Dive Deeper: One Book One Denver

Books

"Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian-American Pop Culture features the best of the magazine's sixty-eight issue run alongside never-before-seen photographs, supplementary writing by long-term contributing journalist Claudine Ko, and tributes from now-famous fans who've been around since day one. Margaret Cho, Daniel Wu, and Randall Park celebrate Giant Robot's enduring legacy alongside pioneering pro-skateboarder Peggy Oki, contemporary art giant Takashi Murakami, culinary darling Natasha Pickowicz, and critically acclaimed essayist Jia Tolentino."

"This is the most wide-ranging and provocative look at punk rock as a social change movement over the past forty-five years, told through first-hand accounts of roughly 250 musicians and activists. John Malkin brings together punk's most famous figures as well as underground voices, creating a new and insightful history of punk throughout the ages."

"Professional wrestling super fandom, Ontario's endlessly unfurling 401 highway, late nights at the convenience store listening to heavy metal--for writer and podcast host Elamin Abdelmahmoud, these are the building blocks of a life. Son of Elsewhere charts that life in wise, funny, and moving reflections on the many threads that weave together into an identity."

"Murray Bowles was the most influential and beloved photographer of the Bay Area punk scene. For more than four decades he captured the excitement, energy, creativity, and tenderness of a thriving community. Collected here for the first time are Bowles? classic images shot in basements, warehouses, and nightclubs where people of all ages gathered to celebrate community."

"Taken together, the observations, reminders, and self-exhortations that make up this novel constitute a personal handbook on 'how to live' or perhaps more urgently 'why to live,' a question the narrator, graduate student Athena Chen, desperately needs to answer. When Chen hears news that her brilliant friend from college has committed suicide, she is thrown into a fugue of fear and doubt. She begins to compile a collection of anecdotes and close readings of moments in the sometimes harrowing (i.e. bloody) world of sports, and in so doing, starts to question the validity and usefulness of our current narratives of success."

"When Nicole Chung graduated from high school, she couldn't hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found a sense of community she had always craved as an Asian American adoptee--and a path to the life she'd long wanted. Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another--and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and tragic inequalities in American society."

"Nimrods is an experimental memoir of fatherhood across two generations, refracted through the lens of immigration, racism, and colonialism. Kawika Guillermo chronicles his difficult relationship to his white alcoholic religious father, the travails of growing up a mixed-race Filipinx punk rock kid, and his ambivalence about his own new fatherhood. Asian American literature has often focused on the relationship between mothers and daughters; Guillermo expands the field to fathers and sons. Guillermo's shameless mixtures of autotheory, queer punk poetry, musical ekphrasis, hai bun, academic (mis)quotations, and bad Dad jokes, present a bold new take on the autobiography."

"The 1990s were a chaotic and gritty and utterly magical time for music, a confounding barrage of genres and lifestyles and superstars, from grunge to hip-hop, from sumptuous R&B to rambunctious ska-punk, from Axl to Kurt to Missy to Santana to Tupac to Britney. In 60 SONGS THAT EXPLAIN THE '90s, Ringer music critic Rob Harvilla reimagines all the earwormy, iconic hits Gen Xers pine for with vivid historical storytelling, sharp critical analysis, rampant loopiness, and wryly personal ruminations on the most bizarre, joyous, and inescapable songs from a decade we both regret entirely and miss desperately."

"Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition--if such a thing exists?"

"When it comes to punk communities across the world, the Orange County punk scene stands out as an undeniable trendsetter that helped define the sound and style of the rapidly evolving genre. From hard luck storytellers Social Distortion and multi-platinum sellers like The Offspring to cult heroes like The Adolescents and T.S.O.L., there’s much insight to gain from the story of this popular though often misunderstood music scene."   

"Copy Machine Manifestos captures the ... history of artists' zines ... , placing them in the lineage of the visual arts and exploring their ... growth over the past five decades. ... [I]llustrated with hundreds of zine covers and interiors, alongside work in other media, such as painting, photography, film, video, and performance, the book also features brief biographies for more than 100 zine-makers including Beverly Buchanan, Mark Gonzales, G.B. Jones, Miranda July, Bruce LaBruce, Terence Koh, LTTR, and more."

"After bottoming out, being institutionalized, and getting sober all by the tender age of fifteen, Moshe Kasher found himself asking: OK, so what else is out there? Over the ensuing decades, he found his way to the answer: a lot. From his current vantage point as a successful stand-up comic, Kasher looks back on his years careening from subculture to subculture, and he immerses readers in the hilariously strange nuances of each of the scenes he's found himself in."

"In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, 'The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany' make complete sense. Chuck Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian."

"Pieces of a Girl is a memoir about abuse and addiction and the power of storytelling and community that helped zine creator and novelist Stephanie Kuehnert survive and thrive. Told in journal entries, original illustrations, and pages torn from her actual diaries and zines, this is the story of Stephanie's life as a struggling outsider who survived substance and relationship abuse to beocme a strong young woman after years trapped in a cycle that sometimes seemed to have no escape."

