"Essays about 1990s popular culture, politics, sports, literature, music"-- At the beginning, everyone's name and address was listed in the phone book, and everyone answered their landline because you didn't know who it was. By the end, exposing someone's address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their cell phone if they didn't know who was calling. Klosterman shows that in the 1990s there was a wholesale shift in how society...

This absorbing collection of letters spans a decade in the lifelong friendship of two remarkable writers who engaged the subjects of literature, race, and identity with deep clarity and passion. The correspondence begins in 1950 when Ellison is living in New York City, hard at work on his enduring masterpiece, Invisible Man, and Murray is a professor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Mirroring a jam session in which two jazz musicians "trade twelves"-each...

"A literary history of the Federal Writers Project"--

A look at the history of the American comedy publication and production company, National Lampoon, from its beginning in the 1970s to 2010. The influence the magazine has had on our culture through turbulent times, morphing into Second City, Saturday Night Live, and the movies, and the stars and sorrows it has produced.

Examines the intellectual deterioration of American politics, from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle, from George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, to its apotheosis in Donald J. Trump.

Dancing in the Dark shows how our worst economic crisis, as it eroded American individualism and punctured the American dream, produced in the 1930s some of the greatest writing, photography, and mass entertainment ever seen in this country.