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Malcolm Hillgartner

Malcolm Hillgartner

  • A collection of treasured stories by the unchallenged master of American fiction

    Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow has deservedly been celebrated as one of America’s greatest writers. For more than sixty years he stretched our minds, our imaginations, and our hearts with his exhilarating perceptions of life. Here, collected in one volume and chosen by the author himself, are favorites such as “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” “Leaving the Yellow House,” and a previously uncollected piece, “By the St. Lawrence.” With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. With a preface by Janice Bellow and an introduction by James Wood, this is a collection to treasure for longtime Saul Bellow fans and an excellent introduction for new readers.

  • “We, the Jury has what most legal thrillers lack—total authenticity, which is spellbinding.” —James Patterson

    On the day before his twenty-first wedding anniversary, David Sullinger buried an ax in his wife’s skull. Now, eight jurors must retire to the deliberation room and decide whether David committed premeditated murder—or whether he was a battered spouse who killed his wife in self-defense.

    Told from the perspective of over a dozen participants in a murder trial, We, the Jury examines how public perception can mask the ghastliest nightmares. As the jurors stagger toward a verdict, they must sift through contradictory testimony from the Sullingers’ children, who disagree on which parent was Satan; sort out conflicting allegations of severe physical abuse, adultery, and incest; and overcome personal animosities and biases that threaten a fair and just verdict. Ultimately, the central figures in We, the Jury must navigate the blurred boundaries between bias and objectivity, fiction and truth.

  • A spellbinding narrative of the high-stakes mission that changed the course of America, China, and global politics―and a rich portrait of the towering, complex figure who carried it out.

    As World War II came to an end, General George Marshall was renowned as the architect of Allied victory. Set to retire, he instead accepted what he thought was a final mission―this time not to win a war, but to stop one. Across the Pacific, conflict between Chinese Nationalists and Communists threatened to suck in the United States and escalate into revolution. His assignment was to broker a peace, build a Chinese democracy, and prevent a Communist takeover, all while staving off World War III.

    In his thirteen months in China, Marshall journeyed across battle-scarred landscapes, grappled with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and plotted and argued with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his brilliant wife, often over card games or cocktails. The results at first seemed miraculous. But as they started to come apart, Marshall was faced with a wrenching choice. Its consequences would define the rest of his career, as the secretary of state who launched the Marshall Plan and set the standard for American leadership, and the shape of the Cold War and the US-China relationship for decades to come. It would also help spark one of the darkest turns in American civic life, as Marshall and the mission became a first prominent target of McCarthyism, and the question of “who lost China” roiled American politics.

    The China Mission traces this neglected turning point and forgotten interlude in a heroic career―a story of not just diplomatic wrangling and guerrilla warfare, but also intricate spycraft and charismatic personalities. Drawing on eyewitness accounts both personal and official, it offers a richly detailed, gripping, close-up, and often surprising view of the central figures of the time―from Marshall, Mao, and Chiang to Eisenhower, Truman, and MacArthur―as they stood face-to-face and struggled to make history, with consequences and lessons that echo today.

  • When Picasso became Picasso: the story of how an obscure young painter from Barcelona came to Paris and made himself into the most influential artist of the twentieth century

    In 1900, an eighteen-year-old Spaniard named Pablo Picasso made his first trip to Paris. It was in this glittering capital of the international art world that, after suffering years of poverty and neglect, he emerged as the leader of a bohemian band of painters, sculptors, and poets. Fueled by opium and alcohol, inspired by raucous late-night conversations at the Lapin Agile cabaret, Picasso and his friends resolved to shake up the world.

    For most of these years Picasso lived and worked in a squalid tenement known as the Bateau Lavoir, in the heart of picturesque Montmartre. Here he met his first true love, Fernande Olivier, a muse whom he would transform in his art from Symbolist goddess to Cubist monster. These were years of struggle, often of desperation, but Picasso later looked back on them as the happiest of his long life.

    Recognition came slowly: first in the avant-garde circles in which he traveled, and later among a small group of daring collectors, including the Americans Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1906, Picasso began the vast, disturbing masterpiece known as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Inspired by the groundbreaking painting of Paul Cézanne and the startling inventiveness of African and tribal sculpture, Picasso created a work that captured and defined the disorienting experience of modernity itself. The painting proved so shocking that even his friends assumed he’d gone mad. Only his colleague George Braque understood what Picasso was trying to do. Over the next few years they teamed up to create Cubism, the most revolutionary and influential movement in twentieth-century art.

