A New York Times Notable Book Arthur Gelb was hired by The New York Times in 1944 as a night copyboy—the paper’s lowliest position. Forty-five years later, he retired as its managing editor. Along the way, he exposed crooked cops and politicians, mentored a generation of our most-talented journalists, was the first to praise the as-yet-undiscovered Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand, and brought Joe Papp instant recognition. From D-Day to the liberation of the concentration camps, from the agony of Vietnam to the resignation of a President, from the fall of Joe McCarthy to the rise of the “Woodstock Nation,” Gelb gives an insider’s take on the great events of this nation's history—what he calls “the happiest days of my life.”
A New York Times Notable Book Arthur Gelb was hired by The New York Times in 1944 as a night copyboy—the paper’s lowliest position. Forty-five years later, he retired as its managing editor. Along the way, he exposed crooked cops and politicians, mentored a generation of our most-talented journalists, was the first to praise the as-yet-undiscovered Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand, and brought Joe Papp instant recognition. From D-Day to the liberation of the concentration camps, from the agony of Vietnam to the resignation of a President, from the fall of Joe McCarthy to the rise of the “Woodstock Nation,” Gelb gives an insider’s take on the great events of this nation's history—what he calls “the happiest days of my life.”
In this insightfully honest and moving memoir about the realities of teaching in an inner-city school, Ed Boland "smashes the dangerous myth of the hero-teacher [and] shows us how high the stakes are for our most vulnerable students" (Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black). In a fit of idealism, Ed Boland left a twenty-year career as a non-profit executive to teach in a tough New York City public high school. But his hopes quickly collided headlong with the appalling reality of his students' lives and a hobbled education system unable to help them. Freddy runs a drug ring for his incarcerated brother; Nee-cole is homeschooled on the subway by her brilliant homeless mother; Byron's Ivy League dream is dashed because he is undocumented. In the end, Boland isn't hoisted on his students' shoulders and no one passes AP anything. This is no urban fairy tale of at-risk kids saved by a Hollywood hero, but a searing indictment of schools that claim to be progressive but still fail their students. Told with compassion, humor, and a keen eye, Boland's story is sure to ignite debate about the future of American education and attempts to reform it.
A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the 2022 National Book Award Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.” As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm. With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.
Set in San Francisco in the 1960s, The Last City Room chronicles the conflict that erupts, ideologically and physically, between the old guard of an aging city newspaper and the ascendant Berkeley radicals determined to be heard at any cost. It's almost a tradition in the city room of The Herald for journalists to collapse at their desks, having worked, imbibed, and smoked themselves into the grave. On these occasions the behavior required by the dead man's erstwhile colleagues - a group of cynical old news hounds with skin the color of faded newsprint - is to applaud, simultaneously hailing their fallen comrade and signaling an opening in the city room. It is in this manner that William Colfax, an ambitious young reporter, earns a coveted position as a staff member of this long-respected newspaper. Colfax accepts the offer mere minutes after his predecessor's body has been carted away. The Last City Room depicts the decline of an influential newspaper in San Francisco during the turbulent early 60s. As the conservatism of the old guard, led by The Herald's publisher and his bylined minions, clashes with the radical leaders ascending to power in the city, Colfax quickly realizes that the golden days of The Herald are long over. With his past threatening to ensnare him between the two warring factions, Colfax's struggle quickly becomes one of not simply proving himself as a reporter, but of maintaining his independence and integrity as a journalist.
Kidnapped as a teenage girl, Ma has been locked inside a purpose built room in her captor's garden for seven years. Her five year old son, Jack, has no concept of the world outside and happily exists inside Room with the help of Ma's games and his vivid imagination where objects like Rug, Lamp and TV are his only friends. But for Ma the time has come to escape and face their biggest challenge to date: the world outside Room.
