"Wired" magazine sent him to Singapore to report on one of the world's most buttoned-up states. "The New York Times Magazine" asked him to describe what was wrong with the Internet. Rolling Stone published his essay on the ways our lives are all "soundtracked" by the music and the culture around us. And in a speech at the 2010 Book Expo, he memorably described the interactive relationship between writer and reader.These essays and articles have never been collected-until now. Some have never appeared in print at all. In addition, "Distrust That Particular Flavor" includes journalism from small publishers, online sources, and magazines no longer in existence. This volume will be essential reading for any lover of William Gibson's novels. "Distrust That Particular Flavor" offers readers a privileged view into the mind of a writer whose thinking has shaped not only a generation of writers but our entire culture.

    Along the way, he takes us on an exploration of lost islands, mythical realms, and the medieval world. Eco also sheds light on the indignant reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses by fascist journalists of the 1920s and 1930s, and provides a lively examination of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s notions about the soul of an unborn child, censorship, violence, and WikiLeaks. These are essays full of passion, curiosity, and obsessions by one of the world’s most esteemed scholars and critically acclaimed, best-selling novelists.

    The subtle musings of Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, and Harryette Mullen are bracketed by the profane and often loud ruminations of Langston Hughes, Darius James, Wanda Coleman, Tish Benson, Steve Cannon, and Hattie Gossett. Some of the funniest writers don't write, so included are selections from well-known yet unpublished wits Lightnin' Hopkins, Mike Tyson, and the Reverend Al Sharpton. Selections also come from public figures and authors whose humor, although incisive and profound, is often overlooked: Malcolm X, Suzan-Lori Parks, Zora Neale Hurston, Sojourner Truth, and W.E.B. Dubois. Groundbreaking, fierce, and hilarious, this is a necessary anthology for any fan or student of American writing, with a huge range and a smart, political grasp of the uses of humor.

    Just Enough Liebling gathers in one volume the vividest and most enjoyable of his pieces. Charles McGrath (in The New York Times Book Review) praised it as a judicious sampling-a useful window on Liebling's vast body of writing and a reminder, to those lucky enough to have read him the first time around, of why he was so beloved. Today Liebling is best known as a celebrant of the sweet science of boxing, and as a feeder who ravishes the reader with his descriptions of food and wine. But as David Remnick observes in his fond and insightful introduction, Liebling is boundlessly curious, a listener, a boulevardier, a man of appetites and sympathy-and a writer who, with his great friend and colleague Joseph Mitchell, deftly traversed the boundaries between reporting and storytelling, between news and art.

    Kennedy Jr., from The Atlantic Monthly “Watching the Detectives” by Jay Kirk, from Harper’s Magazine “For the Love of God” by Jon Krakauer, from GQ “Chief Bratton Takes on LA” by Heather Mac Donald, from City Journal “Not Guilty by Reason of Afghanistan” by John H. Richardson, from Esquire “Megan’s Law and Me” by Brendan Riley, from Details “Unfortunate Con” by Mark Schone, from The Oxford American “To Kill or Not to Kill” by Scott Turow, from The New Yorker

    Haldeman to David Hasselhoff's world tour. Contributors include David Foster Wallace, Jess Mowry, Donnell Alexander, and R.U. Sirius.

    These essays, stories, music reviews, the occasional chemically-induced rant, and a couple of recipes— because, for whatever reason, everyone seems to love his recipes—represent a cross-section of the past seven years’ worth of Warren’s writing online. From jumping around Britain, Europe and North America to just dragging his carcass up to the local pub for a think, this is the unedited spillage from the inside of the writer’s head during the ’00s. Some of it even makes sense.

    A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic-and ultimate authority on the western literary tradition-Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships: that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today.

