Yet for decades after her death, Powell's work was out of print, cherished only by a small band of admirers. Only recently has there been a rediscovery of the writer Gore Vidal calls "our best comic novelist," and whom Edmund Wilson considered to be "on a level with Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark." In a two-volume set, The Library of America presents the best of Powell's quirky, often hilarious, sometimes deeply moving fiction. Dawn Powell -- a vital part of literary Greenwich Village from the 1920s through the 1960s -- was the observant chronicler of two very different worlds: the small-town Ohio where she grew up and the sophisticated Manhattan where she lived for nearly fifty years. If her Ohio novels are more melancholy and compassionate, her Manhattan novels, exuberant and incisive, sparkle with a cast of writers, show people, businessmen, and hangers-on -- all caught with Powell's uniquely sharp yet compassionate eye. A playful satirist, an unsentimental observer of failed hopes and misguided longings, Dawn Powell is a literary rediscovery of rare importance. My Home Is Far Away (1944), the last of Powell's Ohio novels, is a fictionalized memoir of her difficult childhood. With The Locusts Have No King (1948), the story of a scholar's unexpected brush with the temptations of celebrity and riches, Powell resumed her lifelong dissection of New York's pretensions and glamour. The first of three brilliant postwar satires, it was followed by The Wicked Pavilion (1954), a novel that lays bare its characters' illusions about love and success against the backdrop of the Cafe Julien, a relic of a bygone era in the history of Greenwich Village. The volume concludes with Powell's final novel, The Golden Spur (1962), in which she drew on her time spent among painters at the famed Cedar Tavern for an affectionate if pointed satire on Manhattan's art world.

    Glicksberg says if you want to be a writer you have to, quote, sit on a window sill and get all pensive and stuff and jot down descriptions. Unquote Glicksberg! I don't know what kind of things he writes but I found my inspiration in Malibu with a radio, my best girlfriends, and absolutely zillions of boys for miles. I absolutely had to write everything down because I heard that when you get older you forget things, and I'd be the most miserable woman in the world if I forgot all about Moondoggie and what happened this summer. I absolutely owe the world my story. (And every word is true. I swear.) This is Franzie, part Holden Caulfield, part Lolita. The guys call her Gidget--short for "girl midget”--and she’s a girl coming of age in the summer of 1957. Based on the experiences of his own daughter, Frederick Kohner's trend-setting novel became an international sensation and turned its irrepressible heroine into an American pop culture icon whose voice still echoes every thrill, every fear, and every hope that every teenager ever had about growing up.

    News professionals are inclined to blame themselves, but the real culprit is technology and its competing demands on the public's time. The Internet is just the latest in a long series of new information technologies that have scattered the mass audience that newspapers once held. By isolating and describing the factors that made journalism work as a business in the past, Meyer provides a model that will make it work with the changing technologies of the present and future. He backs his argument with empirical evidence, supporting key points with statistical assessments of the quality and influence of the journalist's product, as well as its effects on business success.

    Woodward draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes, personal diaries, files and documents. The focus is on the explosive debates and the decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence.Fear is the most intimate portrait of a sitting president ever published during the president’s first years in office.

    Somebody had to'And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England, he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of trim and sunny place where the films of his youth were set. Instead, his search led him to Anywhere, USA; a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by lookalike people with a penchant for synthetic fibres. Travelling around thirty-eight of the lower states - united only in their mind-numbingly dreary uniformity - he discovered a continent that was doubly lost; lost to itself because blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a stranger in his own land.The Lost Continent is a classic of travel literature - hilariously, stomach-achingly funny, yet tinged with heartache - and the book that first staked Bill Bryson's claim as the most beloved writer of his generation.

    Compiled by the staff and contributors of Mojo magazine, The Mojo Collection tells the stories behind the greatest albums of all time and the artists who made them.

    As a child, he rooted for conventionally good characters like wide-eyed Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. But as Klosterman aged, his alliances shifted—first to Han Solo and then to Darth Vader. Vader was a hero who consciously embraced evil; Vader wanted to be bad. But what, exactly, was that supposed to mean? When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying (and why are we so obsessed with saying it)? In I Wear the Black Hat, Klosterman questions the very nature of how modern people understand the culture of villainy. What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don’t we see Batman the same way we see Bernhard Goetz? Who’s more worthy of our vitriol—Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson’s second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still obsessed with some kid he knew for one week in 1985?Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and limitless imagination, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the anti-hero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). I Wear the Black Hat is the rare example of serious criticism that’s instantly accessible and really, really funny. Klosterman is the only writer doing whatever it is he’s doing.

