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Being the son of counter-culture author William S. Burroughs is bound to be a trial. After all, the man who frequented lesbian dives and had a fascination with firearms couldn't possibly make that great of a father. Perhaps inevitably, William Jr. (called Billy) referred to himself as "cursed from birth" and in the book of the same name editor David Ohle collects parts of Billy's third and unfinished novel Prakriti Junction, his last journals and poems, and correspondence and conversations to recreate this tortured life. Endowed with the sufferings — but not the patience — of Job, Billy's life was often characterized by tragedy and frustration, although there were also pockets of success and levity. More than just the memoir of a casualty of the Beat Generation, Cursed From Birth provides rare insight in Billy's father, as well as his scene, friends, and times. It also provides an all-too-familiar story of familial difficulties that anyone with difficult parents can understand and appreciate.

David Markson was a writer like no other. In his novels, which have been called "hypnotic," "stunning," and "exhilarating" and earned him praise from the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace, Ann Beattie and Zadie Smith. Markson created his own personal genre. With crackling wit distilled into incantatory streams of thought on art, life, and death, Markson's work has delighted and astonished readers for decades.Now for the first time, three of Markson's masterpieces are compiled into one page–turning volume: This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel. In This Is Not a Novel, readers meet an author, called only "Writer," who is weary unto death of making up stories, and yet is determined to seduce the reader into turning pages and getting somewhere. Vanishing Point introduces us to "Author," who sets out to transform shoeboxes crammed with note cards into a novel. In The Last Novel, we find an elderly author (referred to only as "Novelist") who announces that, since this will be his final effort, he possesses "carte blanche to do anything he damn well pleases."United by their focus on the trials, calamities, absurdities and even tragedies of the creative life, these novels demonstrate David Markson's extraordinary intellectual richness—leaving readers, time after time, with the most indisputably original of reading experiences.

In the fateful month of March 2000, shortly after opening a hugely successful show in New York that unveiled the more nefarious financial connections of Presidential candidate George W. Bush, the hugely ambitious Conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was found hanged in his studio, an apparent suicide. With museums lining up to buy his work, and the fame he had sought relentlessly at last within his reach, speculation about whether his death was suicide or murder has titillated the art world ever since. Lombardi was an enigma who was at once a compulsive truth-teller and a cunning player of the art game, a political operative and a stubborn independent, a serious artist and a Merry Prankster, a metaphysicist if not a scientist.Lombardi's spidery, elusive diagrams describing the evolution of the shadow-banking industry from a decades-old alliances between intelligence agencies, banking, government and organized crime, may have made him unique in art history as the only artist whose primary subject, the CIA, has turned around and studied him and his art work. Exhaustively researched, this is the first comprehensive biography of this immensely contradictory and brilliantly original artist whose pervasive influence in not only the art world, but also in the world of computer science and cyber-security is only now coming to light.

In his energetic, funny, and intelligent memoir, Peter Coyote relives his fifteen-year ride through the heart of the counterculturea journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of political street theater and the self-imposed poverty of the West Coast communal movement known as The Diggers. With this innovative collective of artist-anarchists who had assumed as their task nothing less than the re-creation of the nations political and social soul, Coyote and his companions soon became power players.In prose both graphic and unsentimental, Coyote reveals the corrosive side of love that was once called free; the anxieties and occasional terrors of late-night, drug-fueled visits of biker gangs looking to party; and his own quest for the next high. His road through revolution brought him to adulthood and to his major role as a political strategist: from radical communard to the chairman of the California Arts Council, from a street theater apprentice to a motion-picture star.

Aaron Aaronsohn was one of the most extraordinary figures in the early struggle to create a homeland for the Jewish people. Brought to Palestine at age five, as a young man Aaronsohn was a rugged adventurer who became convinced during years of solo explorations that water should govern the region's fate. He compiled both the areas first detailed water maps and a plan for Palestines national borders that predicted andin its insistence on partnership between Arabs and Jewsmight have prevented the decades of conflict to come. In World War I, he ran a spy network with his sister, Sarah, that enabled the British to capture Jerusalem but also made him the rival of his colleague T.E. Lawrence. There is evidence that beautiful, rebellious Sarah, who died tragically in 1917, was the only woman the enigmatic Lawrence ever loved. Ultimately, Aaron Aaronsohn also paid for his devotion to the new nation with his life. A history that speaks directly to the present, Aaronsohns Maps reveals for the first time Aaronsohns key role in establishing Israel and the enduring importance of Aaronsohns maps in Middle Eastern politics today.

