Island Books, Shennan reflects on the essential role fans play, weaving personal anecdotes with stories of legendary gigs by The Clash, The Fall, Joy Division, and more.…
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“My Altercation: The Bandung Melodic Punk Scene 1995-2008” By Prabu Pramayougha (Earth Island Books)
Punk rock histories are usually told through the familiar capitals: London, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. Maybe Berlin, maybe Tokyo if you’re lucky. What’s lost in those recycled myths is the truth that punk rock has always thrived in the margins, in places the spotlight rarely lands. That’s why Prabu Pramayougha’s My Altercation: The Bandung Melodic…
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“Days And Days: The Story About Sunderland’s Leatherface And The Ties That Bind” by Chris MacDonald (Little Rocket Records)
Leatherface never courted recognition. They didn’t fit in the tidy categories that music magazines love to draw, and they never bothered to chase trends. They made jagged, melodic, furious, and tender music that mattered. For those who stumbled upon them, Leatherface felt like a band and a revelation, all at once. Chris MacDonald’s Days and…
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“My Life Song By Song: The Story Of Dr. Strange Records” By Bill ‘Doc’ Plaster
Some record stores serve their purpose while the other are almost institutions that shaped the generations of music enthusiasts. Dr Strange Records belongs firmly to the second category. For over three decades, Bill “Doc” Plaster has nurtured one of punk rock’s true sanctuaries, a shop, label, and mail-order operation that survived the changing tides of…
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Earth Island Books To Release “Reston Hardcore: An Oral History Of Jam For Man And Beyond” By Andy Keiler
Northern Virginia in the `80s and `90s was the greatest independent music scene that almost nobody has ever heard of. Drawing inspiration from the raw energy of DC hardcore and the distinctive sound of Inner Ear Studios, this burgeoning scene spread throughout the suburbs, blending with the rising forces of Go-Go and hip-hop. Reston alone…
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Earth Island Books To Release “Night Comes Down” By Bob Short
For some, Punk was about a handful of big‐name bands who built careers fighting about their supreme importance in the general scheme of things. For most of us spikey haired critters, punk was a lifestyle, a place where all the weird kids got together to play; all those outsiders who could never go home anymore.…
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“An Anarchy Of Demons” by Charlie Harper (Earth Island Books)
A punk memoir rarely arrives with the peaceful authority of someone who has lived through every twist of the genre’s turbulent decades, yet never sensed the need to mythologize his own story. With An Anarchy of Demons, Charlie Harper, a legendary frontman of the U.K. Subs and one of British punk’s longest-standing torchbearers, offers a…
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“What If We Were Water” By Ricky Frost (Earth Island Books)
In What If We Were Water, Ricky Frost presents a poetic chronicle of trauma and healing, arriving like a necessary tide that will immediately resonate with the broader audience. Born from the lived experience of emotional hardship and refined through the prism of mentorship and vulnerability, this 100-page volume of poems and short prose sketches…
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Paul Case’s “Spent” Launches This Wednesday
Paul Case’s ‘Spent’ is a searing mix of poetry and prose hurled straight at the heart of late capitalism. Navigating the chaos of punk, radical politics, addiction, and mental health, Case captures a world fraying at the edges, where personal demons mirror societal collapse and the line between resistance and self-destruction grows increasingly blurred. ‘Spent’…
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Interview: Paul Case, the author of “Spent”
Paul Case’s Spent is a searing mix of poetry and prose hurled straight at the heart of late capitalism. Navigating the chaos of punk, radical politics, addiction, and mental health, Case captures a world fraying at the edges, where personal demons mirror societal collapse and the line between resistance and self-destruction grows increasingly blurred. I…
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