In this essay collection David Lazar looks to our intimate relationships with characters, both well-known and lesser known, from Hollywood's Golden Age. Veering through considerations of melancholy and wit, sexuality and gender, and the surrealism of comedies of the self in an uncanny world, mixed with his own autobiographical reflections of cinephilia, Lazar creates an alluring hybrid of essay forms as he moves through the movies in his mind. Character actors from the classical era of the 1930s through the 1950s including Thelma Ritter, Oscar Levant, Martin Balsam, Nina Foch, Elizabeth Wilson, Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, and the eponymous Celeste Holm all make appearances in these considerations of how essential character actors were, and remain, to cinema.

In his new collection of essays, "Occasional Desire," David Lazar meditates on random violence and vanished phone booths, on the excessive relationship to jewelry that links Kobe Bryant and Elizabeth Taylor, on Hitchcock, Francis Bacon, and M. F. K. Fisher. He explores, in his concentrically self-aware, amused, and ironic voice, what it means to be occasionally aware that we are surviving by our wits, and that our desires, ulterior or obvious, are what keep us alive. Lazar also turns his attention on the essay itself, affording us a three-dimensional look at the craft and the art of reading and writing a literary form that maps the world as it charts the peregrinations of the mind.

Lazar is especially interested in the trappings of memory, the trapdoors of memory, the way we gild or codify, select, soften, and self-delude ourselves based on our understanding of the past. His own process of selection and reflection reminds us of how far this literary form can take us, bound only by the limits of desire and imagination.

Writers of the modern essay can trace their chosen genre all the way back to Michel de Montaigne (1533-92). But save for the recent notable best seller How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell, Montaigne is largely ignored. After Montaigne-a collection of twenty-four new personal essays intended as tribute-aims to correct this collective lapse of memory and introduce modern readers and writers to their stylistic forebear. Though it's been over four hundred years since he began writing his essays, Montaigne's writing is still fresh, and his use of the form as a means of selfexploration in the world around him reads as innovative-even by modern standards. He is, simply put, the writer to whom all essayists are indebted. Each contributor has chosen one of Montaigne's 107 essays and has written his/her own essay of the same title and on the same theme, using a quote from Montaigne's essay as an epigraph. The overall effect is akin to a covers album, with each writer offering his or her own interpretation and stylistic verve to Montaigne's themes in ways that both reinforce and challenge the French writer's prose, ideas, and forms. Featuring a who's who of contemporary essayists, After Montaigne offers a startling engagement with Montaigne and the essay form while also pointing the way to the genre's potential new directions.

Writers of the modern essay can trace their chosen genre all the way back to Michel de Montaigne (1533-92). But save for the recent notable best seller How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell, Montaigne is largely ignored. After Montaigne - a collection of twenty-four new personal essays intended as tribute - aims to correct this collective lapse of memory and introduce modern readers and writers to their stylistic forebear. Though it's been over four hundred years since he began writing his essays, Montaigne's writing is still fresh, and his use of the form as a means of selfexploration in the world around him reads as innovative-even by modern standards. He is, simply put, the writer to whom all essayists are indebted. Each contributor has chosen one of Montaigne's 107 essays and has written his/her own essay of the same title and on the same theme, using a quote from Montaigne's essay as an epigraph. The overall effect is akin to a covers album, with each writer offering his or her own interpretation and stylistic verve to Montaigne's themes in ways that both reinforce and challenge the French writer's prose, ideas, and forms. Featuring a who's who of contemporary essayists, After Montaigne offers a startling engagement with Montaigne and the essay form while also pointing the way to the genre's potential new directions.

In The Body of Brooklyn David Lazar, an acclaimed essayist and prose stylist, offers a vividly detailed, hilarious, and touching recollection of his Brooklyn upbringing in the 1960s and 70s. His immigrant Jewish heritage and his bodily history - from the travails of childhood obesity to the sexual triumphs of post-adolescent leanness - form the core of this series of essays, all of which will win the interest and admiration of readers. Moreover, this film-flavored confection is so infused with Lazar's fascinating turn of mind and memory, forever digressing and reflecting upon his digressions, without ever losing the thread of his story, that his essays will give the reader the distinctive pleasure of witnessing an extraordinary mental performance. Lazar's essays vary in their focus as much as each meanders within itself: he recalls, for example, the ""melon man"" of his childhood, grottoes in Brooklyn, his extensive wardrobe, and his father's ""pragmatically crafty alter ego."" Constantly expanding the boundaries of his writing style, Lazar also includes a unique photo-essay that provides a series of brilliant verbal riffs on old family photographs. The voice found within The Body of Brooklyn - unrepentantly literary, funny, digressive, and centered on Brooklyn - is quite unlike any other in contemporary literature. It will fascinate and intrigue all who listen.

This collection of interviews captures the conversation of one of the most prominent prose writers in the Unites States. About her the "Chicago Sun-Times" says, "She is to literary prose what Sir Laurence Olivier is to acting or Willie Mays is to baseball."

These interviews reveal her uncompromising and frequently contradictory attitudes toward the luxuries and necessities of gastronomy, the idea that sensual appreciation, in all aspects of life, is or should be necessary. In her conversations m. F. K. Fisher often returns to the complexities of her life. Other recurring subjects in these interviews include the nature of aging, the differences between men and women, and her own relationship to her work, which she describes with precision and a selective memory.

These pieces give us a view of M. F. K. Fisher in motion--speaking and changing her mind at will, with fierce wit, unable to tolerate simplistic strategies of thinking and living.

A fieldwork-based sociological study of how participants in City of London financial markets view the markets in which they work and the market mechanism in general. It is more than a narrow study of financial market participants because it is also an empirical investigation into how ideologies function and it develops a critique of pro-market ideologies such as "Thatcherism". Finally, it is a sociological study into the privileged world of high earners and the wealthy.

Markets and Ideology in the City of London is the first fieldwork-based sociological study of how participants in City of London financial markets view the markets in which they work and the market mechanism in general. But it is more than a narrow study of financial market participants because it is also an empirical investigation into how ideologies function and it develops a critique of pro-market ideologies such as 'Thatcherism'. Finally, it is one of a small number of sociological studies into the privileged world of high earners and the wealthy - sociologists too frequently study the powerless and the 'deviant' or 'marginal' groups.

Even before the controversy that surrounded the publication of "A Million Little Pieces," the question of truth has been at the heart of memoir. From Elie Wiesel to Benjamin Wilkomirski to David Sedaris, the veracity of writers' claims has been suspect. In this fascinating and timely collection of essays, leading writers meditate on the subject of truth in literary nonfiction. As David Lazar writes in his introduction, "How do we verify? Do we care to? (Do we dare to eat the apple of knowledge and say it's true? Or is it a peach?) Do we choose to? Is it a subcategory of faith? How do you respond when someone says, 'This is really true'? Why do they choose to say it then?"
The past and the truth are slippery things, and the art of nonfiction writing requires the writer to shape as well as explore. In personal essays, meditations on the nature of memory, considerations of the genres of memoir, prose poetry, essay, fiction, and film, the contributors to this provocative collection attempt to find answers to the question of what truth in nonfiction means.
Contributors: John D'Agata, Mark Doty, Su Friedrich, Joanna Frueh, Ray Gonzalez, Vivian Gornick, Barbara Hammer, Kathryn Harrison, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leonard Kriegel, David Lazar, Alphonso Lingis, Paul Lisicky, Nancy Mairs, Nancy K. Miller, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Phyllis Rose, Oliver Sacks, David Shields, and Leo Spitzer

A vividly detailed, hilariously written recollection of growing up Jewish in Brooklyn during the 1960s and 1970s.