Bücher veröffentlicht von Catapult

The music industry's mighty players have been asleep at the wheel since Napster revolutionized the way music was distributed in the 1990s. A veteran industry reporter tells of the current state of big music, how it got into such dire straits, and where it's going.

In this collection about life as a twentysomething in the twenty–first century, Kathleen Rooney writes with the finesse of someone well beyond her years, but with fresh insights that reveal a girl still making discoveries at every turn. Varied and original, the tales in For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs recount the perils of falling in love with the unlikeliest of people, of visiting the New York apartments of a vanished poet, and of touring an animal retirement home with her parents. Of getting a Brazilian wax, and of chauffeuring a U.S. senator around town. Of saying good–bye to a cousin who's joining a convent, and of trying to convince herself that she's not wasting her life. This is a book about love and longing, poetry and plagiarism, death and democracy, mountain floods and Midwestern cicadas. Here is a young woman struggling to find her place as an adult and a citizen in an America that rarely manages to live up to Whitman's dream of it. With this book, Rooney sings—yes, in fact, she trills—loud and clear.

Combining on-the-slopes experience with off-trail research, author Charlie English follows in the footsteps of the Romantic poets across the Alps, learns how to build igloos with the Inuit on Baffin Island, examines snow-patches in the Cairngorms to detect signs of global warming, and tests his mettle on some of the most perilous peaks on Earth. Along the way, he meets up with a flurry of fellow enthusiasts, from avalanche survivors and resort operators to climate scientists and champion skiers. English is obsessed with snow, and has collected for our enjoyment an amazing array of not-so-random facts about the hexagonal substance that fills the human imagination with wonder. In this "snow handbook," he describes how snow is created, how to build an igloo, how avalanches occur, and (more importantly) how to survive an avalanche. His glossary is filled with snow terms that will delight, such as "coulior," "hoarfrost," "firn," and "sastrugi." Fresh and fun and infused with the adrenaline of adventure, "The Snow Tourist" is a fascinating account of one man's pilgrimage through the world's blanketed fields, ice-capped rooftops, cozy igloos, and snow-covered mountain peaks.

The only thing the writers in this book have in common is that they've exchanged sex for money. They're PhDs and dropouts, soccer moms and jailbirds, $2,500-a-night call girls and $10 crack hos, and everything in between. This anthology lends a voice to an underrepresented population that is simultaneously reviled and worshipped.Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys is a collection of short memoirs, rants, confessions, nightmares, journalism, and poetry covering life, love, work, family, and yes, sex. The editors gather pieces from the world of industrial sex, including contributions from art-porn priestess Dr. Annie Sprinkle, best-selling memoirist David Henry Sterry (Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent), sex activist and musical diva Candye Kane, women and men right off the streets, girls participating in the first-ever National Summit of Commercially Sexually Exploited Youth, and Ruth Morgan Thomas, one of the organizers of the European Sex Work, Human Rights, and Migration Conference.Sex is a billion-dollar industry. Meet the real people who are its flesh and blood.

A thought-provoking reassessment of religious faith and progressive politics from an author whose “wonderful writing is both a surprise and a relief” (Naomi Klein). In All My Bones Shake, author and political activist Robert Jensen sheds light on the spiritual unrest at the root of our nation’s current political, economic, cultural, and ecological chaos. While popular media has reduced the issue of faith to a talking-heads debate between atheists and believers, Jensen shows the conflict to be far more complex. While fundamentalists on both sides have fought to an intellectual standstill and moderates seem content to ignore the battle, Jensen pushes for a progressive approach to theological questions, offering a path of faith that doesn’t negate the modern scientific world or threaten the rights of marginalized people. More than a simple study of the religious debate in America, All My Bones Shake marks a new communion: a way to use theology to create a sustainable society and meet the uncertainty of our lives with confidence.

Upending Christianity's popular notion of Jesus the comforter, the good shepherd, the Lord, and the Savior, this completely new exploration of Mark's Life of Jesus reexamines the image presented in this earliest of the New Testament gospels--the mysterious stranger, the singular, abandoned, and solitary figure--and rethinks the current role of Western culture through a radically altered view of Christianity. The existential Jesus has no interest in sin, and his focus is not on an afterlife. He is anti-church, anti-establishment, anti-family, and anti-community; a teacher, with himself his only student, he gestures enigmatically from within his own torturous experience, inviting the reader to walk in his shoes and ask the question, "Who am I?"This book argues that Jesus is the West's great teacher on the nature of being. Incorporating a new translation of the Gospel of Mark from its original Greek, this radical reinterpretation identifies the philosophical and cultural significance of Jesus in the modern world, based on his life, actions, and reflections.

Historically, a love of cooking has been left to those considered far from cool: suburbanite Betty Crockers toiling over a hot stove. But the new youth-culture sensibility has taken over, merging the axiom "You are what you eat" with its updated mantra "You are who you listen to." "Lost in the Supermarket"--yes, named for the 1979 hit by The Clash--is a creative compendium of recipes that reclaims the kitchen for the hip crowd. At once a meditation on the connection between food and music and a great culinary resource, this cookbook is full of the favorite recipes of some of indie rock's elite. In chapters on both daily dishes and special event grub, contributions from such indie notables as Animal Collective, Black Dice, Sunset Rubdown, and Country Teasers are included, giving readers plenty to groove on, whether they're in it for the tunes or the tastes or both.

