WINNER OF THE 2022 EISNER AWARD FOR BEST COMICS-RELATED BOOK 'Magnificently marvellous' Junot Diaz 'An account of how a motley gang of accidental collaborators created a vernacular mythology out of the dodgiest of commercial occasions ... a revelation' Jonathan Lethem Every schoolchild recognises their protagonists: the Avengers, the X-Men, your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man. The superhero comics that Marvel has published since 1961 make up the biggest self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages and counting. Eighteen of the 100 highest-grossing movies of all time are based on it. And not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing. But Douglas Wolk did. In All Of The Marvels, a critic and superfan takes on the epic to end all epics. What he finds is a magic mirror of the past 60 years, from the atomic terrors of the Cold War to the political divides of our present. The result is an irresistible travel guide to the magic mountain at the heart of popular culture.

Welcome to the first volume in an exciting new annual series that celebrates the year's best American writing about music and its culture, as selected by one of the genre's preeminent practitioners. Covering the gamut of contemporary styles--rock, pop, rap, jazz, blues, country--Guralnick has chosen the kind of pieces that send you right to the record store, by both established writers and bright new talents. With thirty selections drawn from more than a hundred sources, including mainstream magazines like the"New Yorker," music journals like "Spin," and tiny 'zines and websites where the scribes of the new century are found, this collection will be indispensable for music lovers and lovers of wonderful writing alike.

In this remarkable book, Douglas Wolk recreates the evening of October 24th 1962, at Harlem's Apollo Theatre, an evening at the epicentre of Cold War tensions. An evening when James Brown took the stage to be faced by 1500 screaming fans - fans who thought they might well be dead within a week. Wolk reconstructs, in great detail, what took place (and was recorded) inside the Apollo that night: one of the tightest, most legendary performances ever put down on tape. 33 1/3 is a series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. Focusing on one album rather than an artist's entire output, the books dispense with the standard biographical background that fans know already, and cut to the heart of the music on each album. The authors provide fresh, original perspectives, often through their access to and relationships with the key figures involved in the recording of these albums. By turns obsessive, passionate, creative, and informed, the books in this series demonstrate many different ways of writing about music. (A task that can be, as Elvis Costello famously observed, as tricky as dancing about architecture.) What binds this series together, and what brings it to life, is that all of the authors - musicians, scholars, and writers - are deeply in love with the album they have chosen. Previous titles in this now well-established series have beaten sales expectations and received excellent review coverage - the third batch is sure to continue this success. More titles follow in the spring of 2005.

Suddenly, comics are everywhere: a newly matured art form, filling bookshelves with brilliant, innovative work and shaping the ideas and images of the rest of contemporary culture. In Reading Comics , critic Douglas Wolk shows us why and how. Wolk illuminates the most dazzling creators of modern comics-from Alan Moore to Alison Bechdel to Chris Ware-and explains their roots, influences, and where they fit into the pantheon of art. As accessible to the hardcore fan as to the curious newcomer, Reading Comics is the first book for people who want to know not just which comics are worth reading, but ways to think and talk and argue about them.