New Releases by John Waters

A very John Waters traveling show, replete with freaks, robbery, murder, sex, blasphemy, and savage shellfish—a lurid, surreal celebration of camp and trash. The Cavalcade of Perversion is a traveling show run by Lady Divine and a crew of her fellow degenerates. They have to drag suburban housewives into each vile, tasteless performance—only to rob them at gunpoint at the end of each show. When Divine gets bored of the routine and graduates to murdering the attendees one day, it sets her off on a rampage, hunting down her cheating lover, Mr. David, and unleashing a chain of frenzy, a truly blasphemous sex act, and a surreal violation by a giant lobster. Multiple Maniacs is John Waters’ paean to the glories of trash. As Lady Divine chants as she marches proudly into downtown Baltimore at the end of the movie, “I’m a maniac! A maniac that cannot be cured! O Divine, I am Di-vine!”

A feel-good fable and an enduring critique of conformity told with true John Waters flair. Tracy Turnblad, a spunky, full-figured Baltimore teen, wants nothing more than to be a featured dancer on The Corny Collins Show. So when she gets chosen to be on the air, it seems like all her dreams are about to come true. But when she and some of the Black cast of the show try to integrate the segregated dancing, things take on a life of their own. A sweet, hopeful parable about the dangers of conformity and segregation, Hairspray is perhaps the one optimistic entry in John Waters’ shocking and delightfully deranged oeuvre. Both a clear-eyed social critique and a celebration of the dizzying aesthetics of Baltimore in the early 1960s, this is another, softer side to the essential John Waters.

“Burroughs famously dubbed Waters the Pope of Trash. Female Trouble, we might say, is his Summa Trashologica.” —Ed Halter, The Criterion Collection It all goes to hell when Baltimore bad girl Dawn Davenport doesn’t get the cha-cha heels she’s been demanding for Christmas. In this hilarious, irreverent, pyrotechnic melee of high-trash hijinks, Dawn ruins Christmas, skips town, and embarks on a wild ride that involves hitchhiking, robbery, murder, pregnancy—and, of course, modeling and glamour, too. The second installment of John Waters’ classic Trash Trilogy, Female Trouble explodes conventional norms of good behavior (and art) and is all the proof you’ll ever need that sometimes being bad can feel so, so very good.

A grotesque and hilarious satire about the American dream, suburban living, and the corrupting influence of power, set in a world that could only have sprung from the unhinged and brilliant mind of John Waters. On the verge of a suburban mental health crisis, frazzled and wildly unstable housewife Peggy (immortalized by Mink Stole on-screen) runs away from home with her maid and partner in crime, Grizelda (played with spectacular gumption by the sizzling Jean Hill), only to end up in Mortville, a shantytown filled with society’s rejects. Mortville is run by the evil Queen Carlotta, who parades through the cardboard streets taunting and terrorizing her subjects. John Waters’ wild and visionary fable lampoons everything from the staid conservatism of the American dream to race and class relations. The New York Times ranked Desperate Living at “the highest peak atop [John Waters’] trash heap of a filmography.” High praise indeed!

The return of a spectacular, reviled, and iconic classic of American filth! John Waters takes us back to the scene of his original crime against good taste. Watch as Babs Johnson fights to hold on to her title as “Filthiest Person Alive,“ fending off the craven attempts to dethrone her by her nemeses Connie and Raymond Marble. Read along as Waters takes us on a romp through his camp and filthy vision of Baltimore, from nefarious baby-stealing lesbians to scenes of unspeakable things done to unsuspecting chickens, to the film’s iconic and revolting coup de grace (no spoilers, but it is just as stomach-churning on the page more than fifty years later!). Pink Flamingos is John Waters at his provocative, disgusting, piety-puncturing best, with the hellish and hilarious trash masterpiece that first made him a household name.

One part of John Waters’ iconic Trash Trilogy, Flamingos Forever is a dark-comedy screenplay about a drag queen trying to retain her title of “Filthiest Person in the World.” Fifteen years after the events of Pink Flamingos, Babs Johnson returns to Baltimore from a life spent largely in bus station lavatories, only to find that she once again has to fight for the right to claim the title of “World’s Filthiest Person.” Her nemesis Connie Marble’s sister, Vera Venninger, and her necrophiliac husband, Wilbur, are in her way. So begins a new battle of filth. This raucous, filthy—and essential!—volume in John Waters’ oeuvre never made it to the screen, so this is readers’ and his legions of fans’ one chance to see how this ghastly and irreverent saga meets its end!

