Bøger udgivet af Powerhouse Books

A newly expanded edition of the beloved Paris in Winter absorbs readers into magic of the City of Light, showcasing its serendipitous essence and cultural treasures anew with a captivating contemporary introduction and whimsical illustrations by author and artist David CogginsParis in Winter strikes again with a brand new edition including new watercolor drawings with fanciful ink and charming vignettes featuring moments from Coggins’ family's annual New Year's sojourns to Paris, which, because of their unending love for the city, they've been taking together for almost 25 years. This memoir of poetic, lighthearted stories highlights the family's passion for art, food, fashion, and social life. Family rituals—from having lunch each January at the delightful Le Grand Vefour to haunting favorite antique shops and seeking out-of-the-ordinary spots, like a little known garden or a gypsy circus—are interspersed with serendipitous moments: hearing Bono sing "Happy Birthday" to a friend in a bistro, adopting an abandoned lap dog, and the simple pleasures of Parisian street life.Coggins's delicate and intimate drawings capture classic Parisian scenes as well as family and friends against the backdrop of the elegant City of Light under the cloak of winter. Across cafes and hotels, apartments and galleries, the family mixes with a lively group of Parisian and international actors, designers, writers, and students. Furthermore, Coggins weaves in fascinating bits of the city's history and artistic lore, from Victor Hugo's interior designs to the painting that legend has it started Impressionism, to delight Francophiles all over. The first edition of Paris in Winter was a Minneapolis Star Tribune top book in 2015 and has been featured in Condé Nast Traveler, Town and Country Magazine, Mpls/StPaul Magazine, and Twin Cities Public Television. With new charming watercolor illustrations featuring loungers gazing over a duck-filled pond and a woman strolling serenely across a bridge with a view of the Eiffel Tower beyond, this second edition book continues to capture the soul of the City of Love.

The photographs in STREET were taken by Carrie Boretz in New York City from the mid-1970s through the 1990s. It is common knowledge that the city was on rocky ground for many of those years but these are not pictures filled with drama or strife. Instead Boretz was always more interested in the subtle and familiar moments of everyday life in the various neighborhoods where she lived, before much of the graffiti was scrubbed away and the city sanitized and reborn to what it has since become.For so many living in and visiting New York today, it is forgotten or altogether not known how different so many parts of the city were during that time. Many of these pictures show the reality of the streets then, where every day workers, the homeless, the affluent, and tourists all shared the common space, providing examples of how one of the greatest cities in the world was one often filled with contradictions. But there is also a timeless element to these images as children still play in the parks, streets, and schoolyards, commuters still face the elements daily as they wait, there are still regular demonstrations and parades, and the whole spectrum of the joys and pitfalls of humanity are still visible most anywhere a person looks.For Boretz nothing was scripted, it all played out right before her. As Patti Smith said, "You need no rationale, no schooling. It's love at first sight. You see something and you have to capture it. Instinctive, bang, you feel one with it." Indeed, Boretz doesn't have a philosophy about shooting other than trusting her instinct: she saw, she shot, she moved on, always looking for moments that made her heart beat faster. It was the continual rush of knowing that at any time she could come upon something real and beautiful. That is why and how she shot and why and how her STREET is so special.

Join the jubilant journey of fatherhood with a crew of animal dads—and their kids!—engaging in everyday activities which mirror readers' interactions with their father figures. Emily Snape reminds us that Dads come in every shape and size and they may seem as different as can be, but there are two truths for all dads that hold true: you love your dad and your dad loves you.Dads celebrates the vast spectrum of fatherhood with illustrations of animal paternal figures and their families. There are loud and quiet dads, careful and courageous dads, sporty and trendy dads... depicted as gorilla dads, rhino dads, lion dads, dog dads, squirrel dads, octopus dads, even shark dads—to name a few! Each page expresses the joys, trials, humor, concerns, and hope of parenthood. The compare-contrast format sets a rhythm that builds to a meaningful, uplifting conclusion: that love is what each of these dads have in common.

