America has become home to many of the world’s peoples, scattered by war, famine, and economic hardship, drawn here by the desire to live the American dream. According to editors Suarez and Van Cleave, however, recent arrivals as well... Read More

This author is one of those literary figures who is most often encountered as a minor figure in the biographies of better known artists with whom he was friends, such as Tennessee Williams, Gertrude Stein, Max Ernst, and William Carlos... Read More

People do not like to be alone. Although they may claim to desire privacy, in reality most need the comfort of having someone—or something—close by for company. That’s the reason that television is so omnipresent, theorizes... Read More

A tattered copy of an old Argentine cowboy fable of dusty death gives this lively novel its borrowed title, but its code of male fighting honor has a vernacular homeboy sound. This code is very much at home in both Chicago’s rich... Read More

In Welcome to the Dreamhouse, University of Southern California professor Spigel changes the terms of television criticism in a collection of essays that range from the surprising to the sublime. Rather than restaging the dusty argument... Read More

When Alice fell down the rabbit hole and entered Wonderland, she exclaimed “Curiouser and curiouser.” Perhaps she maintained her equilibrium amongst all the oddity by considering the dreamlike nature of her experience. According to... Read More

This impressively illustrated companion volume to a forthcoming TV series on the destruction of the Aztec and Inca civilizations and related explorations is necessarily one of high drama and telling contrasts. It is also broad-based and... Read More

The search for the roots and legacies of America’s second Civil War—the 1960s—continues unabated in the many books investigating this tumultuous era. Writers such as Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and Terry... Read More