From an icon of popular culture, here is inspiring advice for artists, graduates, and all who seek happiness and success on their own terms. So what if you have talent? Then what? When John Waters delivered his gleefully subversive advice to the graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, the speech went viral, in part because it was so brilliantly on point about making a living as a creative person. Now we can all enjoy his sly wisdom in a manifesto that reminds us, no matter what field we choose, to embrace chaos, be nosy, and outrage our critics. Anyone embarking on a creative path, he tells us, would do well to realize that pragmatism and discipline are as important as talent and that rejection is nothing to fear. Waters advises young people to eavesdrop, listen to their enemies, and horrify us with new ideas. In other words, MAKE TROUBLE! Illustrated with slightly demented line drawings by Eric Hanson, Make Trouble is a one-of-a-kind gift, the perfect playbook for gaming the system by making the system work for you.

This book may become to the reality of the past five years what Winston Smith''s diary proposed it might become within the fictional world of 1984. It is intended, first of all, as a permanent record of events that only a few comprehended - in the depths of their meanings and significance - while they were happening; a book - as Winston said - ''For the future, for the unborn''. In that future it may be hard to persuade people that what happened from the spring of 2020 really did happen. Either the past will have been erased to such an extent that no one will know human liberty ever existed, or else a revolution of human consciousness will make it improbable that human beings could ever have so easily been duped into surrendering the rights and freedoms their ancestors had won in blood. A fake pandemic was the signal that one morning began the foreclosure on everything that had, until the evening before, been axiomatically central to the idea of liberal, democratic, constitutional republics. The most shocking thing was not so much that this started to happen, but that almost no one seemed to object to it happening; almost no one sought to cite or defend the rights and liberties being overturned. Liberals fell silent; leftists joined in the clamouring for more and more tyranny. In The Abolition of Reality, John Waters describes not just what happened but the meaning of what happened, in the course of what may well be judged by history - if there is a historiographical record of the times to come - as the most heinous crime of all time. About the Author JOHN WATERS (b. 1955) Having started his career in 1981 with the Irish Music journal Hot Press, John Waters was a columnist with The Irish Times between 1990 and 2014. His first book, Jiving at the Crossroads (1991) became a massive best-seller. He went on to write and publish nine other books, including An Intelligent Person''s Guide to Modern Ireland (Duckworth, 1997), Was it for this? Why Ireland lost the plot (Transworld Ireland, 2012) and Give Us Back the Bad Roads (Currach Press, 2018). He has written a number of plays for stage and radio and contributed to the American magazine First Things and the British magazine The Spectator. Since September 2020, he has been publishing his work twice weekly on Substack, via his newsletter/website John Waters Unchained. The Abolition of Reality is his eleventh book.

Menteuse invétérée, voleuse pathologique, arnaqueuse de génie : Marsha Sprinkle ne compte plus ses ennemis. Certains sont bien déterminés à lui régler son compte et lui faire ravaler ses bobards. À commencer par sa mère et sa fille, son ex-complice lubrique Daryl et une sautillante bande d’hurluberlus, fétichistes du trampoline, tous lancés à ses trousses dans une rocambolesque et décadente course-poursuite à travers le Nord-Est des Etats-Unis. Mais Marsha est intelligente, incroyablement fourbe et celui qui l’attrapera n’est pas encore né ! Le légendaire John Waters signe un premier roman à son image : hilarant, outrancier, déjanté, pervers, choquant. Tout simplement culte.

A hilariously filthy tale of sex, crime, and family dysfunction from the brilliantly twisted mind of John Waters, the legendary filmmaker and bestselling author of Mr. Know-It-All. Marsha Sprinkle: Suitcase thief. Scammer. Master of disguise. Dogs and children hate her. Her own family wants her dead. She’s smart, she’s desperate, she’s disturbed, and she’s on the run with a big chip on her shoulder. They call her Liarmouth—until one insane man makes her tell the truth. Liarmouth, the first novel by John Waters, is a perfectly perverted “feel-bad romance,” and the reader will thrill to hop aboard this delirious road trip of riotous revenge.

