he Secret Affair

Ever since his HOT 97 10-minute freestyle rework of Rising Down highlight "75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)" blew minds in December 2017, Roots’ MC Black Thought has spent a lot of time and energy reasserting his bona fides as a hyper-lyrical powerhouse. But while the skills-recognizing aspect to his revival provides more strong reminders than unexpected epiphanies, he's also been able to better embody the humanistic side of his art along the way. Glorious Game, his collaboration with veteran Brooklyn psychedelic-soul instrumentalists El Michels Affair, embodies this better than anything else to emerge in a strong run that also gave us his Streams of Thought series and his Danger Mouse collab Cheat Codes. You could throw a bit of credit for that to the atmosphere the Affair brings as a backing band: for a certain generation of hip-hop head, their collective ear for funk's stranger, blearier qualities that have been honed from years of RZA reconstructions and retro-cinematic takes on grainy soul-jazz can dredge up some remarkably powerful imagery just on its own.

This eloquent biography of the most influential nobleman of the Elizabethan Age reveals how Robert Dudley brilliantly captivated the court of Elizabeth I—and the heart of a queen.

From Pat Frank—author of the classic apocalyptic sci-fi novel Alas, Babylon—comes a political thriller set, and written, at the dawn of the Cold War, now back in print.
In Pat Frank’s riveting, insightful, and thought-provoking novel, young, outspoken Jeff Baker comes out of World War II determined to work for the State Department. When he lands his assignment in 1949, he becomes the third secretary of the US embassy in Budapest, an observation post behind the Iron Curtain…