Bear LOVES the spotlight in this outrageous A to Z story. When he realizes only “B is for Bear,” he tries to steal the show from all the other animals in the alphabet…A Is for Bear is not your average ABC book! Yes, this title does have an animal that represents each letter of the alphabet… except…We have an interloper that steals the limelight for the whole alphabet and his name is BEAR. Everything starts out normal! “A is for Alphabet, B is for Bear, C is for Cat.” Then, suddenly, “E is for… Eager Bear” (what about Elephant?!) and “F is for Fabulous Bear?” Each letter becomes goofier as this animal story unfolds. “M is for Missing Bear”… but is he really? BEAR takes over the alphabet! He gets away with it at first, too. But FOX has his eye on the game that is afoot. FOX will do all he can to stop BEAR from outshining the list of animals and their rightful letters! BEAR reaches for every trick in his toolbox to remain the ultimate star of the show all of the way to the end. Anastasiya Keegan’s illustrations are full of movement, emotion & vibrant color that lends to the comedy Soren Kisiel theatrical tale brings to Young Readers. Keegan’s signature style that plays with depth and field of vision, seen in Adventures for Breakfast (POW! 2022) continues in A Is for Bear as well as her quirky animated wit visible on every page. A Is for Bear turns the ABC concept on its head. Young Readers see beloved animals that they can point out on the page all while laughing at the wacky, mischievous story that unfolds with our BEAR.

Humans have always bred, farmed, raced, and lived alongside pigeons. Some of us shoo them away and others care for them as the city’s most famous wildlife. The New York Pigeon, now in its second edition with spectacular new images, is a one-of-a-kind, intimate study of this worldwide neighbor."...[There's a] new edition of the book 'The New York Pigeon: Behind the Feathers,' by Andrew Garn, a photographer and writer. For more than 15 years, he has been capturing the oft-loathed birds with studio-style images — dark backgrounds, dramatic lighting and seemingly meaningful expressions....[Garn says] in the introduction to the book that it is as hard to imagine New York City without pigeons as it is to think of the Everglades without alligators or Antarctica without penguins....'Pigeons are our nature...'" -- James Barron for The New York Times The New York Pigeon reveals the unexpected beauty of the omnipresent pigeon as if Vogue devoted its pages to birds, not fashion models. In spite of pigeons’ ubiquity in New York and other cities, we never really see them closely and know very little about their function in the urban ecosystem. This book brings to light the intriguing history, behavior, and splendor of a bird so often overlooked. While The New York Pigeon is primarily a photography book, it also tells the five-thousand-year story of the feral pigeon. Why are pigeons so successful in cities and not in the countryside? Why do they have such diverse plumage? How have pigeons adapted to survive on almost any food? Why are pigeons able to fly up to 500 miles per day but rarely do? How did Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner teach pigeons to do complicated tasks, from tracking missile targets to recognizing individual human faces? Why can pigeons see in the ultraviolet light spectrum, and why is half of their brain used for visual perception? The second edition of The New York Pigeon, with its fresh portraiture and new essay from Catherine Quayle of the Wild Bird Fund, presents dramatic, hyper-real studio portraits capturing the personalities, expressiveness, glorious feather iridescence, and deeply hued eyes of the New York pigeon.

Few styles are more iconic than the finery donned by the crowds at Churchill Downs. For the last decade, Lili Kobielski has photographed Kentucky Derby spectators for Vogue as if they were models on a runway. Enjoy this close-up look at America’s most inimitable sports fashion event!Twenty horses—120 seconds—150 years—timeless fashion. From the hats in the grandstands to the silks on the track, fashion is as much a part of the Kentucky Derby as the thoroughbreds, the jockeys, and the mint juleps. Lili Kobielski has been photographing the Kentucky Derby for Vogue for a decade. She aptly captures the vibrant colors, jovial festivities, and, of course, the fantastic headwear of this iconic day in sports. Kentucky Derby Fashion celebrates the spectators of this epic event and illustrates how their creativity and style make the Derby what it is. The passion for the sport is best displayed by the fashion in the grandstands. With an introduction written by Helmut Lang and contributions from Churchill Downs and the Vogue editorial team, readers get a sense of the Derby’s hallowed place in the worlds of fashion and sports.