    This is the story of an artistic genius with a singular creative gift. It is filled with heartbreak and triumph, despair and delirium, all of it played out against the backdrop of the world’s most captivating city.

  • Aristotle Onassis was a born orator, and Jackie Kennedy would sit and listen to him spin off tales and stories—often racy—by the hour. A speaker of seven languages, he could keep a dinner party of some of the world’s most sophisticated conversationalists spellbound. Even Jackie couldn’t help but drop her reserve and laugh with him. America’s First Lady simply never knew anyone quite as free or exotic as Aristotle Onassis, a paradoxical blend of raconteur and ruffian.

    Beginning with Aristotle Onassis’ childhood and his first financial success as an Argentine tobacco dealer, author Frank Brady gives the listener an intimate account of Onassis’ rise to the ranks of super-billionaire. Brady captures all the drama and romance of this glamorous tycoon, peeling away the persona to reveal the husband, lover, father, financial wiz, and companion to the Churchills, Kennedys, and Roosevelts.

  • A social history of alcoholism in the United States, from the seventeenth century to the present day

    Today, millions of Americans are struggling with alcoholism, but millions are also in long-term recovery. Alcoholics Anonymous and a growing number of recovery organizations are providing support for alcoholics who will face the danger of relapse for the rest of their lives. We have finally come to understand alcoholism as a treatable illness, rather than a moral failure. Today’s advocates can draw inspiration from the victories of sober drunks throughout American history.

    Christopher Finan recounts the nation’s history with alcohol and its search for sobriety, which began among Native Americans in the colonial period, when liquor was used to cheat them of their property. He introduces us to the first of a colorful cast of characters, a remarkable Iroquois leader named Handsome Lake, who dedicated his life to helping his people renounce hard liquor. And we meet Carrie Nation, the wife of an alcoholic who destroyed bars with an ax in her anger over what alcohol had done to her family, as well as the idealistic and energetic Washingtonians, reformed drunks who led the first national movement to save men like themselves.

    Finan also tells the dramatic story of Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, the two drunks who helped each other stay sober and then created AA, which survived its tumultuous early years and has made it possible for millions of men and women to quit drinking. This is narrative history at its best: entertaining and authoritative, an important portrait of one of America’s great liberation movements.

  • Ice Ghosts weaves together the epic story of the Lost Franklin Expedition of 1845―whose two ships and crew of 129 were lost to the Arctic ice―with the modern tale of the scientists, divers, and local Inuit behind the incredible discovery of the flagship’s wreck in 2014.

    Paul Watson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was on the icebreaker that led the discovery expedition, tells a fast-paced historical adventure story: Sir John Franklin and the crew of the HMS Erebus and Terror setting off in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, the hazards they encountered, the reasons they were forced to abandon ship hundreds of miles from the nearest outpost of Western civilization, and the decades of searching that turned up only rumors of cannibalism and a few scattered papers and bones―until a combination of faith in Inuit lore and the latest science yielded a discovery for the ages.

  • The 2015 Paris and San Bernardino terrorist attacks heralded the beginning of a new wave of terrorism―one rooted in the ongoing conflict in Syria and Iraq that shows the possibility of foreign attackers working with citizens of the country. As ISIS seeks to expand its reach in the Middle East, its territory serves as a training and operations base for a new generation of jihadis. Young people from the West, primarily from Europe, have traveled to join the terror organization, reemerging as hardened fighters with military training and a network of international contacts. Many have returned to their homelands, where it is feared they are planning a new series of brutal attacks. When the War on Terror began, Western political leaders assured their citizens that they would be engaging terrorists “over there” in Iraq and Afghanistan and not at home.

    In this guide to the latest development in the War on Terror based on extensive interviews and previously unseen material, Peter R. Neumann explains the phenomenon of the “new jihadis” and why the threat of terrorism and ISIS in the West is greater than ever before.

  • At a time when the hottest issue in US immigration law is the proposed action by President Obama to protect from deportation as many as five million illegals in the United States, the John Lennon case takes on special relevance, notwithstanding the passage of forty years since he was placed in deportation proceedings. This is John and Yoko’s incredible story, as told by the lawyer who fought in the front lines.

