These stories, told in a voice that is at once witty, melancholy, and bravely honest, paint a tableau of lovers and family, of loss and pleasure, desire and memory. From the young secretary who by day hopes someone will notice her Phi Beta Kappa key and by night makes love to a married man she met at a Florsheim shoe store, to the shattering of a marriage by the shores of a tranquil lake, Self-Help is a unique, enduring work of short fiction.

"A smart, thoughtful, and timely exploration of two sisters' lives from the 1950s to the present as they struggle to find their places--and be true to themselves--in a rapidly evolving world. Mrs. Everything is an ambitious, richly textured journey through history--and herstory--as these two sisters navigate a changing America over the course of their lives"-- Growing up in 1950s Detroit, Jo and Bethie Kaufman's roles in the family are clearly defined....

Learn about the different ways people celebrate the Chinese New Year.

What does it mean to think about Dallas in relationship to Dallas? In The History of the Future, McPherson reexamines American places and the space between history, experience, and myth. Private streets, racism, and the St. Louis World's Fair; fracking for oil and digging for dinosaurs in North Dakota boomtowns-Americana slides into apocalypse in these essays, revealing us to ourselves. -- from Amazon.

Throughout his career as one of the foremost playwrights of the twentieth century, Arthur Miller wrote a remarkable series of highly regarded short stories, pieces that reveal the same profound insight, humanism, and empathy that are the hallmarks of his great dramatic works. Presence is a collection of Millers last published fiction-pieces that originally appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and elsewhere-and like his previous collections,...

This book, a sequel and companion volume to Marcus's Real Life Rock: The Complete Top Ten Columns, 1986-2014, is a collection of hundreds of items from the crisscrossing spectrum of culture and politics throughout the tumultuous past six years of American life. Tracking the evolution of national identity during the convulsive Trump administration, Marcus spotlights the most whip-smart cultural artifacts to compose a mosaic portrait of American society,...

Presents thirty essays and articles highlighting a variety of American individuals, communities, and subcultures.