A simple country pig, named Joe, decides he is going to become a fancy musician after seeing an infomercial of a banjo playing dog. He makes his banjo out of junkyard finds and takes his show on the road (ok, his small town!) The problem is he can’t find an animal audience suited for his twingin’ and twangin’! Hopeless and dejected, he enters a back-alley door. He stumbles across a new path… a heavier path where he finds a community of listeners who think his music is totally metal!After seeing a fancy dog playing fancy banjo music on TV, Joe Pig figures he can build his own banjo out of parts he finds in his junkyard. He works morning, noon and night to create this unique instrument… that will hopefully lead Joe to his new gig as a small-town musician with big dreams! Joe falls into a series of hilarious mishaps with less than stellar reactions before he finds success & acceptance in the most unlikely, heavy, place. Sometimes, our talents & dreams lead us to the community we have always waited for. The Story of a Pig Named Joe and His Quest to Be Fancy is an homage to all varieties of music enthusiasts, from groupies to musicians. The story is filled with bluegrass, country, classical and particularly heavy metal vibes. This is a solid picture book for any Young Reader or adult with daydreams of being in a local jam-band or even making it all the way to the big stages as the lead of a rock group!

Chuck Dükman, a circus janitor, almost completes his job for the night when a cowcophony of clowns (really, a whole troop of cow clowns!) run amuck and make Dükman’s stage…yuck! Counting Cows is a 1 to 10 counting picture book with a new obstacle on every page. Who knew the midnight mayhem that circus cow clowns could create! Will Dükman get the stage clean… or is it all just a dream?Count up to ten and down again with this fever dream of a tale! Chuck Dükman, our leading janitor of a theatrical stage, is ready to fall asleep but not until he finishes his janitorial duties. Chuck is roused by a cowcophony of clowns! Our rowdy friends romp around the stage as readers practice their numbers. Does Chuck Dükman find a way to get the theater clean or was it all just a dream? Our troop of clown cows honk horns, tightrope walk, unicycle ride, toss pies & overall make a disastrous, hilarious mess until Chuck Dükman regains control and demands clean-up help. The cows are under great management... but will they succeed in making this playful establishment clean? These circus clowns will if Dükman has anything to say about it! A bonus, Counting Cows is a “Get Ready for Bed” book in disguise! Rowdy playtime, clean-up, wash-up and then time for sleep? This is a story that belongs on the nightstand to read again and again!

"Lindsey Webb's Plat is a haunted, Western elegy which grapples with the suicide of her childhood friend in the context of their Mormon upbringing. In conversation with Joseph Smith's prophesied but unrealized heavenly city, the Plat of Zion, Webb explores a vexed, disorienting space. Her prose poems lead the reader through an unearthly garden and into a house which eludes laws of time or space, unearthing the porous border between the living and the dead. Plat hearkens to Leonora Carrington, Lyn Hejinian, and Willa Cather, with ecstatic and painterly language that broods over gender, death, and memory like a thundercloud. As ecological and built structures feverishly crumble, Webb maps the grief of a yet-unachieved utopias in the wake of personal loss. She considers how dreams for our imagined worlds and selves may survive"--Provided by publisher.