    In 1972 President Richard M. Nixon learned that John Lennon was visiting the United States. Nixon was told that Lennon’s continued presence here could be catastrophic to his plan for reelection. Lennon, who had just made an appearance before an audience of fifteen thousand young fans at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, was rumored to be planning to join Jerry Rubin to lead a series of rock music rallies to “Dump Nixon” in anticipation of the 1972 Republican National Convention. The special significance of the 1972 convention was the fact that this would be the first national election in which the voting age was reduced from twenty-one to eighteen, adding five to ten million new prospective voters. Nixon was not popular with this young group. Lennon was.

    Indeed, Senator Strom Thurmond had just written a Dear John letter to Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, suggesting that deporting Lennon quickly would be an “appropriate countermeasure.” John Mitchell was the head of CREEP, the Committee to Reelect the President, whose day job was as attorney general, in charge of deporting illegal aliens. Following the Watergate-style advice of his legal counsel, John Dean, Nixon decided to “use the available political machinery to screw our political enemies” and proceeded in earnest to deport Lennon and his artist wife, Yoko Ono.

    Lennon and Ono consulted Leon Wildes, an expert in the field of immigration law, about the reason for their visit: their efforts to locate and secure custody of Kyoko, Yoko’s American eight-year-old child by a prior marriage. American courts had granted Lennon and Ono custody, and Ono’s prior husband violated the order to produce the child in court as ordered. Notwithstanding the Lennons’ humanitarian requests, extensions of stay as visitors were denied, the Lennons were placed in strict deportation proceedings, and the US commissioner of immigration instructed the Immigrant and Naturalization Service (INS) not to adjudicate the “outstanding artists” applications filed for Lennon and Ono by Wildes until after the Lennons were deported.

    Wildes kept the Lennons here for five years, despite the efforts of the government to deport them. During all that time, the Nixon administration invariably claimed that the Lennons were being treated like all other aliens and that it had no authority to make exceptions to their strict enforcement and removal of deportable aliens. Wildes invoked the power of the federal courts to discover the existence of the “non-priority program,” a hidden program authorizing the INS to defer the removal of illegals who might sustain serious hardship if removed. Wildes’ success in securing copies of thousands of applications granted such non-priority status ultimately resulted in the grant of that humanitarian remedy to Lennon. Lennon was eventually also granted lawful permanent residence status, overcoming the effects of his old British marijuana conviction.

    Although Wildes did not even know who John Lennon and Yoko Ono were when he was originally retained, he developed a close relationship with them both during the five-year period he represented them and thereafter.

  • In print for over fifty years, One Man’s Meat continues to delight readers with E. B. White’s witty, succinct observations on daily life at a Maine saltwater farm.

    Too personal for an almanac, too sophisticated for a domestic history, and too funny and self-doubting for a literary journal, One Man’s Meat can best be described as a primer of a countryman’s lessons and a timeless recounting of experience that will never go out of style.

  • E. B. White is best known for his children’s books, such as Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan. A columnist for the New Yorker for over half a century and co-author of The Elements of Style, White hit his stride as an American literary icon when he began publishing his One Man’s Meat columns from his saltwater farm on the coast of Maine.

    In E. B. White on Dogs, his granddaughter and manager of his literary estate, Martha White, has compiled the best and funniest of her grandfather’s essays, poems, and letters depicting over a dozen of his various canine companions. Included here are favorite essays such as “Two Letters, Both Open,” “Bedfellows,” and many others, as well as some of White’s little-known “Notes and Comment” pieces covering dog shows, sled dog races, and the trials and tribulations of city canines.

    This is a book for those who recognize a good sentence and a masterful turn of a phrase; for E. B. White fans looking for more from their favorite author; and for dog lovers who may not have discovered the wit, style, and compassion of this most distinguished of American essayists.

  • Legendary author and essayist E. B. White writes, “The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.”

    Covering a large number of subjects, this classic collection features thirty-one of White’s most memorable essays.

  • Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, E. B. White’s stroll around Manhattan remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America’s foremost literary figures. The New York Times named Here Is New York one of the ten best books ever written about the metropolis, and the New Yorker called it “the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city.”

    Included with this essay are two short poems by E. B. White: “Commuter” and “Critic,” both published in the New Yorker in 1925.

  • From the award-winning, esteemed cofounding editor of the legendary Tin House magazine, All Tomorrow’s Parties is an intimate, spirited memoir of a rebellious young man’s fierce pursuit of an artistic life and a portrait of a shifting Berlin in the midst of a cultural renaissance.