Cry-Baby avec Johnny Depp dans un de ses premiers rôles ? C’est lui. Serial Mother mettant en scène une Kathleen Turner en mère tueuse sur fond pastel ? Lui encore. Pink Flamingos avec l’iconique drag-queen Divine ? Vous avez deviné, c’est lui aussi. À 74 ans, John Waters, le “Pape du trash”, revient avec un récit à mi-chemin entre mémoires et livre de conseils dévoyés regorgeant d’anecdotes de tournage et d’expériences personnelles, d’hommages et d’exercices d’admiration (Warhol ; Pasolini ; Tina Turner ; Patty Hearst...), d’humour irrévérencieux et de punchlines ravageuses.

No one knows more about everything—especially everything rude, clever, and offensively compelling—than John Waters. The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and A Dirty Shame, is one of the world’s great sophisticates, and in Mr. Know-It-All he serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood; how to develop musical taste, from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas; how to build a home so ugly and trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and yes, how to cheat death itself. Through it all, Waters swears by one undeniable truth: “Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous. None at all.” Studded with cameos, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst, and Tracey Ullman, and illustrated with unseen photos from the author''s personal collection, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters’ most hypnotically readable, upsetting, revelatory book—another instant Waters classic. “Waters doesn’t kowtow to the received wisdom, he flips it the bird . . . [Waters] has the ability to show humanity at its most ridiculous and make that funny rather than repellent.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “Carsick becomes a portrait not just of America’s desolate freeway nodes—though they’re brilliantly evoked—but of American fame itself.” —Lawrence Osborne, The New York Times Book Review

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It Wasn''t Work - Memoir

The center of conversation during coffee breaks around office watercoolers, at bars and restaurants, on talk shows and in newspapers, is the FBI''s number three national priority only after terrorism and counterintelligence - computer crime. A firestorm unlike any other in Internet history has suddenly erupted and is sending a shockwave across the globe with no end on the horizon in the foreseeable future. ENTER CENTER STAGE: Secret Circle, a novel based on these current real-life events. Grant and his crew discover a secret brotherhood operating under the color of authority within the highest level of the federal government, but not before Grant himself becomes the target of the secret circle that will use all their power to stop him - dead. Proving his client is not a master criminal within a worldwide syndicate involved in extortion, fraud, money laundering, and murder, catapults Grant into the midst of the secret circle, whose members are as cunning as they are formidable. Grant''s run-of-the-mill case soon leads to dangerous discoveries, woven into a vile whirlpool of criminality far beyond conspiracy theories that only Judith Osborne, the Attorney General of the United States, can stop before his last chance of clearing his longtime friend Kyle Miller of the multi-count federal indictment is ripped away. Now with only days remaining to prove Miller is innocent, Grant and the Attorney General are hurled into a chase of surprising jeopardy, and toward the volatile reality about the secret circle''s identity. They quickly learn that even though the secret brotherhood has self-issued "special get-outta-jail-cards" there are systematic master plans even murder can''t hide. After matching wits with the brethren for weeks, their menacing plot and skillfully disguised internal hierarchy of soldiers, captains and the don crystallize for Grant and the Attorney General.

Another Agenda? Those words conjure scenes of warped fairness, biased equity, grotesque frame-ups, stacked juries, prearranged courses of actions and events. Everyone deals with the day-to-day incidents and experiences of their lives, rarely speculating whether if what occurs is somehow being controlled or created by outside forces. Like the rest of us, Grant Westmore never wondered if there was an elite group of masterminds out there mysteriously plotting against him and his friends. Until one night when Rob Moretti placed a collect call from a federal prison in California to Grant, one of Rob''s oldest friends. How did Rob, an ordinary citizen on the verge of success in his life, become the target of this meritocracy? Why, in the eyes of the secret society controlling his fate, did he have to be brought down by an illegal federal prosecution and incarceration? Another Agenda reveals how the evil activities of a self-appointed and pontifical influential cabal, driven by power and greed, surreptitiously operated for decades completely above the law. In most cases, its tampering effect crystallized into the most monumental fall in anyone''s lifetime - a fall that would essentially be impossible to recover from. Another Agenda chronicles the crusade to keep Rob alive so he can see his most precious dream of raising his daughter come true, and so he can accomplish his critical mission of protecting the world from cyber-attacks. Finally, Grant''s maverick crew try to persuade the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America to reverse the white-collar criminal case against Rob Moretti before it''s too late. Will the White House endorse the Attorney General''s plan to see true justice prevail, and can that plan work before there''s an assassination at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Mom. Apple pie. The flag. Red, white, and blue. The White House. Is anything sacred or safe? You''ll truly find the answer to those questions in ... Another Agenda.