The breakout poetry collection in a multiform, poetic conversation between queer and trans artists and writers.Like meeting under a disco ball, or listening to Arthur Russell on the Staten Island Ferry, Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax proposes reading as a form of friendship. Conversational, inquisitive, and scrutinizing, this book goes out to anyone who has loved someone they’ll never get to meet. "Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can't Relax gives me the same kind of excitement and imaginative heat that obsessing over the glossy photo middles of queer biographies does. These poems collectively form a watery slide between past and present, care and anxiety, form and formlessness, verb and noun. We can live large in the slippage between the relational and the overwhelmingly mysterious. It would be so easy to fall into a nostalgic hole, but charles isn't that kind of poet. Rather, we dance (or write) into the polymorphous dawn, "the extended cut, a technology for sensing forever." I'm grateful to have these poems for how they welcome us in through surreal syntax that then somehow forms a new grammar where metabolic harmony with cats and capybaras, zinnias and rambutans, is the norm, is the gay heaven." - Stacy Szymaszek "The poems in Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax possess astonishing depths of love in their arrangements of words and sounds, in their amusement with and within exuberant complexities, and in their utter resistance to giving in to harm and harm’s byways. The long title poem, on and for and with Arthur Russell, is a cascade of forms and voices channeled through dance and the untouch into the continuousness of collective knowledge, movement and grief in the face of devastation. And then like Martin Wong, among many other sources of art and hope, charles theonia digs the way firemen smell, listens for sounds waiting for an open mouth, and knows 'Begin can be replaced with any word that brings you closer.' This book is a companion for life." - Anselm Berrigan “Lucky for us we dream in landscapes / beyond our experience,” writes charles theonia in the long poem opening their electric debut collection, and readers are all the luckier for it. Brimming with a sense of the possible, among its many offerings are 'other arrangements of the self;' the dance of bodies (textual and not) entangled in sound; portals to multiple elsewheres—'Utopia: a compulsion to keep remaking this world.' This world can’t become on its own, hence its gregarious erotics. Jump in!” - Mónica de la Torre "charles theonia's poems are everything!" - Tourmaline "Nothing is not gay, and neither space nor time can prevent people from touching in charles theonia’s new collection of poems, Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor But I Can’t Relax, in which language is motioned to meet desire, to rouse it, spark it, make it public and then make it echo—because why shouldn’t it? theonia’s poems are for creatures of feeling who want both/and. They arouse, resound and satisfy." - Shiv Kotecha

Los Angeles Times calls the writing "funny, transgressive and absurd" in this anthology of Archway Editions' bicoastal event series and scene-making spectacle.Archway Editions finds what’s next in literature with the bicoastal reading series ARCHWAYS, with must-see happenings in LA along with the anarchic, rave-adjacent original in NYC. Salon-style events keep pace with rising trends but stay focused on Archway as an emerging brand for smart writing coming in against the status quo. Readers include upcoming AE authors Jasmine Johnson and Sul Mousavi; national bestseller Ruth Madievsky; Los Angeles Review of Books editor and famed translator Boris Dralyuk; editors from Harper's, Lapham's, NOON; poets, podcasters and influencers alike. This is a vital document from a rising American scene of readers and writers, hipsters and misfits, rave denizens, professors and screenwriters, all joined together by the iconic spectacle of Archways and a shared destiny to be what's next in literature. CONTRIBUTORS slated for the anthology: Aiden Arata, Will Augerot, Ivanna Baranova, Giulia Bencivenga, Helen Donohue, Boris Dralyuk, Jared Daniel Fagen, Luke B. Goebel, Jasmine Johnson, Evan Laffer, Rachel Ly, Ruth Madievsky, Chukwuma Ndulue, Moira O’Neill, Sóla Saar, Iván Salinas, Anna Shoemaker, Liza St. James, John Tottenham and many more.

¡Cuéntalo insta a todos a hablar su verdad, compartir sus sentimientos y sacarlo de sus pechos! ¡Lo que sea que esté en tu mente, lo que sea que esté cargando tu alma, ¡CUÉNTALO!En el encantadormente ilustrado libro de Diego Estebo, Cuéntalo, Nika tiene un problema realmente grande. Está llevando un secreto. Ella quiere contárselo a alguien, pero le da miedo que la gente se ría de ella, o peor aún, se enoje. A veces siente como si el secreto la estuviera aplastando. Cuando ya no puede más, se lo cuenta a su amigo Hailu. En el momento en que sale, el secreto ya no parece tanto grande y ella inmediatamente siente que no está sola. Cuéntalo es un mensaje poderoso para jóvenes y adultos; ¡no dejes que tus secretos te hagan infeliz! ¡Encuentra a alguien en quien confíes y díselo! Una llamada a la acción para muchos temas personales y emocionales, Cuéntalo ayudará a los niños a encontrar el coraje de ser ellos mismos, para quitarse la carga de ocultar sus sentimientos y sentir que no están solos. Ilustrado con colores, texturas, crayones e inks, Estebo pone amor en cada página fresca y original.

