Mid-life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America with Three Chords and an Attitude - Hardcover

Stephen King; Amy Tan; Roy Blount; Ridley Pearson; Dave Barry; Barbara Kingsolver; Al Kooper; Robert Fulghum; Kathi Goldmark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670852341 ISBN 13: 9780670852345

Publisher: Viking, 1994

Synopsis

A crazy chronicle, in words and mostly embarrassing pictures, describes a road trip with fifteen of America's most popular writers, who leave their jobs to hit the road--on a bus--as a performing rock and roll band. 75,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo.

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen King, the world's bestselling novelist, was educated at the University of Maine at Orono. He lives with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King, and their children in Bangor, Maine.
Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, The Opposite of Fate, Saving Fish from Drowning, and two children’s books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which has been adapted as Sagwa, a PBS series for children. Tan was also the co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club, and her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Tan, who has a master’s degree in linguistics from San Jose University, has worked as a language specialist to programs serving children with developmental disabilities. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.

Roy Blount, Jr., grew up in Georgia and served in the army before becoming a celebrated humorist and cultural journalist. He has written for magazines as diverse as Sports Illustrated and The New York Review of Books and is the author of numerous books that include his recent memoir Be Sweet.

Ridley Pearson is the author of more than twenty novels, including the New York Times bestseller Killer Weekend; the Lou Boldt crime series; and many books for young readers, including the award-winning children's novels Peter and the Starcatchers, Peter and the Shadow Thieves, and Peter and the Secret of Rundoon, which he cowrote with Dave Barry. Pearson lives with his wife and two daughters, dividing their time between Missouri and Idaho.

From Publishers Weekly:

The Rock Bottom Remainders, a group of celebrated writers smitten with rock 'n' roll glamour, gladly submitted when independent publicist Kathi Karmen Goldmark conceived the idea of forming a literary rock band to perform at the 1992 American Booksellers Association convention in Anaheim. The band members--including Dave Barry, Matt Groening, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver and Amy Tan--had so much fun with that gig that they decided to take their show on the road, playing clubs from Boston to Miami on a jaunt financed by the advance on this book. Each writer/rocker contributed an article on "what being in a band has meant to me." Their various musings, ranging from the comic to the portentous, straddle the line between the charming and the pompous. The Remainders lapse at times into cliches and stereotypes--i.e., that "real" rockers are illiterate--which make them sound like frat boys and sorority sisters slumming. But even if this project is nakedly self-indulgent, for the most part it is self-aware. And Barry's and Groening's reflections are better than that--hilarious.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0670852341
• ISBN 13: 9780670852345
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 222
• Editor: Dave Marsh