Veteran music critic Dave Thompson’s angry little book is a sometimes mystifying, often hilarious journey through “rock’n’roll…not rock AND roll…or rock & roll” from the late ’60s to the mid-’70s.

For many ’90s music fans, Blind Melon represented much more than just “No Rain” and the Bee Girl that propelled the band to fame.

From its shoestring beginnings as an online zine riddled by runaway word counts and ostentatious, themed reviews, Pitchfork Media has emerged as arguably the preeminent music criticism source of its time while fashioning itself into a multimedia powerhouse, with an empire that includes a major music festival, an online TV station, and now a book, The Pitchfork 500, a hefty slab of text in the same vein of Rolling Stone’s many bathroom readers.

Sleevefacing is where a person covers a part of his or her body with a record album cover, creating a larger picture beyond what the album art portrays.

After four books of nonfiction (including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs), Chuck Klosterman’s fiction debut can’t match the wit and cultural insight of his previous efforts.

Vertigo was founded in 1993 by Karen Berger. Taking a cue from the gritty superhero storylines of the ’80s, the new DC imprint prided itself in fashioning tales for mature readers.

Noel Hudson’s The Band Name Book is a playful encyclopedia of the etymology of thousands of band names from all over the world, from the popular to the obscure.

Julian Cope, Britain’s self-adorned “visionary rock musician and musicologist, hip archaeologist and one-time frontman of the Teardrop Explodes,” doesn’t write books for the laid-back music fan.