This true crime saga—with an eccentric Southern backdrop—introduces the reader to the story of a murder in a crumbling Louisville mansion and the decades of secrets and corruption that live within the old house’s walls. On June 18, 2010, police discover a body buried in the wine cellar of a Victorian mansion in Old Louisville. James Carroll, shot and stabbed the year before, has lain for 7 months in a plastic storage bin—his temporary coffin. Homeowner Jeffrey Mundt and his boyfriend, Joseph Banis, point the finger at each other in what locals dub The Pink Triangle Murder. On the surface, this killing appears to be a crime of passion, a sordid love tryst gone wrong in a creepy old house. But as author David Dominé sits in on the trials, a deeper story emerges: the struggle between hope for a better future on the one hand and the privilege and power of the status quo on the other. As the court testimony devolves into he-said/he-said contradictions, David draws on the confidences of neighbors, drag queens, and other acquaintances within the city's vibrant LGBTQ community to piece together the details of the case. While uncovering the many past lives of the mansion itself, he enters a murky underworld of gossip, neighborhood scandal, and intrigue.
The definitive word on tacos from native Angeleno Wes Avila, who draws on his Mexican heritage as well as his time in the kitchens of some of the world's best restaurants to create taco perfection. In a town overrun with taco trucks, Wes Avila's Guerrilla Tacos has managed to win almost every accolade there is, from being crowned Best Taco Truck by LA Weekly to being called one of the best things to eat in Los Angeles by legendary food critic Jonathan Gold. Avila's approach stands out in a crowded field because it's unique: the 50 base recipes in this book are grounded in authenticity but never tied down to tradition. Wes uses ingredients like kurobata sausage and sea urchin, but his bestselling taco is made from the humble sweet potato. From basic building blocks to how to balance flavor and texture, with comic-inspired illustrations and stories throughout, Guerrilla Tacos is the final word on tacos from the streets of L.A.
A Room in Dodge City follows a nameless drifter into an American heart of darkness. In this nightmarish version of the historic Dodge City, mythic beasts crawl out of the woodwork; bizarre rituals are enacted; and death is never the end. Equal parts humor and horror-show, David Leo Rice's novel combines the mundaneness of modern life-motels, strip malls, temp jobs-with something stranger, darker, and more eternal. Told through linked vignettes that read like metaphoric fairytales gone wrong, Dodge City consumes the reader just as it slowly consumes the drifter, leaving all to wonder whether any of us can ever truly escape this world-or our own. Winner of the Electric Book Award Each chapter is fully illustrated by Christina Collins. "David Lynch meets Neil Gaiman meets Samuel Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd. Just as Dodge City is a place the narrator can never leave, Rice's book sucks you in and doesn't let you walk out of it intact, either." -Nick Antosca, author of The Girlfriend Game, Midnight Picnic, & Fires "With a draftsman's hand and a psychonaut's eye, Rice has mapped the alien precinct in which we already live. I've never encountered a book so strange yet so familiar. Writers such as William Burroughs and Samuel Delany may have helped prepare the ground, but this high-speed, controlled drift across it is all Rice's own." -Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan & A Compendium of Domestic Incidents "A vivid, precisely described nightmare filled with jokes for people who think nothing is funny anymore. Rice imagines American pop culture as a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, and he gives us a carnival barker's tour through a disturbing landscape of lost souls, vain ambitions, and distorted identities, ultimately finding a path to redemption through the spiritual wreckage." -Mark Beauregard, author of The Whale: A Love Story "Rice cares deeply about his characters and this comes out in every vignette. He doesn't follow the nihilistic postmodern structure by declaring that life is meaningless or hopeless. What we find is the presence of hope in all things, no matter how run-down they might appear on the surface." -Joe Halstead, author of West Virginia "Dodge City is a walk on the dark side of the contemporary imagination that reworks the post-realist storytellings of Donald Barthelme or Henri Michaux into a voice that is unique. A picaresque novel for the age of the Darknet and Tor." -Simon Pummell, director of Bodysong & Identicals "In his mind-boggling debut novel, Rice conjures