The Westmore Justice Franchise is a series so far beyond the characterization of unique that it is singular. Westmore Justice is a provocative blueprint for unearthing criminal activities that profoundly alter the balance of a human life - activities that at the time have no particular importance, but when pieced together crystallize into a web of intrigue. From the sunny beaches of Malibu, California, to the corridors of power in Washington, DC, Westmore Justice exposes the kind of truths where countless careers are ruined and many lifetimes wasted. As the clues unfold, Grant Westmore goes with gut intuition and hunches, and not by standard police procedures. A former LAPD detective-turned-Beverly Hills-private-investigator, Grant hasn''t come this far without learning that to catch a killer you have to think like one. As a team, Grant, Marlene Wilson and Carmela Gambini do more than they ever achieved alone. No stranger to wrestling problems head-on, they fight their way through each fiendish scheme, fitting the many jagged fragments into a single, appalling truth, while they cross paths with unscrupulous prosecutors, crime lords, savvy impostors, murderers, and adulterers. In each mystery, Grant and his crew struggle to make what they know to be the truth prevail against swelling and unsettling evidence to the contrary as a Pandora''s Box of crime, legal trickery, and deception slowly opens before their eyes - eyes that never look the other way and usually reveal less than what the guilty hope for. Make no mistake about it, Grant did not grow up the heir apparent to any family fortune. He is proud to have earned his financial rank himself, by toiling hard to build an enviable roster of high-profile criminal defense attorney clients and unjustly prosecuted individuals, unwilling to settle for anything but the truth. Although life is ever-changing, one often says, "nothing like that could ever happen to me." Well, it can and it does in Westmore Justice.

The center of conversation during coffee breaks around office water coolers, at bars and restaurants, on talk shows and in newspapers, is the FBI''s number three national priority only after terrorism and counterintelligence - computer crime. Grant Westmore discovers a secret brotherhood operating under the color of authority within the highest level of the federal government, but not before Grant himself becomes the target of the secret circle that will use all their power to stop him - dead. Proving his client is not a master criminal within a worldwide syndicate involved in extortion, fraud, money laundering, and murder, catapults Grant into the midst of the secret circle, whose members are as cunning as they are formidable. Grant''s run-of-the-mill case soon leads to dangerous discoveries, woven into a vile whirlpool of criminality far beyond conspiracy theories that only Judith Osborne, the Attorney General of the United States, can stop before his last chance of clearing his longtime friend Kyle Miller of the multi-count federal indictment is ripped away. Now with only days remaining to prove Miller is innocent, Grant and the Attorney General are hurled into a chase of surprising jeopardy, and toward the volatile reality about the secret circle''s true identity. In the end, and without warning the unthinkable occurs in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles, as Grant and the Attorney General are about to perform one of the most incredible stings in American judicial history. Regrettably, His Honor will never see the final chapter close in each of the brethren''s personal world as the secret circle is finally decapitated.

Using a blend of reality and fiction, Privilege is a ripped-from-the-headlines slice into the ever evolving, and sometimes finicky, world of privilege, where reality is pushed to the point of no return, and some stars go to jail, some die from their excesses, or merely fade away.Accidentally launched into superstardom when her estranged co-star leaked some sleazy sex photos of the two of them to the public via Facebook, billionaire heiress Allie Dolanne is at the top of the paparazzi A-list. Talk about dumb luck. Like it or not, the self-proclaimed iconic redhead is an entity the world can''t escape.With the paparazzi in their speed dial, and trumping world news, Allie and her Best Friends Forever celebutantes, singer-actress-starlet Lara Tait, once-cute kid star Sheli Lange, and fashion model-actress-singer Kela Ryan, Allie and her singer-starlet sister Tary, feed the celebrity gossip tabloids and Internet sites daily with one shocking shenanigan after the other.Captured on film by a prominent paparazzo, an unexpected sexual indiscretion between two of the BFFs forever changes their lives. This leads Grant Westmore to the breakthrough discovery of a blackmail plot by the paparazzo and his adult film goddess wife, and that there''s a serial killer on the loose in Tinseltown.Grant Westmore mixes the intuitive spirit of the beloved sleuths of classic detective tales with the irony, wit and creativity of a postmodern private eye in Tinseltown. In this gripping mystery, Grant struggles to make what they know to be the truths prevail as a Pandora''s box of crime, trickery, and deception under the color of privilege slowly opens before his eyes.

C''est en 1998, avec The Art of Pleasure, que TASCHEN a fait découvrir au monde l''art remarquable de Touko Laaksonen. Avant cela, Laaksonen, alias Tom of Finland, artiste culte de la communauté gay internationale, était pratiquement inconnu du grand public. En 2009, TASCHEN poursuit l''entreprise avec l''ouvrage ultime retraçant l''oeuvre de Tom, Tom of Finland XXL, une magnifique édition collector grand format réunissant plus de 1000 illustrations et couvrant soixante ans de carrière de l''artiste. Son oeuvre a été réuni avec l''aide de la Tom of Finland Foundation, à partir de collections conservées aux Etats-Unis et en Europe, et comporte de nombreux dessins, peintures et études préparatoires qui n''avaient encore jamais été publiés. D''autres n''avaient jusqu''alors été vus qu''isolément et sont montrés ici dans l''ordre séquentiel prévu par Tom, gagnant ainsi toute leur valeur artistique et leur charge érotique. Cet élégant volume grand format présente toute l''étendue du talent de Tom, de ses portraits sensibles à ses descriptions explicites du plaisir sexuel et à ses hommages pleins de tendresse rendus aux jeunes hommes emportés par le sida, et il inclut, en complément, huit essais écrits pour l''occasion par Camille Paglia, John Waters, Armistead Maupin, Todd Oldham, entre autres, qui reviennent sur l''influence sociale et personnelle de Tom, ainsi qu''une étude approfondie de ses dessins par l''historien d''art Edward Lucie-Smith. Jusqu''à maintenant, la seule chose qui manquait à Tom of Finland XXL était un prix accessible au plus grand nombre. Le nouveau Tom of Finland XXL est toujours aussi gros, fera autant travailler vos biceps et reprend tout du contenu original, mais ne coûte qu''une fraction du prix d''origine. Il vous souhaite la bienvenue.

Utilizing and effectively employing the power of your mind and your brain are essential prerequisites for achieving anything great in life. However, when it comes to the development of their own mind power or brain power many people are clueless. They are not even aware that they possess the means of changing their brain''s circuitry through neuroplasticity based techniques. Neuroplasticity or brain plasticity refers to the brain''s ability to change and adapt as a result of experience. The brain actually has the ability to reorganize itself by creating new neural pathways. So how do you go about increasing your mind power as well as your brain power so that they are both operating at an optimal level In his book entitled Mind Power: The Never Revealed Secret Ways To Achieve Greatness Using Mind Mastery And Neuroplasticity author John Waters shows you exactly how. He gives you a thorough understanding of how your brain functions and provides you with the tricks you need to achieve your greatest self-whether that be your most creative, attractive, intelligent, intuitive, or athletic side.

No Marketing Blurb

"John Waters hitchhikes across America"--Dust jacket cover.

Ireland today stands at a defining moment. The prosperity of the Celtic Tiger years has given way to the sudden crash, the turbulence of the euro crisis, and the loss of our sovereignty to the faceless technocrats of Europe and the IMF. Our leaders seem impotent and rage, bewilderment and despair have swept through Irish society. Was It For This...? delves into the Irish psyche to answer the questions: What happened to our hopes and dreams? What is at the heart of the sense of betrayal that we feel? In the rush to modernity, did we throw away everything of true value? Have we lost the ideals of nationhood and patriotism set out by those who dreamt of the Irish Republic? John Waters’ remarkable new book sweeps through the pages of our recent history to get to the heart our political, social and existential identity crisis. Ranging across a vast canvas, Was It For This...? argues that the Celtic Tiger was built on a collective delusion, and that the seeds of its destruction were sown many years before it even began, when we exchanged our colonial shackles for a no-less destructive dependency for short-term gain. Ireland’s sovereignty was given up long before the IMF came to town. Along the way, Waters ponders our love/hate relationship with Fianna Fáil; the undercurrents that ran through the 2011 presidential election; why our political leaders and commentators have clung onto the remnants of 1960s revolutionary fervour long after the revolution was won; how our denial of an authoritative father figure has led to a leaderless ‘sibling society’; the emptiness of our ‘youth culture’ and the suppression of real thought and discussion through cynicism and irony; and why we have lost the very language that once enabled us to speak of ‘Ireland’ with pride.