The Kraken is lonely. How does he find an everlasting friendship from the sea up above? Kraken finds an unlikely mentorhsip from the Great White Shark. It turns out the creatures that we often push aside might have the best advice for harbouring friendship. What will this unlikely pair teach us? More than the sea can fathom.It's no big surprise that the Kraken has no friends, but he is TIRED OF IT. With a bad temper and a knack for destruction, his talent for meeting new fish is...not so seaworthy. He finds hope when another monster of the deep, a great white shark, offers him some RULES FOR MAKING FRIENDS. Will these rules help the most terrifying monster of the deep make a new chum?

Fun to read, look at, and educational to boot! 1 to 20, Animals Aplenty depicts each number with a specific amimal species: both numerically and as a visual quantity. This visual format is key to teaching children the building blocks of math. Young Readers will count and laugh at the semi-absurd animal moments, snakes with cakes? Chickens reading Dickens? 1 to 20, Animals Aplenty will help any new-to-counting reader remember their numbers. 1 to 20, Animals Aplenty is 2nd POW! title by Katie Viggers, who wrote and illustrated, Almost an Animal Alphabet. 1 to 20, Animals Aplenty teaches kids to count from 1 to 20 as they meet a menagerie of amusing creatures. Each number depicts a different animal species along with a funny rhyme to recognize the number connecte to the animal group. Katie's adorably detailed illustrations will have Young Readers laughing as they count-how-many! Young Readers will romp through the pages, learning their numbers all while receiving visually absurd entertainment with these silly animals and their many props. And it all rhymes, "3 llamas wearing pajamas," "11 dogs and their pet frogs," "12 racoons with the baboons's balloons" "19 snakes eating cakes!"

As a founding member and vocalist in the award-winning pop-soul group The 5th Dimension, LaMonte McLemore enjoyed enormous critical and commercial acclaim in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But arguably just as impactful, if not more so, was his career as a photographer cementing Black women and models in American media and cultural history.

Lo-Life tells the remarkable true story of the Lo Lifes’ OG founder, Rack-Lo, aka George Billips, who, at a young age, simultaneously formed an infamous Brooklyn street crew and introduced high fashion to street life. Now a veteran of a near-fatal gangster lifestyle, his story transformed into one of self-determination, culminating in a career as a successful fashion entrepreneur."A new autobiography from the Lo-Lifes' founder George “Rack-Lo” Billips, published by Brooklyn’s powerHouse books and distributed by Simon & Schuster, sheds light on the origins of the movement, its influence in hip-hop and streetwear, and Billips' journey from criminal to career counselor." -- GOTHAMIST Rack-Lo made some bad choices: he left school, he thieved, he went to jail, he got shot; he had a lust for fast money, materialism, and clothes, and a knack for police run-ins, street confrontations, and skipping out on warrants. Rack-Lo was deep into street life in the late 1980s, when he united teenage crews from the notorious Brownsville and Crown Heights neighborhoods of Brooklyn to found the legendary gang Lo Lifes, who made a name for themselves dressing head to toe in highly coveted Ralph Lauren’s Polo brand clothing—or “Lo.” They acquired this “preppy” fashion by any means necessary: stick-ups, shoplifting, and hustling. What started as an informal gang uniform, organized around clean designs and bright colors, became a devotion to a lifestyle brand, and eventually created an association between street-level crews and the luxury brands that would fundamentally change the pop culture foundation of the fashion industry. Rack-Lo’s personal testimony captures the Lo Life era (1988-2005) like no other. But Rack-Lo didn’t let the game change him. Instead, he changed the game. He survived gun violence, Riker’s Island, police brutality, street conflicts, a poor educational system, and domestic violence long enough to turn around his life and reinvent himself; Rack-Lo continues to be revered for his distinct fashion style, leadership, ability to mobilize his people and brotherhood to visualize and revolutionize a better society. This is the incredible true story of Rack-Lo.

