A timeless novel in the spirited tradition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry FinnOne of the most popular American authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pulitzer Prize winner Booth Tarkington was acclaimed for his novels set in small Midwestern towns. Penrod tells of a boy growing up in Indianapolis at the turn of the twentieth century. His friends and his dog accompany him on his many jaunts, from the stage as...

Nothing is sacred to Jonathan Yardley, and nobody is safe from his penetrating insights. In Monday Morning Quarterback, Washington, D.C.'s best known columnist offers his wit and wisdom on America in the 1990s, from politics and culture to sports and literature. Whatever his target, Yardley's observations are always controversial, outrageous, uncompromising, eye-opening, and hilarious.

"I have no wish to play the pontificating fool, pretending that I've suddenly come up with the answers to all life's questions. Quite the contrary, I began this book as an exploration, an exercise in selfquestioning. In other words, I wanted to find out, as I looked back at a long and complicated life, with many twists and turns, how well I've done at measuring up to the values I myself have set."In this luminous memoir, a true American icon looks back on his celebrated life and ca...

"A hard-hitting sermon on the racial divide, directed specifically to a white congregation." — Kirkus Reviews, starred reviewA New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe BestsellerAs the country grapples with racial division at a level not seen since the 1960s, Michael Eric Dyson's voice is heard above the rest. In Tears We Cannot Stop, a provocative and deeply pe...

The star of Parks and Recreation and author of the New York Times bestseller Paddle Your Own Canoe returns with a second book that humorously highlights twenty-one figures from our nation’s history, from her inception to present day—Nick’s personal pantheon of “great Americans.”To millions of people, Nick Offerman is America. Both Nick and his character, Ron Swanson, are known for their humor and patriotism in equal measure.After ...

A New York Times bestseller: The "entertaining" memoir by the legendary American sportswriter (Chicago Tribune).Frank Deford joined Sports Illustrated in 1962, and over the following decades became one of the most beloved figures in sports journalism—renowned for everything from his NPR commentaries to his status as a Lite Beer All Star.From the Mad Men-like days of SI in the sixties, to the early NBA, to Deford's visit to apartheid South Africa with Arthur...

One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker has met this challenge more successfully and more originally than any other modern American journal. It has indelibly shaped the genre known as the Profile. Starting with light-fantastic evocations of glamorous and idiosyncratic figures of the twenties and thirties, such as Henry Luce and Isadora Duncan, and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Mik...

From the author of the New York Times bestselling How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes a highly entertaining and informative book on the twenty-five works of literature that have most shaped the American character.Thomas C. Foster applies his much-loved combination of wit, know-how, and analysis to explain how each work has shaped our very existence as readers, students, teachers, and Americans. He illuminates how books such as The La...

Once America's capitalist dream town, the Silicon Valley of the Jazz Age, Detroit became the country's greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the furthest. The city of Henry Ford, modernity, and Motown found itself blighted by riots, arson, unemployment, crime and corruption.But what happens to a once-great place after it has been used up and discarded? Who stays there to try to make things work again? And what sorts of newcomers are drawn there?Mark Binelli ...

Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee are respectively responsible for some of the great contemporary works of fiction: Auster's The New York Trilogy or Coetzee's Disgrace are only two of these authors' legendary works. In Here and Now, these remarkable thinkers are brought together in print for the first time.Although Auster and Coetzee had been reading each other's books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster receive...

The story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, and melodrama has turned everything—news, politics, religion, high culture—into one vast public entertainment.Neal Gabler calls them "lifies," those blockbusters written in the medium of life that dominate the media and the national conversation for weeks, months, even years: the death of Princess Diana, the trial of O.J. Simpson, Kenneth Starr vs. William Jefferson Clinton. Real Life as Entertainment is hardly a new phe...

Snapshots of the U.S.'s last nine generations—from the creators of the Mindset List media sensationJust as high school graduates in 1957 couldn't imagine life without zippers, those of 2009 can't imagine having to enter phone booths and deposit coins in order to call someone from the street corner. Every August, the Mindset List highlights the cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of that year's incoming college class. Now this fascinating book extends th...