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.

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.

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

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?"

Los Angeles, they say, is a siren. Calling all of us not born in this in this city, like the Whore of Babylon to an end-of-the-world orgy. It's easy for those of us recent additions to this freakshow-sex party to ignore that this city is followed by an immense history that still lingers along the streets (and the gutters) we walk everyday. New Angelenos truly enthralled with their home have years of reading ahead of them, starting with the apocalyptic Day of the Locust. For the slackers just mildly interested in getting some head from Los Angeles, there is only one book: Come Down From the Hills and Make My Baby. Reading Cole Coonce's pornographic love letter to Los Angeles is like skipping ahead in the history textbook straight to the Rodney King beating. After all, those of us here and now really cannot do without a little knowledge of the decade from which our city has not recovered. Loosely factual, this novel follows the indifferent musical career of the experimental-punk-noise outfit Braindead Soundmachine, the drunken exploits of the band members in East Hollywood when it was actually seedy, and the narrator's post-modern love for Los Angeles as he watches it burn on TV during the L.A. riots from a sports bar in Oregon. This book is worth picking up for its sexy, nihilistic description of transvestite strippers alone. But as a historical document, it's priceless.-Evan George, Los Angeles Alternative Press