Cassette From My Ex

Cassette from My Ex is a website much in the same vein as Post Secret.

Created by Jason Bitner (co-founder of another confessional culture project FOUND), Cassette from My Ex is a collection of stories from writers and musicians that offers a nostalgic and often romanticized look back at first loves, that first kiss, and yes, heartbreaks.

These stories remind us what it was like to be young and in love with the perfect music providing us a soundtrack.

Each story centers around a tape given by the infamous ex.

Breaking out beyond the World Wide Web, Cassette from My Ex has gone off-line and made itself tangible giving us Cassette from My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Loves Lost.

The book may have a limited audience in medium (how many people outside of this blog actually takes the time to make a mixtape anymore?) but transcends the mixtape culture becoming art, and honest portrayal of the youthful spirit. Showcasing passion through small black plastic and magnetic tape. Recorded love. We think it will last, but as the tape itself will attest to, can often warp and break, getting stuck in the very machine that surges it forward.

Cassette is filled with tales of the tragic ("Live Free or Die"), quirky ("The Mixtape Virgin"), and the strangely sweet with Rick Moody and Stacey Richter's back and forth letters trying to remember what exactly happened between them and what the heck Richter actually put on that darn tape ("Ribbed...for her pleasure").

Even more exciting, Rob Sheffield (the mixtape master himself, author of "Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time*," and the most rockin'-est man in a sweater) has lent to the book his humble offerings, "You Got the Peaches, I Got the Cream:" a story about loving a girl destined to run. This one entry alone has the power to make Cassette not just a necessity but a given right. Was that too much? Too bad, Sheffield rocks. Period.

Laced throughout the entries are useful, fun articles to help keep the art of mixtapes alive.

Collected into 224 pages Cassette from My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Love Lost was released October 27

*Run out and get it along with Cassette