Running so hard you think you'll choke on your next breath. Lungs burning like they're drenched in battery acid. Peripheral vision blurred by the same adrenaline that drowns out the cheers coming from the full stadium. And of course, the reporters. The men scribbling furiously on their notepads so they can publish every stumble, sprain, and sniffle in these historic games.This was the world of the female athletes in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, the first games in which women were allowed to compete (and on a trial basis, at that). Nicknamed "the Peerless Four," the Canadian track team included some of the strongest and most diversely talented women on the scene. Narrated by the team's chaperone—a former runner herself—the women embark on their journey with the same golden goals as every other Olympian, male or female. But as the Olympic tension begins to rise with unexpected injuries, heartbreaking disqualifications, and the pressure of supreme athletic performance, each woman discovers new fears and new priorities, all while the weight of women's future in the Olympics rests on their performance poise.The Peerless Four is more than a sports novel, more than a record of how far women's rights have come in the past 75 years. It's a meditation on sacrifice, loyalty, commitment, perseverance, and the courage to live a true underdog tale.

Celebrity and crime pay off big time for an American sociopath in Paris in “one of the great joys in new noir fiction” (Los Angeles Review of Books).Dr. Crandall Taylor—or rather the actor who plays him—is enjoying a cushy new life in the City of the Lights where his now–cancelled American soap opera has become a prime time retro cult hit. This newfound stardom isn’t wasted on him. Anxious to keep his brutal past a secret from fans, he’s enjoying all the fruits that fame has to offer: adulation, entrée into the trendiest clubs, and sex. What he really wants is to fund a feature film.Crandall uses his charm and intellect to draw into his narcissistic web four women: a horny network executive; an internet porn star; a bookish university student with a nasty bent; and the fetching starlet wife of an arms dealer. Crandall accepts both the crime lord’s cash and his beautiful wife’s advances. Big mistake. Now Crandall must channel his violent, megalomaniacal dark side just to stay alive—and on the run.From the national bestselling author of The Ice Harvest comes “an ingeniously twisty old–school noir along the lines of James M. Cain” (Spinetingler Magazine). With it, the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know . . . quintessential American huckster . . . and in Phillip’s sly, deft hands we find ourselves sinking down eagerly with him, glorying in the beautiful muck” (Edgar Award–winning author Megan Abbott).

The rifle fire in Dallas that killed John F. Kennedy didn't just start a frantic effort to find his assassins. It also launched a flurry of covert actions by officials like Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Helms to hide U.S. plans to invade Cuba with the secret help of Cuba's Army Commander, Juan Almeida. Cover-ups by top U.S. officials prevented a major international catastrophe but also prevented a full investigation of JFK's assassination, spawning a tragic legacy of secrecy. Extensively documented and based on exclusive interviews and newly declassified files from the National Archives, this update and expanded edition of "Legacy of Secrecy" details: The full story behind Mafia godfather Carlos Marcello's confession to JFK's murder, with new details appearing for the first time in this updated edition Each step taken by mob bosses Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and Johnny Roselli to hide the results that followed The secret attempts of Robert F. Kennedy and his aides to expose his brother's killers, continuing his war against the Mafia by focusing increased attention on the Mafia bosses behind JFK's assassination until RFK's own murder "Legacy of Secrecy" also includes new evidence about the assassination of Martin Luther King, exposing connections between James Earl Ray and Marcello, who "brokered" the hit for a Georgia white supremacist. Additionally, this trade paperback edition features fresh information about Robert Kennedy's murder, revealing the criminal ties of Sirhan and his two mob attorneys. The long shadow of secrecy surrounding both JFK's murder and the coup plan ultimately set the stage for the Watergate break-in. It drove Richard Nixon from office, triggered the murders of five Congressional witnesses, and continues to impact U.S.-Cuba relations today.

The Last Animal by Abby Geni is that rare literary find a remarkable series of stories unified around one theme: people who use the interface between the human and the natural world to contend with their modern challenges in love, loss, and family life. These are vibrant, weighty stories that herald the arrival of a young writer of surprising feeling and depth.Terror Birds tracks the dissolution of a marriage set against an ostrich farm in the sweltering Arizona desert; Dharma at the Gate features the tempest of young love as a teenaged girl must choose between mans best friend, her damaged boyfriend, and a beckoning future; Captivity follows an octopus handler at an aquarium still haunted by the disappearance of her brother years ago; The Girls of Apache Bryn Mawr details a Greek chorus of Jewish girls at a summer camp whose favorite counselor goes missing under suspicious circumstances; In the Spirit Room centers on a scientist suffering the heartbreaking loss of a parent from Alzheimers while living in the natural history museum where they both worked; in Fire Blight a father grieving over his wifes recent miscarriage finds an outlet for comfort in their backyard garden and makes a surprising discovery on how to cherish living things; and in the title story, a retired woman traces the steps of the husband who left her thirty years ago, burning the letters he had sent along the way, while the luminous and exotic wildlife of the Pacific Ocean opens up to receive her.Unflinching, exciting, ambitious and yet heartfelt, The Last Animal will guide readers through a menagerie of settings and landscapes as it underscores the connection among all living things.

