"Opal is a fiercely independent young woman pushing against the grain in her style and attitude, Afro-punk before that term existed. Coming of age in Detroit, she can't imagine settling for a 9-to-5 job--despite her unusual looks, Opal believes she can be a star. So when the aspiring British singer/songwriter Neville Charles discovers her at a bar's amateur night, she takes him up on his offer to make rock music together for the fledgling Rivington...

"Set in the mid-1970s, Do What They Say or Else tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who lives with her working-class parents in a small town in Normandy"--

With dry wit and piercing observation, Beard writes about the relationship between two teenage girls in the 1970s--misfits whose friendship is tested by their families' claims on them, by a clique of popular girls, and by the first startling, subversive intimations of womanhood.

A portrait of a young girl in the glorious wasteland of 1990s Los Angeles, Fade Into You recalls the hormonal haze and urgency of adolescence. High school junior Nikki Darling alternates between cutting class and getting high, falling into drugs, crushes, and counterculture to figure out how she fits into the world. Running increasingly wild with other angst-ridden outcasts, she pushes herself to the edge only to find herself trapped in the cyclical...

"A poignant and hilarious oral history of a (fictitious) musical phenomenon. Celebrated music critic and cultural historian David Hajdu unravels the mystery of a one of-a-kind artist, a pianist with a rare neurological condition that enables her to make music that is nothing less than pure, unmediated emotional expression. Her name is Adrianne Geffel, praised as 'the Geyser of Grand Street' and the 'Queen of Bleak Chic'. Yet despite her renown, she...

The year is 1969, and the Bayleen Island Folk Fest is abuzz with one name: Jesse Reid. Jesse Reid's intricate guitar riffs and supple baritone are poised to tip from fame to legend with this one headlining performance. That is, until his motorcycle crashes on the way to the show. Jane Quinn is a Bayleen Island local whose music flows as naturally as her long blond hair. When she and her bandmates are asked to play in Jesse Reid's place at the festival,...

"This debut novel takes place at the elite Seoul National University in 1970s South Korea during the final years of a repressive regime. The novel follows the fates of two women--Jisun, the daughter of a powerful tycoon, who eschews her privilege to become an underground labor activist in Seoul; and Namin, her best friend from childhood, a brilliant, tireless girl who has grown up with nothing, and whose singular goal is to launch herself and her...

But the unfinished King did contain a finished novella that Wallace had already considered publishing as a stand-alone volume. It is the story of a young man, a self-described "wastoid," adrift in the suburban Midwest of the 1970s, whose life is changed forever by an encounter with advanced tax law.

"The protagonists of these skillful and inventive stories have traveled various paths--from Japan to Brazil, L.A. to Gardena, San Francisco to Tokyo--but along the way, they have all become archivists, whether they know it or not. They examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high-school locker-room chatter, cart the contents of a household cross-country, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants....