Books

FICTION

Make Me Believe is a unique book: part crime novel, part non-fiction chronicle, part memoir, part reportage, part love story. I use actual court documents, actual AP stories and other primary documents throughout the story as a way of engaging the audience in a participatory reading of the book that raises the stakes and lifts the veil that often alienates non-fiction readers from fiction. The book begins in the court room in 1995. The first 20 pages consist purely of actually witness testimony I stitched together. The voices of these people – everyone from family members to the police to his best friend who was also the star witness – map the day of the murder based on what they witnessed with their own eyes. But then the story moves forward to the fall of 2002, which is a month after Toronto’s actual execution. I imagined my protagonist as me and wondered, “What if instead of going on with my life, I’d dropped everything, headed to Dallas and attempted to figure out what happened?” In this sense, the entire story is based on a series of “What ifs…?” that, taken together, interrogate the easy, accepted narrative that allowed jurors and an entire community to execute Toronto.

Mysterious Distance
Derek Beres

Mysterious Distance is a story of cycles: the cycle of romance, of death, of dreams … and of corn. Updating an old Aztec agricultural mythology to suit the meaning of our times—a time of mistrust and rebellion in the ways we consume, as well as the ways we relate to one another—Beres holds up a mirror and invites us to examine our own cycles. In the end, it is a tale we can all relate to: that of love and love lost, that of life and death, and that of the mysterious distance between the romance of who we are and the life we want to live, and the life that presents itself before us. It is a reminder that as far as we run from our patterns, we cannot run from ourselves, and, more importantly, that there is no reason to: the ritual of life is a rite of celebration, even when times seem darkest. Mysterious Distance is an emotional and heartfelt meditation on the state of modern America and our relationship with foreign cultures and ideas, all the while focused on what matters to us the most: family, friends and affairs of the heart.

The Best of Intentions
Dax-Devlon Ross

Following his painful divorce, Gus Steadman embarks on a cross-country road trip that ultimately lands him in his hometown after a dozen years of self-imposed exile. A perpetual dilettante infected with a near-debilitating nostalgia for his fading youth, 30-year-old Gus is finally ready to get his life in gear and live in the moment when he discovers that his prep school pal is running for mayor against a twenty-year incumbent and former civil rights activist. Hoping to kick-start his life he joins the campaign only to find himself falling deeper and deeper into the absurd, underhanded world of urban politics. In the end, and after all sorts of unexpected doors have opened along the way, it’s up to him to choose where his loyalties lie and his principles stand. The Best of Intentions is the timeless story of the soul searcher striving to reconcile past with present, theory with practice, idealism with pragmatism. It interrogates the promises of opportunity and unmasks the perils of upward mobility; pits our undying hunger for spiritual connectedness against our insatiable thirst for worldly validation. Most of all, it explores the individual’s fight to live of integrity in a confusing world devoid of easy answers.

NON-FICTION

Global Beat Fusion: The History of the Future of Music
Derek Beres

Since publication in June 2005, Global Beat Fusion has helped to define the emerging global culture being created by international music and the musicians that search past their own nations to create and collaborate. Featuring candid and close-up interviews with Karsh Kale, Krishna Das, Cheb i Sabbah, Bill Laswell, Ojos de Brujo, Zakir Hussain, Mercan Dede, Nickodemus, Boban Markovic, Niyaz and many more, this important work is the definitive source for the most progressive musical movement of the 21st century. As NPR stated, “Global Beat Fusion: The History of the Future of Music is not a book about music alone. It’s about a growing worldwide community that’s searching for shared experience without politics or corporate involvement. And it could fill many different slots on the bookshelf.” Newsday noted that “Beres takes a Joseph Campbell-like comparative look at various cultures, then discusses the semi-underground patchwork of musicians who are using this often-sacred music for dancefloor kinetics. He then explains why that combination is not as incongruous as it might seem at first glance.”

The Nightmare and The Dream: Nas, Jay-Z and the History of Conflict in African-American Culture
Dax-Devlon Ross

Tracing the evolution and transformation of the dilemma through the movements, myths and moments that shaped black America and the Hip-Hop generation in the 20th century, The Nightmare and The Dream compellingly argues that the battle between Nas and Jay-Z at the turn of the new millennium was the latest in a long line of creative conflicts between complex, oppositional black icons. An absorbing voyage through time and rhyme, Nightmare situates the ideas and imagery of two of hip-hop’s most intriguing, innovative and controversial icons alongside the most mythologized figures in African-American history. In doing so, this ground-breaking book explains how their truce should be read as the Hip-Hop generation’s response to the tradition of conflict that has heretofore defined black creative thought. Just as previous generations have rescued their heroes from worshippers and cynics alike, The Nightmare and The Dream liberates these two artist-icons from the manacles of mindless misinterpretation by bringing some real and well-earned rigor to an analysis of their careers.

Sound Against Flame: The Process of Yoga and Atheism in America
Derek Beres

Sound Against Flame is an insightful and inquisitive look inside two emerging cultural ideas gripping the modern American consciousness: yoga and atheism. While seemingly opposed in numerous contexts, author/yoga instructor Derek Beres uncovers a common foundation as startling as it is revelatory to practitioners of any, or no, faith. The end result is a book that looks past the modern association of yoga with seeking ‘pure bliss’ without awareness of the suffering of life as well as the assumption in America that yoga is merely comprised of a bunch of postures, diving straight into the heart of the discipline. Used as part of the curriculum for Derek’s yoga teacher training program at Equinox Fitness, Sound Against Flame is a great resource for aspiring teachers, as well as for seasoned practitioners seeking to explore the history of yoga in the context of modern America.

Tangled Web: The Best Music Tour You Never Heard Of
Derek Beres

Photojournalist Derek Beres spent one month on the road documenting Musica Fresca, a Latin music tour featuring Yerba Buena, Voltio, Akwid and Radio Mundial. Hired by Yahoo!Telemundo to keep a daily online record of 15 national dates, Beres went from blogging the most ambitious Hispanic tour ever produced in America to uncovering the behind-the-scenes follies of greed and deception. Tangled Web is an eye-opening, informative and honest journey through today’s music industry, and how by weaving through the pitfalls of industry devotion to the arts reigns supreme. Written as a daily journal with commentary in the beginning and end, this conversational work is key to understanding the struggles of foreign identity in American music circles, moving past the exotica often afforded to international music, driving right into the humanity that we all share as artistic and creative beings.

COLLABORATIONS

The Underdog’s Manifesto: A Guerilla Artist’s Path to Independence
Creature (w/Dax-Devlon Ross)

Part memoir, part survival manual, The Underdog’s Manifesto isn’t just one artist’s story — it’s every artist’s story. It’s our laughter in the face of disbelief; our resistance of corporate domination and social apathy; our commitment to crafting something original despite our culture’s fascination with derivative, disposable mush. Underdog is the anti-How-To book. Creature’s aim isn’t to sell another rags to riches homily; through his candid reflections, raw wisdom and generosity of spirit he reminds us that there’s no shame in a hard day’s hustle. Throughout history underdogs have spirited the most authentic, audacious and original art, and spawned movements forever altering the creative landscape. Years from now Underdog may very well be regarded as the artistpreneur’s clarion call. In the meantime let the voices and visions of these artists inspire you to look within and ask yourself why you create, what you’re willing to sacrifice, what you believe and what it really means to be successful. Featuring interviews with Underdogs such as Percee P., Duo Live and “Lucky” Logan P. McCoy and afterword by revolutionary thinker Jeremy Glick – the man that frustrated Bill O’Reilly as no one else ever has – The Underdog’s Manifesto is an indispensable and evolutionary addition to the process of becoming a confident and full-bodied artist.

COLLECTIONS

A Staircase of Words, Volume One
Derek Beres & Dax-Devlon Ross

In his introduction to his latest book of essays, Another Day on the Front, Ishmael Reed compares essay writing to sparring in a gym all day. I couldn’t agree more. Essays are the writer’s calisthenics. They’re not as ‘glamorous’ as novels, as ‘important’ as political tomes, as ‘serious’ as books of history and journalism, as ‘self-indulgent’ as memoirs, as ‘affecting’ as books of poetry, or as ‘marketable’ as self-help books. Notwithstanding these ‘shortcomings’ they are necessary to both readers and writers. Essays keep writers sharp, fit, ready to meet the task of sorting out the world, de-mystifying it, eliminating the illusions we live by and so forth. They’re where writers get to speak without artifice or literary pretense to an audience hungry for searching, stumbling, but always steadfast voice of a kindred spirit. – from Dax’s introduction

What Do You Believe?
Derek Beres, editor

The first Outside the Box Publishing anthology began with one not-so-simple question put forth by founders Derek Beres & Dax-Devlon Ross to: What do you believe? This collection is comprised of 29 answers in forms ranging from long and critical essays to haikus and emails. That such a seemingly basic question could provide such a wide range of possibilities is proof of the power of questioning. It is impossible to read this book and not pose the very same question to yourself, and with any luck, witness just how much the nature of belief informs you, and how meaningful a question it truly is. This volume includes contributions by N. Frank Daniels, Jeff Tamarkin, Jill Ettinger, Jeff Gamble, Andrew Gandolfo, Erica DeLorenzo, Mark Gorney, Caroline Leavitt, William Doty, Sasha Dmochowski, Dax-Devlon Ross and Derek Beres.