National Book Award Finalist: This autobiographical road-trip novel exploring life and politics in the 1950s became "an underground bestseller" ( The Village Voice).The year is 1956, and a blacklisted Hollywood agent sets off on a cross-country adventure from Los Angeles to New York City. Along the way—stopping at bars, all-night restaurants, and gas stations—the twenty-nine-year-old narrator, at once egotistical and compassionate, barrels across the "blue...

A soulful tour de force of the world of coal miners in Yorkshire, a way of life like no otherIn this psychologically astute novel set in the boisterous South Yorkshire mining town of Dinlock, Davie, a young miner, paints to ease the mental and physical pain of digging coal, on his knees, two thousand feet underground. Sigal creates through Davie a microcosmic portrait of this backbreaking work, performed by men dedicated to social change. In close detail, Sigal illu...

This tale of a Russian immigrant is a "gripping and gritty memoir [and] a eulogy for a combative, self-conscious, often violent American working class" ( Los Angeles Times) .Jennie Persily, with her fiery red hair, buxom figure, and bohemian spirit, is a strong-willed fighter for justice and a passionate lover. A Russian-Jewish émigré who organizes unions in the sweatshops and on the mean streets of Chicago during the thirties and forties, Jennie ...

A passionately realized novel about an affair between a wandering American and cutting-edge female novelistClancy Sigal's fourth novel centers on expatriate Gus Black, a freethinker who moves to England in search of a new life. He absorbs the native culture by plunging into its dark corners. Amid the upheavals, he lands a job at Vogue, consorting with models like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, and commences a passionate affair with Rose O'Malley, a brilliant wr...

A riotously funny saga of institutional insanity, based on the author's association with the notorious psychiatrist R. D. LaingDespite massive literary success, Sidney Bell feels perpetually unsatisfied and suffers unexplained physical ailments. Desperate to straighten out his twisted life, anxiety-ridden Sid seeks help from experimental psychiatrist Dr. Willie Last, whose therapeutic methods involve hallucinatory drugs such as LSD and trading places with his patien...

This a hilarious memoir of Clancy Sigal’s escapades as a young Hollywood agent on the Sunset Strip, peddling writers and actors in a blacklist-crazed golden age” movie industry of the 1950s. Atom bomb tests light up the night sky, and everyone is either naming names or getting named in the McCarthy witch hunt. By day a fast-talking salesman, at night he’s the point person of a small circle of anarchistic oddballs. He’s dogged by two FBI agents who want to be set up with s...

'An exuberant, breathless sprint through London in the fifties, sixties and seventies… It's bright, boisterous and extremely funny' Tatler'Clancy's scapegrace adventures are described with so much vitality and scabrous wit you feel as charmed as one of his serial conquests … Marvellous' Spectator'If you're searching for something to keep you on the edge of your sun lounger this summer, look no further'

Christy Moore is in every sense Ireland's folk hero. Mentor to a whole generation of Irish musicians, he holds a unique place in musical history. In l992 he broke all attendance records during 12 packed nights at the Point in Dublin. In the UK he fills concert halls around the country. In l997 he announced that he was taking an extended break from touring and recording. It was headline news in Ireland. So was his comeback which began in l999. Set to be an enormous best-seller, his autobiog...

Picking up her story in the late ’60s at age 21, Cathy Gildiner whisks the reader through five years and three countries, beginning when she is a poetry student at Oxford. Her education extended beyond the classroom to London’s swinging Carnaby Street, the mountains of Wales, and a posh country estate.After Oxford, Cathy returns to Cleveland, Ohio, which was still reeling from the Hough Ghetto Riots. Not one to shy away from a challenge, she teaches at a high school where police es...

**“[Kurt Vonnegut] has never been more satirically on-target. . . . Nothing is spared.”—***PeopleJailbird* takes us into a fractured and comic, pure Vonnegut world of high crimes and misdemeanors in government—and in the heart. This wry tale follows bumbling bureaucrat Walter F. Starbuck from Harvard to the Nixon White House to the penitentiary as Watergate’s least known co-conspirator. But the humor turns dark when Vonnegut shines his spotlight on the cold hearts ...

Before he runs out of time, Irish bon vivant Malachy McCourt shares his views on death - sometimes hilarious and often poignant - and on what will or won't happen after his last breath is drawn.During the course of his life, Malachy McCourt practically invented the single's bar; was a pioneer in talk radio, a soap opera star, a best-selling author; a gold smuggler, a political activist, and a candidate for governor of the state of New York.It seems that the...

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is classic Tom Wolfe, a funny, irreverent, and "delicious" (The Wall Street Journal) dissection of class and status by the master of New JournalismThe phrase 'radical chic' was coined by Tom Wolfe in 1970 when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers at his duplex apartment on Park Avenue. That incongruous scene is re-created here in high fidelity as is another meeting ground between milit...