Frederick Langlois could be that geeky 17-year-old found in every high school -- the one who closely clutches his poem-filled notebook, who feels a bit too deeply, who's just a little too old for his years. But Frederick isn't in high school. He's in a hospital ward with other critically ill adolescents, dying of bone cancer. "Mercury Under the Tongue" chronicles his short stay there, from his distant but friendly relationship with his therapist through comic moments in the ward and his emergent friendships with other teenage patients. Some survive, others are lost, and at the end, Frederick must make a final reckoning with himself and his family, one that is at once dispassionate and deeply felt. Avoiding both misty stoicism and made-for-TV bathos, the book exposes the fallible body as the humanizing factor that grounds spirited adolescent talk, creating a believable, likable protagonist while weaving a compelling, lyrical story.

In the 1800s, the young Clarence King was an icon of the new America: a man of adventure and intellect, a flash-in-the-pan celebrity who combined science and exploration with romanticism and charm. Robert Wilson's biography, "The Explorer King," vividly depicts King's daredevil feats including his journey to the highest peak of the Sierra Nevada, and uncovers the reasons for the shocking decline he suffered after his days on the American frontier. Through King's own rollicking tales, some true, some embroidered, of scaling previously unclimbed mountain peaks, of surviving a monster blizzard near Yosemite, of escaping ambush and capture by Indians, of being chased on horseback for two days by angry bandits, Robert Wilson offers a powerful combination of adventure, history, and nature writing, he also provides the bigger picture of the West at this time. Ultimately, King himself would come to symbolize the collision of science and business, one of the sources of his downfall. Fascinating and extensive, "The Explorer King" movingly portrays the America of the nineteenth century and the man who--for better or worse--typified the soul of the era.

Rei Hayakawa, a lonely, bulimic freelance writer with a drinking problem, wanders into a convenience store. She's swaddled in her coat and scarf, while her thoughts - of alienation, of hunger, of the need for gin and white wine - drift in via stream-of-consciousness. A trucker named Okabe walks in, deliberately grazes her behind, and at the same time, Rei's cell phone, set on vibrate, goes off over her heart. Rei impulsively gets into Okabe's truck with him - and stays. Suddenly she finds herself embarking on a road journey across the wintry landscape of Japan with a complete, and possibly dangerous, stranger. Can the physical relationship that develops between them give Rei what she needs, and can she ever free herself from her self-destructive tendencies? Both parties are wounded, guarded and distant -- can they learn to trust each other? Author Mari Akasaka brings her trademark wordplay and vivid imagery to this compelling story of an unlikely pairing set against the bleak backdrop of Japan's highways. Adapted for the screen in 2003, "Vibrator" has also been made into a film.

During the last days of the Balkan War in the summer of 1995, Anthony, a hapless American questioning the dot-com values that allow him to live a pampered existence in San Francisco, agrees to join Gisela, a beauty he barely knows, in a search for her son, lost in a Hungarian orphanage. In Budapest they meet Marsh, a brilliant but frustrated British war correspondent. Anthony thinks he has found in Eastern Europe what his former life was missing: enterprising young people openly questioning U.S. values, determined to remake their own world. But when an odd and edgy love triangle emerges and he discovers his mission with Gisela is much darker than he imagined, Anthony is thrown further in flux. Moving from the tattered romanticism of Budapest, through the sparkling Dalmatian coast, and into the brutalized landscape of inland Croatia, the novel takes a shocking turn of irreversible consequence."Radiant Days" is held taut in the voice of Anthony, whose desire to experience a more serious (and thrilling) life leaves injury in its wake. With a swift plot and seamless style, Michael FitzGerald delivers a story of unattainable love, misplaced lust, and the politics of compassion.

Since well before Marco Polo's fabled journey, the literature of travel has always made for grand reading. In "The Irish Way: A Walk Through Ireland's Past and Present, Robert Emmett Ginna has written a memorable contribution to the genre, for here is Ireland, viewed by a veteran traveler intent on depicting the country as it truly is and describing what has made Ireland and the Irish what they are today. In his eighth decade, Ginna set out to walk the length of Ireland, some 350 miles from its most northerly point, Malin Head, in Donegal, to Kinsale, on the Atlantic coast of Cork. Familiar with the country for many years, Ginna had seen the influx of high-tech industries and membership in the European Union transform Ireland from a poor, largely agricultural country into the prosperous "Celtic tiger." He wanted to judge for himself what the Irish had gained--and perhaps lost--and what they have preserved from a rich yet tumultuous heritage. Ginna encountered a host of interesting Irish men and women from many walks of life on his trek through three counties of Northern Ireland and ten counties of the Republic. Among them were the soldiers of the British garrison in Omagh, the young woman who directs the annual film festival in strife-scarred Londonderry, the self-made man who founded the Famine Museum at Strokestown, captains of high-tech industries, and farmers whose families have worked their lands for generations. At Birr, he visited the Earl of Rosse in the castle his family has held for nearly four hundred years and where a forebear constructed what was for seventy-five years the world's greatest telescope. In Tipperary, Ginna was regaled at a show by rollicking priests, talked horses with a successful racehorse trainer, and met a gentleman farmer who had unearthed an early medieval chalice valued at more than 6 million. In the thriving city of Cork, the Republic's second largest, Ginna sought out the Lord Mayor, spoke with an innovative police superintendent, explored Cork's vibrant cultural scene, and met the woman who is probably Ireland's youngest feature-film director. And of course, all through his journey, Ginna enjoyed serendipitous encounters with engaging characters in the pubs that are at the center of so much of Irish social life. Weaving song, poetry, and story into his narrative, Ginna brings to life the heroes and rogues, saints and patriots, who have shaped Ireland's turbulent and colorful culture and history.