Supergirl Mixtapes


Book Description

Sixteen-year-old Maria leaves her father and grandmother in Red Hill, South Carolina, to live with her estranged mother, an artist who lives with her young boyfriend in a tiny apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side.




Mixtape Nostalgia


Book Description

Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation tells the story of the mixtape from its history in 1970s bootlegging to its resurgence as an icon of nostalgic analog technology. Burns looks at the history of the mixtape from the early 1980s and the rise of the cassette as a fundamental aspect of the music industry. Stories from music fans collecting hip hop mixtapes in the Bronx or recording songs off the radio permeate the book. She discusses the continued contemporary appeal of the mixtape as musicians, novelists, memoirists, playwrights, and even podcasters have used it as a metaphor for connection and identity. From Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape to Questlove’s Mixtape Potluck Cookbook, Burns analyzes how the mixtape can function as a plot point, a stand-in for emotional connection, or an organizing structure. The book shows how creators use the iconography of the mixtape cassette to create ephemera, from coffee subscriptions to board games, which speaks to the appreciation of the tangible and the analog. The desire to find connection through sharing a physical artifact permeates the various creative uses of the mixtape. From blockbuster films like Guardians of the Galaxy to mixtape throw pillows, Burns highlights the mixtape as a site of collective memory tied to youth culture, community identity, and sharing music.




Write in Tune: Contemporary Music in Fiction


Book Description

Contemporary popular music provides the soundtrack for a host of recent novels, but little critical attention has been paid to the intersection of these important art forms. Write in Tune addresses this gap by offering the first full-length study of the relationship between recent music and fiction. With essays from an array of international scholars, the collection focuses on how writers weave rock, punk, and jazz into their narratives, both to develop characters and themes and to investigate various fan and celebrity cultures surrounding contemporary music. Write in Tune covers major writers from America and England, including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Jim Crace. But it also explores how popular music culture is reflected in postcolonial, Latino, and Australian fiction. Ultimately, the book brings critical awareness to the power of music in shaping contemporary culture, and offers new perspectives on central issues of gender, race, and national identity.




Supergirl Mixtapes


Book Description

In Meagan Brothers's Supergirl Mixtapes, a music-obsessed girl travels to New York City to find herself. After years of boredom in her rural South Carolina town, Maria is thrilled when her father finally allows her to visit her estranged artist mother in New York City. She's ready for adventure, and she soon finds herself immersed in a world of rock music and busy streets, where new people and ideas lie around every concrete corner. This is the freedom she's always longed for—and she pushes for as much as she can get, skipping school to roam the streets, visit fancy museums, and flirt with the cute clerk at a downtown record store. But just like her beloved New York City, Maria's life has a darker side. Behind her mother's carefree existence are shadowy secrets, and Maria must decide just where—and with whom—her loyalty lies.




Debbie Harry Sings in French


Book Description

Johnny's had kind of a tough life so far, and he's always been a bit of a freak. His goth look usually includes black nail polish and a little mascara.When he discovers Debbie Harry, the lead singer of Blondie, he not only likes her music but realizes that he kind of, sort of, wants to BE her. He'd like to be cool and tough and beautiful like her. He'd like to dress like her. He's not gay, at least he doesn't think so. So what does it mean? And what should he tell his amazing new girlfriend? This wise, hip novel introduces shades of gray into the black-and-white ideas of sexuality and gender. Anyone who has ever wished they could be a little bit tough and a little bit glamorous will recognize themselves in Johnny.




Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl


Book Description

"In these irreverent pages, a shapeshifter gets a crash course in gender and sexuality by inhabiting both sides of the binary and arriving precisely somewhere in the middle." —O, The Oprah Magazine “HOT” (Maggie Nelson) • “TIGHT” (Eileen Myles) • “DEEP” (Michelle Tea) It's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flaneur with a rich dating life. But Paul's also got a secret: he's a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Paul transforms his body and his gender at will as he crossed the country––a journey and adventure through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his/her way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.




Weird Girl and What's His Name


Book Description

In the podunk town of Hawthorne, North Carolina, high school geeks Lula and Rory share everything-- sci-fi and fantasy fandom, an obsession with old X-Files episodes, and the feeling that they'll never quite fit in.




Grrl Scouts: Magic Socks #3


Book Description

Gwen and Rita are forced to pick up the pieces after Daphne's brutal death. Josie moves into power with the Magic Socks, quickly becoming a pop cult sensation. This third issue is stuffed to the gills with an action-packed story, bonus art, soundtrack, and sketchbook plus, a variant cover by the mighty, mighty MIKE HUDDLESTON! Pure fun! Pure flavor!




Ship Breaker (National Book Award Finalist)


Book Description

Set in a dark future America devastated by the forces of climate change, this thrilling bestseller and National Book Finalist is a gritty, high-stakes adventure of a teenage boy faced with conflicting loyalties. In America's flooded Gulf Coast region, oil is scarce, but loyalty is scarcer. Grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts by crews of young people. Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota--and hopefully live to see another day. But when, by luck or by chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life: Strip the ship for all it's worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life.... In this powerful novel, Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Paolo Bacigalupi delivers a fast-paced adventure set in the vivid and raw, uncertain future of his companion novels The Drowned Cities and Tool of War. "Suzanne Collins may have put dystopian literature on the YA map with The Hunger Games...but Bacigalupi is one of the genre's masters, employing inventively terrifying details in equally imaginative story lines." —Los Angeles Times A New York Times Bestseller A Michael L. Printz Award Winner A National Book Award Finalist A VOYA 2010 Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers Book A Rolling Stone 40 Best YA Novels Book Don’t miss the other books in the series: The Drowned Cities Tool of War




Miss World


Book Description

It's 1993. Kimmy Ho's never really been happy (and thinks her life sucks). She's not really good at anything - or at least, that's what her mother says. But music makes her feel better, and gives her something to live for. Then, she gets raped on the day Kurt Cobain's found dead. And her life begins to suck even more. From his death comes her cross-dressing imaginary friend Joey, and her budding romance with Walter, the skinny kid from special-ed. Walter shows her love and the ability to feel pleasure again, but even he can't make everything better. Not when he also awakens a lust for violence and revenge that she never knew she had inside her.