The story goes that under the influence of blues and rock and roll, Britain suddenly started making spectacularly great music in the 1960s like some clever, quick learning cultural satellite of America. But Britain’s mid twentieth-century pop music explosion didn’t happen from a standing start. The reasons something so dazzling and multifaceted appeared lie deeper than those legendary deliveries of blues records to Liverpool’s port and the legacy of music halls.

Jeff Nuttall: Anything But Dull is the first full-length biography of the poet, performance artist, provocateur, and polymath Jeff Nuttall, who famously wrote “I paint poems, sing sculptures, draw novels.” Nuttall was a key figure in the formation of the counterculture, collaborating with William Burroughs, John Latham, R. D. Laing, Alexander Trocchi, and other major avant-garde figures of the 1960s. With The People Show, Nuttall staged some of the first performance art in the United Kingdom and continued to push boundaries in his teaching career and the forty books he published.

A Russian Jew who spent most of his life in England and America, Alexander Bakshy (1885-1949) was a theater critic and literary translator. He was also an innovative theorist who applied to theater the discourse of self-reflexive modernism, prizing anti-illusionist medium-awareness. Indeed, he was something of a pioneer in the area of “spectatorship” and medium-awareness, going so far as to argue in favor of the modernist idea of overt presentationalism on stage as opposed to disingenuous representationalism.

Paul Brian Heise’s The Wound That Will Never Heal is an original allegorical reading of Richard Wagner’s epic music drama The Ring of the Nibelung. Heise challenges the standard view that Wagner merely dramatizes the conflict between love and power and demonstrates instead that his greatest work is an allegory exploring humanity’s longing for transcendent value and that quest’s paradoxical establishment of a science-based secular society.

Ninety-nine years ago, a new form of storytelling emerged from the ruins of World War I. Different in scope and power from theater or literature, and unlike any film that had come before, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari addressed a direct challenge to its audience, demanding to be viewed as something other than what was immediately presented. Unfortunately, criticism has not risen to the challenge.

Speaking of Wagner compiles in a new and highly accessible format celebrated author, lecturer, and Metropolitan Opera commentator William Berger’s collection of talks and presentations about Richard Wagner, the most controversial, and perhaps the most widely influential, artist in history. These talks have been successful with diverse audiences, ranging from newcomers to the field to the most exacting experts, often at the same time!

The past decade has overflowed in a raging stream of contradictions. Old certainties have yielded to relentless insecurity over a time when much of the human experience got immeasurably better even as many things only ever seemed to get worse. As Paul du Quenoy’s globetrotting criticism reveals, the arts were in a ferment that matched profound and yet totally unpredicted social and political transformations.

In 1759 the court of the Italian Duchy of Parma adopted the inspiration of cultural creators who recommended a reform of Italian opera along French lines. These writers favored combining Italian-style music with the wider range of musical genres and scenic variety of French opera. As the prize-winning music critic and commentator George W. Loomis shows in this groundbreaking volume, the young composer Tommaso Traetta was engaged to create new operas responding to these demands.

For forty years, Jackie Frame stood at the center of business, entertainment, and publicity in Classic Hollywood. This stunning collection of never before told vignettes reveals that lost world in all its splendor and with all its quirks. No scholar of the period will be able to reconstruct its dynamics, and no fan will be able to appreciate the film and music of those exciting times, without a careful consideration of these scintillating and revelatory memoirs by a true Hollywood insider.

Foreword by Professor Joseph Donohue

“..Matos's important book provides a well-researched, well-written, and fascinating discussion of the notion of contagion from Ibsen and into Pinero and Jones.” Professor Gregory Tague, St Francis College, editor of Origins of English Literary Modernism,1870-1914