This is the first fully researched in depth biography to appear of this seminal figure, and in it Mike Barnes gives equal weight to Don Van Vliet''s second career as a successful and highly collectable fine artist.'

Captain Beefheart

Barnes, Mike

Biographies & Memoirs

Quartet Books

The unclassifiable music of Don Van Vliet―alias Captain Beefheart―and his departure from performing in the 80s have mystified fans and followers for years, and kept the rumor mills busy. Mike Barnes' Captain Beefheart: The Biography puts those rumors to rest as it tells the strange but true tale of a musical genius and his otherworldly odyssey from the California desert to stages and studios across the world.Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band arrived in the public consciousness in 1969 with the two-album set Trout Mask Replica, eventually praised by Rolling Stone as one of the best records of all time. Distilling a new audio experience from blues, psychedelic rock, and free jazz, the Captain and his band went on to confound journalists, intrigue reviewers, and amaze listeners with a decade and a half of albums and performances. Yet after recording his final album Ice Cream for Crow in 1982, Beefheart left music to begin a successful career as an internationally exhibited painter. His reluctance to give interviews has only enhanced the Captain Beefheart mystique.For his thoroughly researched biography of Beefheart, journalist Mike Barnes interviewed friends, acolytes, and members of the Magic Band to get the full story of Beefheart's collaborations and conflicts with kindred spirit Frank Zappa, his 're-education' of the members of the Magic Band, and the legal battles that kept the album Bat Chain Puller from ever being released. Barnes' biography illuminates the enigmatic artist, and brings the reader to an understanding of his creative drive.Previously published only in the U. K., the U. S. edition of Captain Beefheart: The Biography contains new material and new photographs.

Captain Beefheart: The Biography

Humor & Entertainment

Cooper Square Press

Barnes's newest collection of short stories is lively, sharp and curious, spanning the continent and delving into the flaws and foibles of a vast array of characters. `Mike Barnes brings to Aquarium a deceptively relaxed precision and a grown-up acceptance of puzzlement as a natural state of mind.'

Aquarium

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Porcupine's Quill

In stories of stark passion and haunting trauma, Contrary Angel finds an acute clarity in those moments when human desires meet the sorcery of the world. The stories are exuberantly diverse in both subject matter and technique, as evidenced by a few of their titles: `Urchipelago', `Karaoke Mon Amour', `Cogagwee', `Do Not Stand Outside the Grande Restaurant.' They take us from the brilliant career of the runner Tom Longboat to the comic machinations of a peeping Tom landlord. The final four-story sequence, `Doctors', follows an Egypt-obsessed girl from a savage childhood incident through her `running' years as an athlete, traveller, wife and doctor, culminating in a devastating encounter in an operating room in the middle of the night.
Stories from Contrary Angel have appeared twice in The Journey Anthology, twice in Best Canadian Stories, and won the Silver Medal at the National Magazine Awards.

Contrary Angel

The poems in Calm Jazz Sea>/i> reveal a world forever becoming and disappearing, watched over and handled gently by the compassionate intelligence of Mike Barnes. In the everyday and the ephemeral meals, drinks, weather, work, moments of solitude or connection he finds ways to engage the secret matter of humanity: what horrifies, astonishes, or comforts us. Like the sea of the title, restless and receptive, the language of the poems moves through many levels of voice: from an easy vernacular to the strain of conversation, or from the precise record of sensual matter to the insubstantial gestures that constitute thought. SHORTLISTED for the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award.

Calm Jazz Sea

Poetry

Brick Books

Shooting Made Easy

An instructional work devoted to clay pigeon shooting, featuring step-by-step illustrations and presenting advice on mastering the sport.

Sports & Outdoors

Reynolds, Mike

Hunting & Fishing

The Crowood Press Ltd.

It is 1984. The latest recession is said to be over, and in the steel city of Hamilton, things are picking up. For Paul, however, an ex-rock guitarist and current art gallery attendant, life has slowed to the pace of a still life on a wall. He badly needs a jolt -- and he gets one. Soon after the arrival of an exhibition of Surrealist art, puzzles start to multiply around him. Before long, he is trying to find his way in a maze that includes a chess problem, violent death, Paul Klee, cocaine, bikers, a strip club and its art-patron owner, and a host of clashing egos and agendas in the gallery. And then there is Claudia, a young artist with a quick brush and a caustic tongue, who may know more than she is saying about the mysteries Paul is chasing. Catalogue Raisonné is a novel about the mystery of art and the art of mystery, and the power of both to awaken sleeping senses.

Catalogue Raisonne

Literary

Biblioasis

"Fiercely alive, marked by a sharp, unerring eye for detail and a wonderful way with metaphors."—Toronto Star 
At a psychiatric hospital in the eighties, patients formed what they called The Adjustment League to protect themselves against the depredations of a corrupt and abusive staff. Many years later, the leader of this group—a man known only as "The Super"— receives a letter leading to the discovery of a pornographic ring in need of "adjustment."
Mike Barnes is the author of eight previous books. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he lives and writes in Toronto, Ontario.

The Adjustment League

United States

"In a dark time," wrote Theodore Roethke, "the eye begins to see"―and with Braille Rainbow, Mike Barnes reveals both darkness and the light that shines beyond it. Beginning with a suite of poems completed before and immediately following his admission to a psychiatric unit as a young man, Barnes's quiet lyricism and formal sensitivity capture those moments of perception that remind us how to see.

Braille Rainbow: poems

SHORTLISTED FOR THE TORONTO BOOK AWARD AS SEEN ON GLOBAL NEWS TV'S THE MORNING SHOW A CBC CANADIAN BOOK TO READ FOR MENTAL HEALTH WEEK Drawing on the author’s seven years of caring for his mother through Alzheimer’s, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver is what its title promises: four dispatches to an anonymous long-term caregiver. In brief passages that cast fresh light on what it means to live with dementia, Barnes shares trials, insights, solace―and, ultimately, inspiration.
 Meant to be a companion in waiting rooms, on bus routes, or while a loved one naps, Be With is a dippable source of clarity for harried readers who might only have time for a few lines or paragraphs. Mike Barnes writes with sensitivity and grace about fellowship, responsibility, and joyful relatedness―what it means to simply be with the people that we love.

Be With: Letters to a Caregiver

Essays & Correspondence

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Barnes, Mike. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Barnes, Mike