Meditations on maximum velocity. An introspective history of the land speed record.

A delta blues singer guides a Third Reich officer on a tour of controversial Civil War Battles. En route, they retrace the steps of cagey Confederate hero Nathan Bedford Forrest's greatest triumphs and vicious bloodbaths, while re-evaluating the notions of human bondage, charisma, existentialism and duty before encountering the very violence they themselves might be complicit in.

Volume 1 of the Cole Coonce drag strip reader. Churned out between races while sitting in a trackside porta-potty, Coonce's collection of incendiary drag strip journalism was written during his days at Super Stock & Drag Illustrated, Full Throttle News and Nitronic Research, between his stints as a guitar player in Braindead Soundmachine and his return to show business as Angelyne's fluffer in Studio City, California. Its 256 pages of ack-ack includes "Viva La Nitro " and "Who's Afraid of Arley Langlo?"

Sex & Travel & Vestiges of Metallic Fragments is an anthology of essays probing and deconstructing modern and historical concerns, from Katrina to Antietam to Hollywood to Irwindale; be it luscious low-rent lap dancers or land speed record losers; reactionary rock stars or genocidal Confederate Generals; Death Valley meth-heads or Japanese drifters; Teutonic milfs in swimsuits or Ashcroft informants; anarchic adrenaline-addled urban bicyclists or Scientologists; from Mark E. Smith and Merle Haggard to Kathie Lee Gifford, Courtney Love and the chick from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Of the zeitgeist and a cosmological constant, this collection of literary journalism for the fast, the inquisitive and the appalled.