Fifty naughty satires that break new ground and brighten your day with tongue-in-cheek observations you can't find anywhere else, not even on "Saturday Night Live" or "Mad TV: " *Politics and Politicians *Famous Writers *Child Beauty Pageants *Modern Art *TV Commercials *Canadian Shopping *TV Reality Shows *Liberals and Left-Wingers *Public Television *Famous Talk-Show Hosts *Government Bureaucrats *Modern Music *Miss America Pageant *Home Shopping Network *Pornography *Religion *Movie and TV Stars *Travel Articles *Sports *And Much, Much More...
Winner of the Man Booker Prize Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature New York Times Bestseller Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, The Denver Post, BuzzFeed, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly Named a "Must-Read" by Flavorwire and New York Magazine's "Vulture" Blog A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant. Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.
Born to an eminent Russian family, Vladimir Nabokov came to America fleeing the Nazis and remembered his time here as the richest of his life. Indeed, his best work flowed from his response to this storied land. With charm and insight, Robert Roper fills out this period in the writer's life: his friendship with Edmund Wilson, his time at Cornell, his role at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. But Nabokov in America finds its narrative heart in his and his family's serial sojourns into the West. Roper has mined fresh sources to bring detail to these journeys, and traces their significant influence in Nabokov's work: on two-lane highways and in late-'40s motels and cafés, we feel Lolita draw near, and understand Nabokov's seductive familiarity with the American mundane. Nabokov in America is also a love letter to U.S. literature, in Nabokov's broad embrace of it from Melville to the Beats. Reading Roper, we feel anew the rich learning and the Romantic mind behind some of Nabokov's most beloved books.
The years of the Great Depression, World War II, and their aftermath brought a sea change in American music. This period of economic, social, and political adversity can truly be considered a musical golden age. In the realm of classical music, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson, Virgil Thompson, and Leonard Bernstein -- among others -- produced symphonic works of great power and lasting beauty during these troubled years. It was during this critical decade and a half that contemporary writers on American culture began to speculate about "the Great American Symphony" and looked to these composers for music that would embody the spirit of the nation. In this volume, Nicholas Tawa concludes that they succeeded, at the very least, in producing music that belongs in the cultural memory of every American. Tawa introduces the symphonists and their major works from the romanticism of Barber and the "all-American" Roy Harris through the theatrics of Bernstein and Marc Blitzstein to the broad-shouldered appeal of Thompson and Copland. Tawa's musical descriptions are vivid and personal, and invite music lovers and trained musicians alike to turn again to the marvelous and lasting music of this time.
This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.
2034: Evangelical secret agents, fast food moguls, the voice of God in computer software, violence in the Bermuda Triangle! George W. Bush's foreign policy vindicated by a quick victory in Iraq, lucrative invasions of Egypt and Syria followed, bringing unparalleled prosperity to America and setting off thirty years of right-wing rule. But when a war in Iran goes bad--and the resulting cover-up goes worse--the democrats reclaim the presidency. This is the time of Pax Americana and its zealous anti-hero, government agent Tuck Squires. Reading the ironic silences between the lines of the thriller, and roaring like a jet engine, Pax Americana is a sacrilegious, conspiratorial monster; like a literary dogfight between Martin Amis and Robert Anton Wilson, loaded with prophecy, Baumeister's debut is an exorcism and an antidote for our era. 'Like an episode of Archer written by Kurt Vonnegut, Baumeister takes us into a hilarious and high-velocity world of espionage and global politics in this send-up of god, country, and the possibility of doing good in a world gone bad. It's fast-paced fun, watch out for paper cuts as the pages fly by.' -Shya Scanlon 'If there is to be an American peace, it's certainly not going to come on the pages of this lit match of a novel. Kurt Baumeister has fashioned exactly the old school pre- and post-Bond techno x-travaganza everyone bored with explorations of the louvre has been waiting for. Pax Americana is both dark satire and deeply satisfying, an adrenaline rush that runs through suspect politics, spirituality software, and the sacredly profane. It's a blast. Buy it now.' -Sean Beaudoin