    From the local and mundane-crime blotters, crop prices, and Sunday sermons-to the Federalist Papers and Watergate, the press has played an outsized role in our nation's culture and history. Newspapers in America have always been the crucible where our passions and debates are tried by the only judge this nation respects: public opinion. At a time of great transition in the news media, "Deadline Artists" celebrates the relevance of the newspaper column through the simple power of excellent writing. It is an inspiration for a new generation of writers--whether their medium is print or digital-looking to learn from the best of their predecessors. Contributors include: Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko, Murray Kempton, Ernie Pyle, Peggy Noonan, Thomas L. Friedman, David Brooks, Mitch Albom, Dorothy Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Benjamin Franklin, Fanny Fern, Richard Harding Davis, Grantland Rice, Will Rogers, Orson Welles, Langston Hughes, Woody Guthrie, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, H.L. Mencken, Ben Hecht, Westbrook Pegler, Heywood Broun, Damon Runyon, W. C. Heinz, Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, Russell Baker, Art Buchwald, William F. Buckley, Hunter S. Thompson, Pete Dexter, Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, Leonard Pitts, Anna Quindlen, Thomas Boswell, Tony Kornheiser, Kathleen Parker, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, Michael Kinsley, Cynthia Tucker, George Will, Jack Newfield, Mike Barnicle, Pete Hamill and Steve Lopez.

    Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.

    Awarded the Wilfred Owen Prize in 2004 for his poetry condemning U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Mr. Pinter has succeeded as no other of his generation in combining his artistry with his political activism. Death etc. brings together Pinter’s most poignant and especially relevant writings in this time of war. From chilling psychological portraits of those who commit atrocities in the name of a higher power, to essays on the state-sponsored terrorism of present-day regimes, to solemn hymns commemorating the faceless masses that perish unrecognized, Mr. Pinter’s writings are as essential to the preservation of open debate as to our awareness of personal involvement in the fate of our global community.

    E. "Doc" Smith MEGAPACK™ collects 11 works by Smith, including entries in the Lensman, Skylark, Subspace, and Lord Tedric series -- in all, more than 1,700 pages of galaxy-spanning adventure! Included are:TRIPLANETARYFIRST LENSMANTHE VORTEX BLASTERTHE GALAXY PRIMESMASTERS OF SPACETHE SKYLARK OF SPACESKYLARK THREESPACEHOUNDS OF IPCSUBSPACE SURVIVORSTEDRICLORD TEDRICIf you enjoy this ebook, don't forget to search your favorite ebook store for "Wildside Press Megapack" to see more of the 250+ volumes in this series, covering adventure, historical fiction, mysteries, westerns, ghost stories, science fiction -- and much, much more!

    But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches–not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart. In The War Against Cliché, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.

    In this anthology of essays, poetry, and fiction by some of America's most gifted writers, renowned sixties authority Ann Charters sketches the unfolding of this most turbulent decade. Organized by thematically linked chapters chronicling important social, political, and cultural movements, The Portable Sixties Reader features such luminaries as Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Robert Lowell, Eudora Welty, Bob Dylan, Malcolm X, Susan Sontag, Denise Levertov, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Lenny Bruce, Ishmael Reed, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Rachel Carson, and Gary Snyder. The concluding chapter, "Elegies for the Sixties," offers tributes to ten figures whose lives--and deaths--captured the spirit of the decade.Cover photograph by Herbert Orth/TimePix.Contributors that wouldn't fit in the author field:Norman Mailer, Dave Mandel, Peter Matthiessen, Michael McClure, Country Joe McDonald, Thomas Merton, Kate Millett, Janice Mirikitani, N. Scott Momaday, Anne Moody, Larry Neal, Tim O'Brien, Charles Olson, Dan Paik, Rosa Parks, Sylvia Plath, Allen Polite, Dudley Randall, Ishmael Reed, Carolyn M. Rodgers, Muriel Rukeyser, Edward Sanders, Richard Schmorleitz, Anne Sexton, Gary Snyder, Valerie Solanas, Susan Sontag, Gloria Steinem, Hunter S. Thompson, Sally Tomlinson, Calvin Trillin, Eric Von Schmidt, Diane Wakoski, Alice Walker, Lew Welch, Eudora Welty, Malcolm X, & Al Young

    This is the dance of history in our age: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, back and forth and from side to side, we step across these fixed and shifting lines. —from Part IVWith astonishing range and depth, the essays, speeches, and opinion pieces assembled in this book chronicle a ten-year intellectual odyssey by one of the most important, creative, and respected minds of our time. Step Across This Line concentrates in one volume Salman Rushdie’s fierce intelligence, uncanny social commentary, and irrepressible wit—about soccer, The Wizard of Oz, and writing, about fighting the Iranian fatwa and turning with the millennium, and about September 11, 2001. Ending with the eponymous, never-before-published speeches, this collection is, in Rushdie’s words, a “wake-up call” about the way we live, and think, now.