As captain of the college football national champion Nebraska Cornhuskers, Jason Peter was the master of all he surveyed, whipped to a frenzy by his own power and ambition. But just a few years later, his NFL career in ruins after devastating injuries, he found himself consumed by addictions: first painkillers, then crack, and finally heroin, ingested in quantities that would have killed most people. In "Hero of the Underground", Jason Peter tells his story with utter candor, an athlete's attitude and a junkie's single-minded obsessive clarity. Prowling the pre-dawn streets of Manhattan, strung out and fearing he has murdered his girlfriend...flying cross country in a chartered jet with two high-priced call girls and His and Theirs piles of coke and heroin...crawling inch by inch through shag carpet toward the door of a last-ditch Los Angeles hotel with the utter conviction that he is being surveyed through the peephole...these and other vivid scenes punctuate a life that is part Bukowski (without the exhausted world-weariness), part Burroughs (both William and Augusten), and part A Million Little Pieces (except it all really happened).

The accomplished poet and scholar John Crowe Ransom made profound contributions to twentieth-century American literature. As a teacher at Vanderbilt University he was also a leading member of the Southern Agrarian movement and a contributor to the movement's manifesto I'll Take My Stand. Ransom's Land! is a previously unpublished work that unites Ransom's poetic sensibilities with an examination of economics at the height of the Great Depression. Politically charged with Ransom's aesthetic beliefs about literature and his agrarian interpretation of economics, Land! was long thought to have been burned by its author after he failed to find a publisher. Thankfully, the manuscript was discovered, and we are now able to read this unique and interesting contribution to the Southern Agrarian revival. After the publication of I'll Take My Stand in 1930, Ransom, who provided the book's Statement of Principles in addition to its lead essay, became convinced that the book had not adequately proposed an economic alternative to Northern industrialism, which had fairly obliterated the Southern way of life. Land! was Ransom's attempt to fill this gap. In it he presents the weaknesses inherent in capitalism and argues convincingly that socialism is not only an inadequate alternative but inimical to American sensibilities. He proposes instead that agrarianism, which could flourish alongside capitalism, would relieve the problems of unemployment and the "permanently unemployed." In particular, he argues that what he calls the "amphibian farmer"-who can survive in both a monetary and a non-monetary economy- would never, so long as he relied on himself for necessities, have to fear unemployment. America, Ransom claims, is unique in offering this opportunity because, unlike in European countries, land is plentiful.