    Rob Spillman has devoted his life to the rebellious pursuit of artistic authenticity. Born in Germany to two driven musicians, his childhood was spent among the West Berlin cognoscenti in a city two hundred miles behind the Iron Curtain. There, the Berlin Wall stood as a stark reminder of the split between East and West, between suppressed dreams and freedom of expression.

    After an unsettled youth moving between divorced parents in disparate cities, Spillman would eventually find his way into the literary world of New York City, only to abandon it to return to Berlin just months after the wall came down. Twenty-five and newly married, Spillman and his wife moved to the anarchic streets of East Berlin in search of the bohemian lifestyle of their idols. But Spillman soon discovered he was chasing the one thing that had always eluded him: a place, or person, to call home.

    In his intimate, entertaining, and heartfelt memoir, Spillman narrates a colorful, music-filled coming-of-age portrait of an artist’s life that is also a cultural exploration of a shifting Berlin.

  • A former Islamic State hostage and veteran Middle East journalist explores misperceptions of Islamic State and their consequences.

    For more than a decade, French journalist Nicolas Hénin has reported from the front lines of conflict in the Middle East, much of his time spent in Iraq and Syria. He witnessed the events leading to the rise of Islamic State, and in June 2013, he was himself captured by IS and spent ten months in captivity with James Foley and others who were beheaded soon after Hénin was released. Those barbarities and the first strikes against Islamic State prompted Hénin to present in Jihad Academy what he knows IS to be, in contrast to the misperceptions he sees perpetuated on an ongoing basis.

    Hénin sees Islamic State as a political entity, having arisen out of a sense of injustice and lack of hope and as the natural result of the Western inability to support Syrian democracy activists. The West, however, sees IS only as a terrorist organization, ignoring its political message and goals; by doing so, we act as a recruitment agent for Islamic State and largely overlook the greatest victims of IS violence: civilians on the ground. IS will only be ultimately defeated, he argues, by the people of the region, just as others have overthrown groups that practiced political violence on their people.

    Jihad Academy is a fresh and powerful assessment by a writer with the perspective of a historian, the passion of a journalist long committed to the region, and the credibility of someone who has witnessed terrorism firsthand. Hénin’s is an important new voice in the ongoing debate about our role in the Middle East.

  • Fifteen years ago, Bronx-born plumber Tommy Rosa died in a hit-and-run incident. Lying by the road, he felt a tug whisking him off into a tunnel of light to meet his divine teacher in heaven. After several weeks in a coma, Tommy returned to earth to walk again with a heightened sense of connection to one and all.

    Around the same time, Dr. Stephen Sinatra, an integrative cardiologist, was dismantling the prevailing ideas of preventive pharmacology with his holistic approach to treatment. In their first encounter, Tommy got the intuitive message that Dr. Sinatra had an infection in his hip. Tommy’s insight confirmed Dr. Sinatra’s own suspicion. When Tommy shared with Dr. Sinatra the divine revelations of healing that he had learned, Dr. Sinatra was shocked—the keys to solving the imbalance of energy that he had identified as the cause of most chronic illnesses were the same as those Tommy was relating.

    From this intersection of the divine and the scientific, Tommy Rosa and Dr. Sinatra began writing a prescriptive guide for healthy living. In Health Revelations from Heaven and Earth, Tommy Rosa reveals the eight revelations, gleaned from God, that will lead you toward revitalized health, a newfound sense of purpose, and spiritual balance—fully corroborated by Dr. Sinatra’s four decades of medical expertise—bringing heaven and earth a little bit closer.

  • Two ambitious men. One historic mission.

    With a blinding flash in the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1945, the world was changed forever. The bomb that ushered in the atomic age was the product of one of history’s most improbable partnerships. The General and the Genius reveals how two extraordinary men pulled off the greatest scientific feat of the twentieth century.

    Leslie Richard Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers, who had made his name by building the Pentagon in record time and under budget, was made overlord of the impossibly vast scientific enterprise known as the Manhattan Project. His mission: to beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb. So he turned to the nation’s preeminent theoretical physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer—the chain-smoking, martini-quaffing son of wealthy Jewish immigrants, whose background was riddled with communist associations—Groves’ opposite in nearly every respect. In their three-year collaboration, the iron-willed general and the visionary scientist led a brilliant team in a secret mountaintop lab and built the fearsome weapons that ended the war but introduced the human race to unimaginable new terrors. And at the heart of this most momentous work of World War II is the story of two extraordinary men—the general and the genius.

