Sex, Drugs, Rock 'n' Roll, and . . . Ham Sandwiches?

If you are a music fan, you may be aware of some of music's most enduring mysteries. Where did Pearl Jam get their name? Are the White Stripes related by blood or by marriage? Did Mama Cass really die from choking on a ham sandwich? Gavin Edwards has heard just about every strange question, racy rumor, and legend of the music world. As the writer of Rolling Stone's "Rolling Stone Knows" column, Edwards proved himself as a one-man encyclopedia of music trivia. Now he shares all of his knowledge with you. Look inside to find the...

In the decades immediately following the French Revolution, British writers saw the narrative ordering of experience as either superficial, dangerous or impossible. Linking storytelling to other forms of social action, including the making of contracts and promises, Gavin Edwards argues that the experience of radical social upheaval produced a widespread scepticism about narrative as linguistic artefact, the transmission of narrative through storytelling and the understanding of individual or collective life as a temporal sequence with a beginning and an end.