In 1991, Ireland was in the midst of a devastating recession; thousands of young Irish men and women had emigrated over the previous decade, and divisive social and moral debates on abortion and divorce had rocked Irish society. The great pillars of society - politics and religion - were beginning to crumble, a process that continued in subsequent years as both institutions were hit by scandal. A questioning of the values on which Ireland had been built had begun, with an apparently unbridgeable divide opening between "traditionalists" and "modernizers". At the start of the decade, the modernizers appeared to have won, with the election as President of the iconic Mary Robinson. Irish Times columnist John Waters captured the zeitgeist of the time with the hugely successful Jiving at the Crossroads, which sold over 50,000 copies. A defining book of the era, its success was partly due to its remarkable blending of social/cultural commentary with personal memoir. At the emotional core of the book was the relationship between John and his father, and the story of Ireland was intricately woven into this powerful narrative. It was the first in a long line of books to question the very notion of modern Irish identity, and to examine the deep-rooted tensions at the heart of the Irish psyche. Twenty years later, much has changed in Ireland, and yet Jiving at the Crossroads remains a deeply resonant book, particularly in the light of the remarkable rise and precipitous fall of the Celtic Tiger, and the fresh questioning of how we got where we are now. This twentieth anniversary reissue of a landmark book, with a new Afterword, will be welcomed by those who remember it, and will be a fascinating insight for a new generation of Irish people.

Which 50 People turned Ireland into the fecked-up country she is today? Bono? Haughey? Louis Walsh? de Valera? It''s time to name and shame the great, the good and the gobshites... Conventional wisdom has it that Ireland, after a violent and tragic history, had began to get things right. But when the ill wind of recession cruelly snatched that self-satisfied achievement away, it all seemed like exceedingly back luck. In his 50 brilliantly acerbic portraits Waters reveals a consistent pattern of self-delusion, myopia, inferiority complex, bravado, defeatism, cynicism, sentimentalism and conceit. He traces Ireland''s story from the paranoid insularism and cultural myopia that followed national Independence, though the post-Sixties obsession with a faux ''self-confidence'', to the final, salutary meltdown of the Celtic Tiger, and strangely lacking either Celts or tigers. Once among the oldest civilization in Europe, Ireland has ended up as a second-rate version of the England it tried to discard. It threw out not merely the bathwater and the baby, but also the bathtub, the sponge and the rubber duck...

In 1991, Ireland was in the midst of a devastating recession; thousands of young Irish men and women had emigrated over the previous decade, and divisive social and moral debates on abortion and divorce had rocked Irish society. The great pillars of society - politics and religion - were beginning to crumble, a process that continued in subsequent years as both institutions were hit by scandal. A questioning of the values on which Ireland had been built had begun, with an apparently unbridgeable divide opening between "traditionalists" and "modernizers". At the start of the decade, the modernizers appeared to have won, with the election as President of the iconic Mary Robinson. Irish Times columnist John Waters captured the zeitgeist of the time with the hugely successful Jiving at the Crossroads, which sold over 50,000 copies. A defining book of the era, its success was partly due to its remarkable blending of social/cultural commentary with personal memoir. At the emotional core of the book was the relationship between Waters and his father, and the story of Ireland was intricately woven into this powerful narrative. It was the first in a long line of books to question the very notion of modern Irish identity, and to examine the deep-rooted tensions at the heart of the Irish psyche. Twenty years later, much has changed in Ireland, and yet Jiving at the Crossroads remains a deeply resonant book, particularly in the light of the remarkable rise and precipitous fall of the Celtic Tiger, and the fresh questioning of how we got where we are now. This twentieth anniversary reissue of a landmark book, with a new Introduction, will be welcomed by those who remember it, and will be a fascinating insight for a new generation of Irish people. It is published in parallel with a brand new book by John Waters, When We Are Free, which takes up the story of Jiving twenty years on to reflect on Ireland and the Irish in 2011.