  • In this extraordinary follow-up to the critically acclaimed The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom—one of today’s preeminent thinkers—offers us a bold rewrite of the evolutionary saga. He shows how plants and animals (including humans) have evolved together as components of a worldwide learning machine. He describes the network of life on Earth as one that is, in fact, a “complex adaptive system,” a global brain in which each of us plays a sometimes conscious, sometimes unknowing role. And he reveals that the World Wide Web is just the latest step in the development of this brain. These are theories as important as they are radical.

    Informed by twenty years of interdisciplinary research, Bloom takes us on a spellbinding journey back to the big bang to let us see how its fires forged primordial sociality. As he brings us back via surprising routes, we see how our earliest bacterial ancestors built multitrillion-member research-and-development teams a full 3.5 billion years ago. We watch him unravel the previously unrecognized strands of interconnectedness woven by crowds of trilobites, hunting packs of dinosaurs, flocks of flying lizards, troops of baboons making communal decisions, and adventurous tribes of protohumans spreading across continents but still linked by primitive forms of information networking. We soon find ourselves reconsidering our place in the world. Along the way, Bloom offers us exhilarating insights into the strange tricks of body and mind that have organized a variety of life forms: spiny lobsters, which, during the Paleozoic Era, participated in communal marching rituals; and bees, which, during the age of dinosaurs, conducted collective brainwork. This fascinating tour continues on to the sometimes brutal subculture wars that have spurred the growth of human civilization since the Stone Age. Bloom shows us how culture shapes our infant brains, immersing us in a matrix of truth and mass delusion that we think of as reality.

    Global Brain is more than just a brilliantly original contribution to the ongoing debate on the inner workings of evolution; it is a “grand vision,” says the eminent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, a work that transforms our very view of who we are and why.

  • The Lucifer Priciple is a revolutionary work that explores the intricate relationships among genetics, human behavior, and culture to put forth the thesis that “evil” is a by-product of nature’s strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric. Though this argument is not a new one—it has been brought forth by such great historical figures as St. Paul, Thomas Hobbes, and Raymond Dart—Howard Bloom here takes fresh data from a variety of sources and shapes it into a lens through which listeners can reinterpret the human experience.

  • American Warlords is the story of the greatest “team of rivals” since the days of Lincoln.

    In a lifetime shaped by politics, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proved himself a master manipulator of Congress, the press, and the public. But when war in Europe and Asia threatened America’s shores, FDR found himself in a world turned upside down, where his friends became his foes, his enemies his allies. To help wage democracy’s first “total war,” he turned to one of history’s most remarkable triumvirates.

    Henry Stimson, an old-money Republican from Long Island, rallied to FDR’s banner to lead the Army as Secretary of War and championed innovative weapons that helped shape our world today. General George C. Marshall argued with Roosevelt over grand strategy, but he built the world’s greatest war machine and willingly sacrificed his dream of leading the invasion of Europe that made his protégé, Dwight Eisenhower, a legend. Admiral Ernest J. King, a hard-drinking, irascible fighter who “destroyed” Pearl Harbor in a prewar naval exercise, understood how to fight Japan, but he also battled the Army, the Air Force, Douglas MacArthur, and his British allies as they moved armies and fleets across the globe.

    These commanders threw off sparks whenever they clashed: generals against politicians, Army versus Navy. But those sparks lit the fire of victory. During four years of bitter warfare, FDR’s lieutenants learned to set aside deep personal, political, and professional differences and pull a nation through the twentieth century’s darkest days.

    Encircling Roosevelt’s warlords—and sometimes bitterly at odds with them—was a colorful cast of the Second World War’s giants: Winston Churchill, MacArthur, Josef Stalin, Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Charles de Gaulle. These and other larger-than-life figures enrich a sweeping story of an era brimming with steel, fire, and blood.

    Drawing upon a wealth of primary sources, American Warlords goes behind closed doors to give readers an intimate, often surprising view of titans who led America from isolation to the summit of global power. Written in a robust, engaging style, author Jonathan W. Jordan offers a vivid portrait of four extraordinary Americans in the eye of the war’s hurricane.

