Norman Mailer. Hunter S. Thompson. David Foster Wallace. All Stephen Markley ever wanted was a reason to use their names in a book blurb. In November 2011, the nascent author and journalist attended a Republican presidential primary debate in Rochester, Michigan, wishing to see first-hand one of the most outlandish, jaw-dropping, eye-brow-raising primaries in American political history. The author of “Publish This Book” took his seat in the media filing center, set up his laptop, and uncap...

From the author of Ohio (Best Books of Summer 2018 Selection in Time, Vulture, and the New York Post) comes a brilliant, hilarious, and deeply touching memoir that blows the roof off the genre.Fed up with the complicated quest of trying to get a book published, Stephen Markley decided to cut to the chase and simply write a memoir about trying to publish a book—this book, to be precise. It's the most "meta" experiment he's ever un...

“Extraordinary...beautifully precise...[an] earnestly ambitious debut.” —The New York Times Book Review“A wild, angry, and devastating masterpiece of a book.” —NPR“[A] descendent of the Dickensian ‘social novel’ by way of Jonathan Franzen: epic fiction that lays bare contemporary culture clashes, showing us who we are and how we got here.” —Oprah Daily“A book that has stayed with me ever si...

A New York Times Notable Book“This book is, simply put, a modern classic. If you read it, you'll never forget it. Prophetic, terrifying, uplifting.” —Stephen KingFrom the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired i...

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times:"Those hungry for political news will read Double Down for the scooplets and insidery glimpses it serves up about the two campaigns, and the clues it offers about the positioning already going on among Republicans and Democrats for 2016 ... The book testifies to its authors’ energetic legwork and insider access... creating a novelistic narrative that provides a you-are-there immediacy... They succeed in ...

"[A] merciless but often humorous look at the shortcomings of American politics" by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Parliament of Whores ( Booklist).Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards is a brilliant, disturbing, hilarious, and sobering look at why politics and politicians are a necessary evil—but only just barely necessary. Read P. J. O'Rourke on the pathetic nature of our attempts to govern ourselves and lau...

The bestselling author of Zero shows how mathematical misinformation pervades-and shapes-our daily lives.According to MSNBC, having a child makes you stupid. You actually lose IQ points. Good Morning America has announced that natural blondes will be extinct within two hundred years. Pundits estimated that there were more than a million demonstrators at a tea party rally in Washington, D.C., even though roughly sixty thousand were there. Numbers h...

Friedman discusses a government system that is no longer controlled by "we, the people." Instead of Lincoln's government "of the people, by the people, and for the people," we now have a government "of the people, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats," including the elected representatives who have become bureaucrats.

Ever been left spluttering over some fatuous fib trying to pass itself off as information, even as fact? Of course you have. We all have. It's bullshit, and as Laura Penny sees it, we're drowning in the stuff. Your Call Is Important to Us is Penny's brilliant take on the "all-you-can-eat buffet of phoniness" that is our lives today."We live in an era of unprecedented bullshit production," Penny says. While bullshit is not new, more money, more media, and more people at mics have le...

Everywhere in America, the forces of digitization, innovation, and personalization are expanding our options and bettering the way we live. Everywhere, that is, except in our politics. There we are held hostage to an eighteenth century system, dominated by two political parties whose ever-more-polarized rhetorical positions mask a mutual interest in maintaining a stranglehold on power.The Declaration of Independents is a compelling and extremely entertaining manifesto on b...

Why is your brother-in-law concerned about the Estate Tax? Why do millionaire news reporters get everything wrong? Why are blood-sucking teachers bankrupting America?Jimmy Dore, the comedy darling of America's Progressive Left, answers all these questions and more! In this laugh-out-loud collection of essays that are both street-smart and informed, Jimmy sets out to discover what's wrong. Crackling with caustic wit and insight, no aspect of American life is safe from Jimmy's hilario...

Michael Graham has met the enemy, and they is us. Fifty years after the Greatest Generation fought and died on foreign soil to rescue democracy from fascism, the question facing America is Can we survive the Dumbest Generation? Can a nation of uniquely uninformed idiots living in a culture that celebrates stupidity possibly govern themselves? If the question sounds harsh, you havent read The Dumbest Generation or (author Michael Graham would argue) the Palm Beach Post. From the bumbling ba...