a series of seemingly unassuming vignettes that read like a revelatory prose poem written by the Zodiac Killer. A celebration of what it means to know that you know that you can never know everything." -Mike Kleine, author of Kanley Stubrick "Don't enter into Rice's terrifying and hilarious fictional multiverse looking for causality, continuity, or logic, as we know them. A Room in Dodge City will plunge you into a nightmarish warren-maze where somewhere, amid the numberless trapdoors, inner chambers and branching halls on branching halls, a literary orgy is going down among the imaginative intellects of Blake Butler, Kathryn Davis, Haruki Murakami, Livia Llewellyn, and Robert Coover, refereed by Cronenberg and Lynch." -Adrian Van Young, author of Shadows in Summerland & The Man Who Noticed Everything "A Room in Dodge City warps the serial format to its own uncanny ends. Briskly paced with elegantly streamlined prose, the book follows its own impeccably strange and addictive dream logic." -Jeff Jackson, author of Mira Corpora & Novi Sad "Unsettling and unsettled, reading A Room in Dodge City is like reading Jakob von Gunten's dream journal the day after he'd stayed up late to watch High Plains Drifter and Videodrome." -Gabriel Blackwell, author of Madeleine E. Find out more about Alternating Current Press at alternatingcurrentarts.com.
The primary purpose of this book is to make a passionate, but practical appeal to the reasonable, to the rational, to the righteous, and even to the radical and the racist, to reconsider the error of their ways regarding a host of pertinent issues facing 21st century United States of America. If you are a person that is fake, phony, or a fool, you might not want to read this book. If you can’t handle the unfiltered, politically incorrect, unadulterated truth, then don’t read this book. If you are sensitive and easily offended, don’t read this book. If you are not in one those categories, you need to read this book. This book represents the author’s frustration with a people and a nation that is losing its way. This book calls out a divided 21st-century America, that in many cases, calls right wrong and calls wrong right. America has become a nation, that in some cases, applauds, condones, and celebrates wrong doing, but dismisses and ignores doing right. A nation who has certain citizens who think they are upholding the ideals and freedoms of the foundation of this country, but on the contrary, are doing and behaving in a way that is the exact opposite of the values and principles this nation was founded on. This book is a wake-up call to the citizens of the greatest nation in the history of mankind to come together and get it together, before we wreck it together. This book is a wake-up call to my black community. We must do better. This book is a wake-up call to all Christians in America. Christians in America have got to rise up and come together to do better. This book is a wake-up call to white America. White Americans must do better. This book also is a wake-up call and reminder to all American citizens to be thankful for our fine military personnel, border patrol agents, ICE agents, police officers, fireman, and all civic duty servants, who faithfully put their lives on the line every day to insure the safety of the citizens of this country. This book is a wake-up call to all Americans. We, as a nation, must come together to do better. To black, white, brown and all Americans, don’t let the controversial title deter you from reading this book. This book challenges black, white, brown, yellow and all Americans to do better toward one another. We have some critical issues facing this nation and this book does not shy away from addressing any of them head on. This book also offers wise, practical, fair, and reasonable solutions to many of the critical issues facing this nation. There are so many interesting and different topics discussed in this book, it is like getting ten books in one. This book is like a strong cup of coffee or a spicy bowl of gumbo. It has a little some of everything in it and it will give some people heartburn. Unarmed Blacks being killed and abused by those sworn to protect us, and nothing is being done about it. Blacks killing one another at record numbers, and no one seems to care. The book How To Kill A Black Man offers a very thought-provoking answer to this controversial, eye brow raising, emotion stirring title. This book also deals with a lot other interesting, debatable controversial, yet pertinent topics to meditate and consider. Not only does this book address controversial issues, it also offers reasonable and honest solutions to some challenging issues in the African–American community and 21st century United States of America.