  • When Thomas Alva Edison asks for information, most feel compelled to give it. Not University of Washington professor Benjamin Bradshaw. Not when the question concerns a device conceived in anger and harnessed for murder. Bradshaw hopes the mysterious invention remains lost in Elliott Bay, eluding the search of deep-sea divers. But when, on a cold December morning in 1903, an electrician is found dead in the men's wear window of Seattle's Bon March├® clutching a festoon of Edison's holiday lights, Bradshaw suspects a dangerous game has been set in motion. Greed, passion, silence? Motives multiply as the dead man's secrets come to light.

    Bradshaw and his investigative partner Henry Pratt join Seattle police detective James O'Brien to narrow suspects, but Bradshaw's intuition fails him. His heart is elsewhere, his attention distracted by the dilemma of loving a woman he cannot marry without defying his faith. With Christmas fast approaching, the pressure mounts, as does Bradshaw's dread that this will be his first unsolved case. With no other option, he does the unthinkable and prepares to face his greatest fears. Whatever the outcome, there will be no going back.

  • The wickedest, most wonderful science fiction story ever created in our—or any—time

    Anything can begin at a party in California—and everything does in this bold masterwork by a grand master of science fiction.

    When four supremely sensual and unspeakably cerebral humans—two male, two female—find themselves under attack from aliens who want their awesome quantum breakthrough, they take to the skies—and zoom into the cosmos on a rocket roller-coaster ride of adventure, danger, ecstasy, and peril.

  • In his blockbuster new book, businessman and entrepreneur Donald J. Trump argues that America is in serious trouble, and that our days as a superpower are numbered.

    “Our nation has become a whipping post for the rest of the world. It’s time to get tough on China and other countries that are methodically and systematically taking advantage of the United States,” says Trump. “We need to get serious about the debt, we need to get serious about oil, we need to get serious about job creation, and we need to get serious about our country’s future.” With his trademark candor and charisma, Trump reveals his hard-line, commonsense solutions to the problems plaguing us today and shows how we can put our country back on the path to greatness.

    Nobody is better at achieving spectacular success than Donald Trump. Here, Trump shows how America can do the same.

  • This extraordinary book is the result of Saul Bellow’s sojourn in Israel in 1975. A personal record of his stay—his experiences and impressions—as well as a meditation, it crackles with wit and controversy on America’s relationship with this embattled country.

    Using quick sketches and vignettes, Bellow captures the personal opinions, passions, and dreams of several Israelis, and he also adds to these his own reflections on being Jewish in the twentieth century. The varying viewpoints of those he encounters and interviews offer a revealing look at the history and challenges of Israel, and Bellow’s passionate storytelling draws listeners in to share in his experience.

  • Hailed as one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, this vibrant portrait of 1930s culture masterfully explores the anxiety and hope, the despair and surprising optimism of distressed Americans during the Great Depression.

    Morris Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer called "one of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature," has brought together a staggering range of material, from epic Dust Bowl migrations to zany screwball comedies, elegant dance musicals, wildly popular swing bands, and streamlined art deco designs. Exploding the myth that Depression culture was merely escapist, Dickstein concentrates on the dynamic energy of the arts and the resulting lift they gave to the nation's morale. A fresh and exhilarating analysis of one of America's most remarkable artistic periods, Dancing in the Dark is a monumental critique.

  • Herzog is a man seeking balance, trying to regain a foothold on his life. Thrown out of his ex-wife’s house, Herzog retreats to his abandoned home in a remote village in the Berkshire Mountains. Amid the dust of the disused house, he begins scribbling letters to family, friends, lovers, colleagues, enemies, dead philosophers, ex-presidents—anyone with whom he feels compelled to set the record straight. The letters—which are never sent—are a means to cure himself of the psychic strain of the failures of his life: that of being a bad husband, a loving but poor father, an ungrateful child, a distant brother, an egoist to friends, and an apathetic citizen.

    Herzog is primarily a novel of redemption. For all of its innovative techniques and brilliant comedy, it tells one of the oldest of stories. Like The Divine Comedy, it progresses from darkness to light, from ignorance to enlightenment. Today it is still considered one of the greatest literary expressions of postwar America.

  • Winner of the first National Book Award in 1950, this modern classic takes us into the gritty underbelly of post–World War II America. It is the story of “Frankie Machine,” a veteran, drug addict, and card-dealer in an illicit poker game being run in Chicago’s near northwest side. Frankie has just returned from the federal prison for narcotics addicts in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was exposed to all the pressures, anxieties, and temptations that had put him there in the first place.