A witty, sometimes curmudgeonly, often helpful look at various fads, crazes, morals, fashions, and mores in America today ranges from comments on good weather to a pontifical guide for the truly ambitious.

    Steiner’s discussion of the break with the traditional literary past (Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Latin) is illuminating and attractively undogmatic.  He writes as a man sharing ideas, and his original notions, though scarcely cheerful, have the bracing effect that first-rate thinking always has.” –New Yorker“In Bluebeard’s Castle is a brief and brilliant book.  An intellectual tour de force, it is also a book that should generate a profound excitement and promote a profound unease…like the great culturalists of the past.  Steiner uses a dense and plural learning to assess his topic: his book has the outstanding quality of being not simply a reflection on culture, but an embodiment of certain contemporary resources within it.  The result is one of the most important books I have read for a very long time.”—New Society

    Through rare interviews and with unique insight, Peter Guralnick tells the definitive story of the songs that inspired a generation and forever changed the sound of American music.

    From the Freedom Rides and confrontations with the Alabama Klan to the "hate-dappled" Summer of Love, Tales of Beatnik Glory is the epic of America in the sixties, in a language of droll invention and stoned mythopoesis, from a man who once dared to exorcise the Pentagon. This revised edition adds two new volumes and includes twenty-five never-before-published stories

    Now, firmly established as a classic, the fourth edition features a completely new introduction as well as an entirely updated discography that includes CDs for the first time.

    There is a brief chronology of O'Hara's short life and an index of titles.

    Rather, the teenager as icon can be traced back to the 1890s, when the foundations for the new century were laid in urban youth culture. Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture is a monumental cultural history that charts the spread of the American ideal of youth through England and Europe and around the world. From Peter Pan to Oscar Wilde, Anne Frank to the Wizard of Oz, Savage documents youth culture’s development as a commodity and an industry from the turn of the last century to its current driving force in the global economy. Fusing film, music, literature, diaries, fashion, and art, this epic cultural history is an astonishing and surprising chronicle of modern life sure to appeal to pop culture fans, social history buffs, and anyone who has ever been a teenager.

    Through analysis of products, political campaigns and television programs of the 1950s, Packard shows how the insidious manipulation practices that have come to dominate today’s corporate-driven world began. Featuring an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller, The Hidden Persuaders has sold over one million copies, and forever changed the way we look at the world of advertising.Vance Packard (1914-1996) was an American journalist, social critic, and best-selling author. Among his other books were The Status Seekers, which described American social stratification and behavior, The Waste Makers, which criticizes planned obsolescence, and The Naked Society, about the threats to privacy posed by new technologies.

    In them he not only demonstrated how he thought, but proposed a rule as to how thinking ought to proceed. Tracing his arguments and their development in these essays is a rich and rewarding exercise. The range of Orwell's interests was limitless, and a glance at the titles of some of his subjects in this book gives us an idea..."Shooting an Elephant," "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool" and "England Your England." "Orwell requires of himself that he think his way through things using truthfulness as his only star. His contribution to our culture came during a desperate era, and helped us navigate the trackless post-war years." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)

    Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching (what Cage called writing through).

    But it was much more than that. It was a cogent history of an unruly era, from the rise of Bill Haley to the death of Jimi Hendrix.And while telling outrageous tales, vividly describing the music, and cutting through the hype, Nik Cohn would engender a new literary form: rock criticism. In his book's wake, rock criticism has turned into a veritable industry, and the world of music has never been the same. Now this seminal history of rock 'n' roll's evolution is available once more -- as riotous a spree as any in rock writing.

    His monumental, unsettling images have an extraordinary power to disturb, shock, and haunt the spectator, "to unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently".Eminent writer and curator David Sylvester provides the definitive account of the career of an artist whose friend and collaborator he was for more than forty years. Drawing on his unparalleled personal knowledge of Bacon's inspirations and intentions, he first offers a critical overview of the development of Bacon's work from 1933 to the early 1990s, and then addresses its crucial aspects. Sylvester also reproduces previously unpublished extracts from his celebrated conversations with Bacon in which the artist speaks about himself, modern painters, and the art of the past. Finally, he gives a brief account of Bacon's life, correcting errors that elsewhere have been presented as facts.Accompanying the incisive and revealing text are reproductions of almost every Bacon work discussed, including twelve triptych fold-outs. The most complete work on Bacon yet, this book constitutes a portrait of one of the creative geniuses of our age by a writer of comparable distinction.

    "The City of Nets," as Brecht called Berlin, before the deluge, and people who created and those who destroyed it.

    When Little Richard burst onto the scene in the early 1950s, he sounded like nothing on earth. Drenched in sweat, screaming, hollering and pumping his piano, his stage act was so explosive that for years people assumed the real man could never match the flamboyant public image. Then came Charles White's sensational book exposing the even more astonishing life and times of Richard Wayne Penniman from Georgia.Little Richard made himself a star through sheer force of personality, breaking racial and sexual taboos on his way to becoming the primal force of Fifties rock 'n' roll. Elvis Presley called him 'the greatest'. Otis Redding called him his 'inspiration' and James Brown called him his idol. Charles White is the only author to have captured the true energy of Little Richard. Using Richard's own words, White chronicles a staggering career that spanned the very rules of rock 'n' roll, the rise of The Beatles, tussles with God and The Devil and an erratic series of comebacks. Illustrated with pictures from Little Richard's own archive and including a comprehensive discography.

    Forster, Joyce Cary, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Thorton Wilder, William Faulkner, Georges Simenon, Frank O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Alberto Moravia, Nelson Algren, Angus Wilson, William Styron, Truman Capote, Francoise Fagan.