"I don't know where he's buried, but if I did I'd piss on his grave." —Jerry Wexler, best friend and mentorHere Comes the Night: Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues is both a definitive account of the New York rhythm and blues world of the early '60s, and the harrowing, ultimately tragic story of songwriter and record producer Bert Berns, whose meteoric career was fueled by his pending doom. His heart damaged by rheumatic fever as a youth, doctors told Berns he would not live to see twenty–one. Although his name is little remembered today, Berns worked alongside all the greats of the era—Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, Burt Bacharach, Phil Spector, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, anyone who was anyone in New York rhythm and blues. In seven quick years, he went from nobody to the top of the pops—producer of monumental R&B classics, songwriter of "Twist and Shout," "My Girl Sloopy" and others.His fury to succeed led Berns to use his Mafia associations to muscle Atlantic Records out of a partnership and intimidate new talents like Neil Diamond and Van Morrison he signed to his record label, only to drop dead of a long expected fatal heart attack, just when he was seeing his grandest plans and life's ambitions frustrated and foiled.

From the author of Pulitzer-nominated The Devil’s Highway and national bestseller The Hummingbird’s Daughter comes an exquisitely composed collection of poetry on life at the border. Weaving English and Spanish languages as fluidly as he blends cultures of the southwest, Luis Urrea offers a tour of Tijuana, spanning from Skid Row, to the suburbs of East Los Angeles, to the stunning yet deadly Mojave Desert, to Mexico and the border fence itself. Mixing lyricism and colloquial voices, mysticism and the daily grind, Urrea explores duality and the concept of blurring borders in a melting pot society.

Over the years, Wendell Berry has sought to understand and confront the financial structure of modern society and the impact of developing late capitalism on American culture. There is perhaps no more demanding or important critique available to contemporary citizens than Berrys writings just as there is no vocabulary more given to obfuscation than that of economics as practiced by professionals and academics. Berry has called upon us to return to the basics. He has traced how the clarity of our economic approach has eroded over time, as the financial asylum was overtaken by the inmates, and citizens were turned from consumers entertained and distracted to victims, threatened by a future of despair and disillusion.For this collection, Berry offers essays from over the last 25 years, alongside new essays about the recent economic collapse, including Money Versus Goods and Faustian Economics, treatises of great alarm and courage. He offers advice and perspective that should be heeded by all concerned as our society attempts to steer from its present chaos and recession to a future of hope and opportunity. With urgency and clarity, Berry asks us to look toward a true sustainable commonwealth, grounded in realistic Jeffersonian principles applied to our present day.

Originally published more than twenty years ago and winner of a Lambda Literary Award, Paris Was a Woman is a rare profile of the female literati in Paris at the turn of the century. Now with a new preface and illustrations, this "scrapbook" of their work—along with Andrea Weiss' lively commentary—highlights the political, social, and artistic lives of the renowned lesbian and bisexual Modernists, including Colette, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach, and many more.Painstakingly researched and profusely illustrated, it is an enlightening account of women who between wars found their selves and their voices in Paris. A wealth of photographs, paintings, drawings, and literary fragments combine with Weiss' revealing text to give an unparalleled insight into this extraordinary network of women for who Paris was neither mistress nor muse, but a different kind of woman.

"Soon after the World Trade Center towers fell on 9/11, it became clear the United States would invade Afghanistan. Writer and 'This American Life' radio producer Scott Carrier decided to go there too. He wanted to see for himself: who are these fanatics, the fundamentalists, the Taliban and the like? What do they want? In his new book, Prisoner of Zion, Carrier writes about his adventures, but also about the bigger problem. Having grown up among Mormons in Salt Lake City, he argues it will never work to attack the true believers head-on. The faithful thrive on persecution. Somehow, he thinks, we need to find a way-- inside ourselves-- to rise above fear and anger"--P. [4] of cover.

Mark Perdue has so many problems that when he starts feeling chest pains on the tarmac at LAX, it dawns on him that a heart attack might be an efficient way out. Once an eminent physicist, he hasnt published or had a new idea in a decade. The younger professors at UC Berkeley pity him, and hes taken to using the back staircases to avoid their looks, which all seem to be labeling him dead weight. At home, his wife has been inconsolable since the recent late-term abortion of their afflicted fetus. And he cant deny it any longerhe is decidedly losing his mental faculties to chronic Lyme disease.Now Mark is visiting Los Angeles with his ambitious daughter, Carlotta, so she can attend a Celebrity Fantasy Vacation, in which she is promised three days and two nights of the rock star lifestyle (musical talent not required, promises the brochure). On stage, Carlotta sings her way to a new self-confidence, giving Mark a glimmer of joy in her sense of victory. But then she disappears with her newly acquired paraplegic boyfriend to take an excursion to the Hollywood sign and gets them all arrested, Mark included. Mark now faces a night in jailand maybe a hint of what he really needs to be happy.