"A gritty, gripping memoir by the singer Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age, Soulsavers), chronicling his years as a singer and drug addict in Seattle in the '80s and '90s."

"When Julia Lee was fifteen, her hometown went up in smoke during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The daughter of Korean immigrant store owners in a predominantly Black neighborhood, Julia was taught to be grateful for the privilege afforded to her. However, the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, following the murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper, forced Julia to question her racial identity and complicity. She was neither Black nor white. So who was she?"

"Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang. Side B finds Tracy, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city in 2019, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure."

"The funny and insightful first-person story of the trailblazing movie director of the 80s and 90s whose fearless punk drama, "Smithereens" became the first American indie film to compete at Cannes, and smash hit "Desperately Seeking Susan" led to a four-decade career in film."

"In 1975, during the fall of Saigon, Phuc Tran immigrates to America along with his family. By sheer chance they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life. In this coming-of-age memoir told through the themes of great books such as The Metamorphosis, The Scarlet Letter, The Iliad, and more, Tran navigates the push and pull of finding and accepting himself despite the challenges of immigration, feelings of isolation, teenage rebellion, and assimilation, all while attempting to meet the rigid expectations set by his immigrant parents."

"On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born--a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam--and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity."

"Every day Willis Wu leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy-- and he sees his life as a script. After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he has ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family, and what that means for him in today's America."

"A political and intellectual history of American counterculture and the historical figures who redefined mainstream understandings of freedom, culture, art, and politics-from The Beat Generation to Basquiat."

"From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist."

Movies

In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese-American boy learns what his family can't teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.

Wayne Wang's follow-up to his watershed indie Chan Is Missing is a family portrait that gracefully combines the director's signature gentle humanism and eye for poignant detail. Offering another fresh perspective on San Francisco's Chinese American community, Wang takes a bittersweet look at the generational pas de deux between an aging immigrant widow and her devoted daughter, torn between filial duty and her desires.

The story of Stevie, a teenager growing up in Los Angeles. He struggles with his family, including his abusive old brother and co-dependent single mom. He also struggles with his richer friends at school. When Stevie befriends a crew of skateboarders, he learns some tough lessons about race, class, and privilege.

A tender and sweeping story about what roots people that follows a Korean-American family that moves to a tiny Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream. The family home changes completely with the arrival of their sly, foul-mouthed, but incredibly loving grandmother. Amidst the instability and challenges of this new life in the rugged Ozarks, this film shows the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home.

Friends navigate interpersonal relationships and cross the country in search of an ideal connection.

Music

70th years on from the legendary 1953 concert at Massey Hall, Toronto that featured jazz legends Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach on stage together, comes this complete collection with mastering and Audio Restoration by Paul Blakemore.

Pet Sounds is the eleventh studio album by the American rock band the Beach Boys, released on May 16, 1966, by Capitol Records. It includes songs "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "Sloop John B."

Belle and Sebastian present 22 live performances featuring songs from across their 25 year career. The recordings showcase the Scottish septet at the height of their power during their 2019 tour, including tracks performed on the band's own Mediterranean cruise, "The Boaty Weekender."

Bob Dylan revolutionized both rock and folk music with his 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited. Dylan not only changed his sound, but his image as well. The album includes one of his biggest hits, Like a Rolling Stone.

Greatest Hits is a compilation released by American hip-hop trio that was released on March 25, 2003. The album features the majority of the group's singles discography and some fan favorites.

Axis: Bold as Love is the second studio album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. it released in 1967, only seven months after the release of the group's highly successful debut album, Are You Experienced. It has been described as "a vital album, containing some of rock's molten milestones."

In 1971, British rock group The Kinks signed with RCA Records. This freed the group to explore more personal album styles. This is the first album they released with the new record label.

Frontman Kurt Cobain sought to make music outside the restrictive confines of the Seattle grunge scene, drawing influence from groups such as the Pixies and their use of "loud/quiet" dynamics. It is their first album to feature drummer Dave Grohl. Despite low commercial expectations by the band and it's record label, Nevermind became a surprise success in late 1991, largely due to the popularity of it's first single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit". 

Quarantine The Past: The Best Of Pavement comes out on March 9, 2010. This fully remastered 23-track compilation will be available on MID-PRICED double LP, CD and digital album formats. The tracks span the entirety of Pavement's career from 1989 to 1999, from the scratchy and mysterious sounds of their early vinyl-only releases to the rich, multilayered warmth of their final recordings. Although the compilation does not include any unreleased material, it definitely digs deeper than the hits.

Pearl Jam's classic 1994 album was remastered and now includes three bonus tracks. Features the hits Better Man and Immortality.

Filled with one classic track after another, this hugely influential album offers a glimpse into what was to come from Public Enemy. The 16-track album features a fresh and modern sound.