A prolific poet, raconteur, activist, and thinker, Allen Ginsberg was also a prolific collector, meticulously saving letters, postcards, draft notes and manuscripts, photographs and snapshots, appearance bills and rally broadsheets, not only featuring him personally, but also his fellow poets, singers, lovers, writers, journey companions, friends, and agitators. Gathered here publicly for the first time is his personal archive of events and experiences documenting his life as a young man, breakaway poet, expansive spirit, curious intellectual traveler, and relentless enthusiast of the provocative and the profane."Ginsberg was our angel. Look beneath your shopping cart—poetry is everywhere if you are so attuned. Ginsberg, like Whitman, is still underneath our boot soles. He left his corporeal existence in 1997, at age 70, but he left behind filing cabinets the size of Texas, and, in his new book, 'Material Wealth,' Pat Thomas unloads the Ginsberg archive and leaves no stone unturned." - AIR MAIL "'Material Wealth' opens out Ginsberg’s complexity and charisma and showcases a dynamic poet and public figure..." - TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT There are hundreds of thousands of items carefully stored and archived at Stanford University’s Allen Ginsberg collection. Counterculture historian Pat Thomas, with the full cooperation of the Allen Ginsberg Estate's Peter Hale, has compiled and annotated a remarkable volume of material, unearthing in the process one astounding find after another. The result is a tome of previously unpublished historical paperwork and vintage graphics and photographs and ephemera that promises an unprecedented look inside one of the most prolific poets and agitators of cultural mores of the 20th century. A poster for Patti Smith’s first-ever poetry reading. Correspondence from Allen’s stint as literary agent for William S. Burroughs and Herbert Huncke. Yippie manifestos from Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and John Sinclair of the MC5. A ticket for a 1974 concert by Bob Dylan & The Band (with Yoko Ono’s phone number scribbled on the back). Posters documenting early Beat Generation readings in 1950s San Francisco as well as later ones capturing the 1960s Haight-Ashbury Hippie era. Allen’s own remarkable journey is here, too: agreements for BBC Radio appearances, schedules of lecture tours, notes for his iconic Kaddish poem. A parody of Howl as ‘Towel’ by Terry Southern. Obsessive letters from fans he never met. Though this project is so much more than a book of Allen’s photography, the featured images can’t go unmentioned: Allen’s lens finds not only Kerouac, Corso, Burroughs, and other Beats, but also Lou Reed, Van Morrison, Philip Glass, Norman Mailer, Marianne Faithful, Anne Waldman, Iggy Pop, Don Cherry, Robert Frank, and Patti Smith. You’ll find he often scribbled his affection for the subject right on the photo itself. Packed with ephemera you’ve never seen, Material Wealth is a smorgasbord of things that most of us would have tossed away decades ago: notes to oneself, accounting statements, letters of intent, fan and media crushes, criticisms and critiques, posters of events now considered historical and cultural canon, political manifestos, et al. These are just a few of the most intriguing items folded between the pages of the one Ginsberg book that has never been—and needed to be done: a visual annotated compendium that reveals one of the unparalleled minds of his generation.

"Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents. Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly's death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was. A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love. Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent" --

"The greatest and most fearless living writer turns his unerring eye to the art world and the fraught relationship between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. The relationship between Warhol and Basquiat is already one of the most iconic, intensely analyzed partnerships in the history of art. Ishmael Reed brings the same unsparing, deeply researched perspective as he did for the Archway Editions bestseller The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, for a captivating, illuminating final word on the famous duo. Already the subject of controversy during its original 2021-2022 run at the Theater for the New City in the East Village, Archway Editions is proud to bring you the unabridged text of The Slave Who Loved Caviar, Reed's latest feat of research and drama, the tragedy as disturbingly real for today's artists as it was in the 1980's"--

The lost world of the “gay paradises” in San Francisco and New York is beautifully documented in this collection of remarkably intimate portraits and street scenes taken by photography activist and chronicler Nicholas Blair from 1979–1986. The lovely, carefree utopia pre-AIDS gay communities offered a long-maligned culture evoke a halcyon existence of peace and acceptance, with only a hint of the dark cloud of the AIDS epidemic looming, and early protests and demands for humane treatment just beginning to take hold."Blair’s new book, 'Castro to Christopher: Gay Streets of America 1979–1986,' transports viewers to the heat and hedonism of that time – a period looked back on as a kind of twilight zone, after Stonewall and before the darkness of the Aids epidemic." -- AnOther "'Castro to Christopher,' the photographer’s first book, is a portrait of that brief, blissful period in LGBTQ history. Its subjects reach out to caress and to protest; they stare to confront and to surrender. Each gesture and interaction is rendered in handsome black-and-white, with Blair’s shadow as the only visible proof of his presence in the intimate moments captured." -- DOCUMENT JOURNALBetween 1979 and 1986—after Stonewall and before the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic—there was a period of exuberant and burgeoning gay life in places even then known as “gay paradises.” There were others, but the best known were San Francisco’s Castro District, New York’s Christopher Street and Fire Island, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. The joy—and pathos—of these tragically lost worlds is beautifully and vibrantly documented in this collection of compelling portraits and street scenes photographed by Nicholas Blair. As a teenager lured to San Francisco from New York—via hitchhiking to Buenos Aires—Blair lived in a hippie-style arts commune just across town from the Castro. With a Leica rangefinder camera loaned to him by a childhood friend, Blair began honing his craft as a photographer amidst the explosion of LGBTQ life that was rapidly eclipsing the hippies as the most visible (and photographable) counter-culture movement of the day. Blair's revealing, evocative, and celebratory photos are a window into the outburst of pent-up celebration and (occasionally) riotous ebullience of theretofore closeted persons who had suddenly felt the door of tolerance opening a crack, and who were now leaning in, hard, to live life openly as their true and genuine selves. Perhaps most ironic, viewed from today’s perspective of intersectionality, is how extensively, especially in the San Francisco images, the “hippie” background dovetails with, for example, the vibrant flamboyance of many of those in the Pride Parades. How many degrees of separation are there, really, between Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence? If the specter of AIDS were not hanging over these photographs, it would be as if they were showing us a parallel universe where full equality under law for LGBTQ people could have come so much sooner. As they stand, these historic images are time capsules of a few places in America, where, for the very first time, and for a very short while, it was okay to be gay.

A village is left in ruins after the bombs fall. The beloved library is burned to ash. Food is scarce. Danger is abundant. Every aspect of daily life is changed. How will home ever feel as it once did? But then one day, the Librarian emerges in the town square. Seated on a bench in front of the library's remains, she opens a book and begins to read aloud. The village children stop to listen. "Foolish woman," Papa says. "Too dangerous," Mama agrees, hurrying the children away. But day after day the librarian returns to her post, her voice carrying stories above the thunder of tanks and to the broken hearts of the people. Little by little, the persistent Librarian's stories seed hope in the people, and their village begins to mend. Inspired by the bombing of the National Library of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, and bombing of the library at the University of Mosul in Iraq, The Librarian's Stories is a testament to the enduring connection between stories and hope.

In the last two decades, a bizarre and violent musical subculture called "Black Metal" has emerged in Norway. Its roots stem from a heady blend of horror movies, heavy metal music, Satanism, Paganism, and adolescent angst. In the early-mid 1990s, members of this extremist underground committed murder, burned down medieval wooden churches, and desecrated graveyards. What started as juvenile frenzy came to symbolize the start of a war against Christianity, a return to the worship of the ancient Norse gods, and the complete rejection of mainstream society.