Fall Book Preview 2015: Hot Rock Reads, From Patti to Petty

Release Date: September 8th 

Overview: Hynde chronicles her entire life, from growing up in Ohio to hanging out on the 1970s British punk scene to the wild first few years of the Pretenders.

Motivation: "I'm approaching writing this memoir . . .  as I would an album," she said. "I hope it makes you root through your closet and dust off your guitar."

Revelation: Hynde spent so much time with the Sex Pistols that she wasn't surprised when Sid Vicious was arrested for Nancy Spungen's murder. "We were only surprised that he'd stuck it out as long as he had. . . ." she writes. "Who could forget [Nancy's] shriek, a sound not unlike that of an untrained cockatoo. 'Sid — SID! WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO MAKE ME MY FAMOUS CREAM-CHEESE BAGEL? SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIID!' "

Release Date: October 27th

Overview: The guitarist and Portlandia star remembers her days with pioneering punk band Sleater-Kinney, wrapping up when the group went on hiatus in 2006.

Motivation: "I wanted to have an agency of how I show myself to people, and writing a book is a much easier way of sharing rather than being misconstrued."

Revelation: Brownstein blames herself for Sleater-Kinney's implosion: On the 2006 tour that ended the band for eight years, she suffered from shingles and says she became so consumed by anxiety that she began punching herself in the face. "I saw the enemy and it was me," she writes. "I saw the enemy and it was me; I wanted to destroy it. Pow! I couldn't stop. Thud! You fucking fraud. I was in the ring with only myself."

Release Date: October 6th 

Overview: The full story of Fogerty's life and career, from the rise of Creedence Clearwater Revival to their highly acrimonious breakup in the early 1970s.

Motivation: "I'm just being brutally honest," Fogerty has said. "I'm not trying to shock or surprise anybody. It's just the only way I've been able to exist."

Revelation: When Fogerty's Creedence bandmates demanded to help write songs in the early Seventies, it was the beginning of the end for the group. "The worst thing that ever happened to my band was the Beatles," Fogerty writes, "because the guys in my band thought they could be the Beatles. . . . These guys had no clue about what was necessary. A vision. That's just the truth."

Release Date: October 6th

Overview: While Just Kids focused on one era of her life, this book jumps around in time from the death of her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin.

Motivation: "I wanted to write whatever I felt like, things from literature to coffee to memories of Fred in Michigan. . . . I hopped on a train and kept going."

Revelation: Shortly before Bobby Fischer died, Smith ran into the chess master in Iceland. "He began testing me immediately by issuing a string of obscene and racially repellent references that morphed into paranoiac conspiracy rants," she writes. " 'Look, you're wasting your time,' I said. 'I can be just as repellent as you, only about different subjects.' " The pair ended up singing Buddy Holly songs for hours.

Eight years after teaming up with director Peter Bogdanovich for the documentary Runnin' Down a Dream, Tom Petty is delving even deeper into his past by cooperating with his longtime friend and Del Fuegos guitarist Warren Zanes on Petty: The Biography (due November 10th). Zanes even got estranged former Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch to break his long silence and dish on their bitter split. "Petty's story is a band story," says Zanes. "That meant I didn't just need his participation, I needed that band to open up to me. And I needed Stan Lynch to be among them."