    Wilson mercilessly exposes the damage Trump has done to the country, to the Republican Party he served for decades, and to the conservative movement that has abandoned its principles for the worst President in American history.No left-winger, Wilson is a lifelong conservative who delivers his withering critique of Trump from the right. A leader of the Never Trump movement, he warns his own party of the political catastrophe that leaves everyone involved with Trump with reputations destroyed and lives in tatters.Wilson unblinkingly dismantles Trump’s deceptions and the illusions to which his supporters cling, shedding light on the guilty parties who empower and enable Trump in Washington and the news media. He calls out the race-war dead-enders who hitched a ride with Trump, the alt-right basement dwellers who worship him, and the social conservatives who looked the other way.Everything Trump Touches Dies deftly chronicles the tragicomic Trump story from the early campaign days through the shock of election night, to the inconceivable trainwreck of Trump's first year. Rick Wilson provides not only an insightful analysis of the Trump administration, but also an optimistic path forward for the GOP, the conservative movement, and the country. Combining insider political analysis, blunt truths, and black humor, Everything Trump Touches Dies is perfect for those on either side of the aisle who need a dose of unvarnished reality, a good laugh, a strong cocktail, and a return to sanity in American politics.

    For Clinton, that meant contorting himself around the various factions of the Democratic party to win the presidency. Gingrich employed a scorched-earth strategy to upend the permanent Republican minority in the House, making him Speaker. The Clinton/Gingrich battles were bare-knuckled brawls that brought about massive policy shifts and high-stakes showdowns—their collisions had far-reaching political consequences. But the ’90s were not just about them.  Kornacki writes about Mario Cuomo’s stubborn presence around Clinton’s 1992 campaign; Hillary Clinton’s star turn during the 1998 midterms, seeding the idea for her own candidacy; Ross Perot’s wild run in 1992 that inspired him to launch the Reform Party, giving Donald Trump his first taste of electoral politics in 1999; and many others. With novelistic prose and a clear sense of history, Steve Kornacki masterfully weaves together the various elements of this rambunctious and hugely impactful era in American history, whose effects set the stage for our current political landscape.

    These short works display Wharton's talent as a satirist "skilled at dissecting the elements of emotional subtleties, moral ambiguities, and the implications of social constrictions" (Cythina Griffin Wolfe, from the Introduction).Roman fever (1934)Xingu (1911)The other two (1904)Souls belated (1899)The angel at the grave (1901)The last asset (1904)After Holbein (1928)Autres temps (1911)

    Now, with this collection of original essays, he reminds us of the principles upon which the United States was founded. Looking at the freedoms that define us, from the vote to the press; the values that have transformed us, from empathy to inclusion to service; the institutions that sustain us, such as public education; and the traits that helped form our young country, such as the audacity to take on daunting challenges in science and medicine, Rather brings to bear his decades of experience on the frontlines of the world’s biggest stories. As a living witness to historical change, he offers up an intimate view of history, tracing where we have been in order to help us chart a way forward and heal our bitter divisions. With a fundamental sense of hope, What Unites Us is the book to inspire conversation and listening, and to remind us all how we are, finally, one.

    In Why We Suck, Dr. Denis Leary uses his common sense, and his biting and hilarious take on the world, to attack the politically correct, the hypocritical, the obese, the thin--basically everyone who takes themselves too seriously. He does so with the extra oomph of a doctorate bestowed upon him by his alma mater Emerson College. "Sure it's just a celebrity type of thing--they only gave it to me because I'm famous," Leary explains. "But it's legal and it means I get to say I'm a doctor--just like Dr. Phil." In Why We Suck, Leary's famously smart style and sardonic wit have found their fullest and fiercest expression yet. Zeroing in on the ridiculous wherever he finds it, Leary unravels his Irish Catholic upbringing, the folly of celebrity, the pressures of family life, and the great hypocrisy of politics with the same bright, savage, and profane insight he brought to his critically acclaimed one-man shows No Cure for Cancer and Lock 'n Load, and his platinum-selling song, "Asshole." Proudly Irish American, defiantly working class, with a reserve of compassion for the underdog and the overlooked, Leary delivers blistering diatribes that are penetrating social commentary with no holds barred. Leary's book will find wide appeal among people who want to laugh out loud or find a guide who matches their view of what's wrong in America and the world-at-large; and fans of his one-man shows, his many movies, and Rescue Me, Leary's Golden Globe and Emmy-nominated television show. Why We Suck is the latest salvo from one of America's most original and biting comic satirists.

    Nobel Peace Prize winner, bestselling author, activist, and political icon, Al Gore has become one of the most respected and influential public intellectuals in America today. The Assault on Reason takes an unprecedented look at how faith in the power of reasonâ€"the idea that citizens can govern themselves through rational debate

    A newer edition may be found here.From one of the 20th century's great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.

    He also gave it a figure of enduring romantic allure–fiery, restless, extravagant, a prodigal gambler and inveterate seducer of women. Having forged a dazzling, controversial career that cost him the enmity of one tsar and won him the patronage of another, he died at the age of thirty-eight, following a duel with a French officer who was paying unscrupulous attention to his wife.In his magnificent, prizewinning Pushkin, T. J. Binyon lifts the veil of the iconic poet’s myth to reveal the complexity and pathos of his life while brilliantly evoking Russia in all its nineteenth-century splendor. Combining exemplary scholarship with the pace and detail of a great novel, Pushkin elevates biography to a work of art.