Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music (American Music Series)

Arts & Photography

Nicolay, Franz

Music

University of Texas Press

In 2009, musician Franz Nicolay left his job in the Hold Steady, AKA "the world's greatest bar band." Over the next five years, he crossed the world with a guitar in one hand, a banjo in the other, and an accordion on his back, playing the anarcho-leftist squats and DIY spaces of the punk rock diaspora. He meets Polish artists nostalgic for their revolutionary days, Mongolian neo-Nazis in full SS regalia, and a gay expat in Ulaanbaatar who needs an armed escort between his home and his job. The Russian punk scene is thrust onto the international stage with the furor surrounding the arrest of the group Pussy Riot, and Ukrainians find themselves in the midst of a revolution and then a full-blown war. While engaging with the works of literary predecessors from Rebecca West to Chekhov and the nineteenth-century French aristocrat the Marquis de Custine, Nicolay explores the past and future of punk rock culture in the post-Communist world. An audacious debut from a vivid new voice, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control is an unforgettable, funny, and sharply drawn depiction of surprisingly robust hidden spaces tucked within faraway lands.

The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar

Tantor Audio

In 2009, musician Franz Nicolay left his job in the Hold Steady, AKA "the world's greatest bar band." Over the next five years, he crossed the world with a guitar in one hand, a banjo in the other, and an accordion on his back, playing the anarcho-leftist squats and DIY spaces of the punk rock diaspora. He meets Polish artists nostalgic for their revolutionary days, Mongolian neo-Nazis in full SS regalia, and a gay expat in Ulaanbaatar who needs an armed escort between his home and his job. The Russian punk scene is thrust onto the international stage with the furor surrounding the arrest of the group Pussy Riot, and Ukrainians find themselves in the midst of a revolution and then a full-blown war.    While engaging with the works of literary predecessors from Rebecca West to Chekhov and the nineteenth-century French aristocrat the Marquis de Custine, Nicolay explores the past and future of punk rock culture in the post-Communist world. An audacious debut from a vivid new voice, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control is an unforgettable, funny, and sharply drawn depiction of surprisingly robust hidden spaces tucked within faraway lands.

In 2009, musician Franz Nicolay left his job in the Hold Steady, aka “the world’s greatest bar band.” Over the next five years, he crossed the world with a guitar in one hand, a banjo in the other, and an accordion on his back, playing the anarcho-leftist squats and DIY spaces of the punk rock diaspora. He meets Polish artists nostalgic for their revolutionary days, Mongolian neo-Nazis in full SS regalia, and a gay expat in Ulaanbaatar who needs an armed escort between his home and his job. The Russian punk scene is thrust onto the international stage with the furor surrounding the arrest of the group Pussy Riot, and Ukrainians find themselves in the midst of a revolution and then a full-blown war.&gt; While engaging with the works of literary predecessors from Rebecca West to Chekhov and the nineteenth-century French aristocrat the Marquis de Custine, Nicolay explores the past and future of punk rock culture in the postcommunist world in the kind of book a punk rock Paul Theroux might have written, with a humor reminiscent of Gary Shteyngart. An audacious debut from a vivid new voice, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control is an unforgettable, funny, and sharply drawn depiction of surprisingly robust hidden spaces tucked within faraway lands.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

The New Press

The Replacements sang about the bittersweet fruit of life. Love. Loss. Ambition. Failure. They showed us the highs of the party, and the lows of the harrowing hangover. The Mats wrote about people who dared to be, and ended up aching for it. They were square pegs in the round hole of the world, and for their fans, they connected like no other band. Twenty-five crime writers take to the page to honor their misfit heroes with a series of stories about the sad, the twisted, the beat down, and the darkness that looms just beyond the periphery. Each tale is inspired by a Replacements song, and each story is just as unique and heartbreaking as its inspiration. Get in the van and ride to the next town with this rare tribute to a rarer musical phenomenon.

Waiting To Be Forgotten: Stories of Crime and Heartbreak, Inspired by The Replacements (Gutter Books Rock Anthology Series)

Literature & Fiction

Segura, Alex

Belcamino, Kristi

Shaw, Johnny

Stallings, Josh

Stringer, Jay

Flanagan, Josh

Short Stories & Anthologies

Gutter Books LLC

Product Description 
Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay hits the backroads with singer-songwriter Rudy Pauver as he navigates a conflicted relationship with a successful protégé and the unexpected arrival of his spirited young niece.\nIn the doldrums of a career as a cult figure, Rudy has been overshadowed by Ryan Orland, to the point where Rudy is now identified as an imitator of the younger man. Ryan is generous and supportive, but Rudy finds it hard to be grateful, especially as a sordid confrontation results in their estrangement. When his sister’s daughter, a teenage runaway, turns up asking to join him on the road, Rudy has to come to terms with the limits of his ambition and the nature of his obligation to family. 
Someone Should Pay for Your Pain is an exploration of the nature of creativity and popular success; artistic and ethical influence; the pathos of the middle-aged artist; changing standards of sexual morality; and guilt and penance in a post-religious society. 
Reading group guide available to download from publisher's website. 
 Review \n"Starting at the midlife crisis of an early-aughts indie rock never-was, Franz Nicolay delivers a tight-fisted gut punch of a novel, weaving a road-weary world with a lyricist's skill for evocation, emotion, and economy....A knockout fiction debut from a longtime troubadour." — 
Buzzfeed, "42 Great Books To Read This Spring"\n"Remember buying a novel at an actual bookstore & taking it home & starting it, then you can't stop & you're up till 3 a.m. plowing through it? Thanks to the great Franz Nicolay for writing That Novel. A punk rock tale like no other: 
Someone Should Pay For Your Pain"—Rob Sheffield\n"The kindest praise I believe a writer can give another about their work is: I wish I'd written this. About 100 pages into Franz Nicolay's debut novel, 
Someone Should Pay for Your Pain, that thought hit me like a baseball bat. God, even that title fills me with envy....bleak, beautiful, authentic, sweet, and sobering. I can't recommend this book enough for Rockers Of a Certain Age."—Dan Ozzi, 
REPLY ALT\n"Nicolay's pitch-perfect observations make his story intriguing and all too true, zooming by like trees on the side of the highway. If the most specific things are the most relatable, then this carefully orchestrated takedown of musician life and will hit home with anyone who is reckoning with the bleary truths of a self-righteous life, from either side of forty." — 
Razorcake\n"It's wonderful...If you've been in a band or been even loosely tied to a scene, you know these people and these places and these roads and these dive bar floor tiles and these mattresses in the corner at the local flophouse. It's real and it's relatable and it's a sort of book about what happens after the 'coming of age' stuff gets old...a hell of a novel." — 
Dying Scene\n"Nicolay's insight into that world comes across vividly."— 
SPIN\n"Moving, funny, and sometimes brutal...teems with perfect tiny details."— 
New Books Network\n"Punchy and wise...brutally funny and heartfelt."— 
Chronogram\nAbout the Author \nFranz Nicolay is a musician and writer living in New York's Hudson Valley. His first book, 
The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar, was named a "Season's Best Travel Book" by The New York Times 
. Buzzfeed called his second book 
Someone Should Pay for Your Pain a "knockout fiction debut." He teaches at Bard College.

Someone Should Pay for Your Pain: A Novel

Literary

Gibson House Press

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