"Heyday" is a brilliantly imagined, wildly entertaining tale of America's boisterous coming of age-a sweeping panorama of madcap rebellion and overnight fortunes, palaces and brothels, murder and revenge-as well as the story of a handful of unforgettable characters discovering the nature of freedom, loyalty, friendship, and true love.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, modern life is being born: the mind-boggling marvels of photography, the telegraph, and railroads; a flood of show business spectacles and newspapers; rampant sex and drugs and drink (and moral crusades against all three); Wall Street awash with money; and giddy utopian visions everywhere. Then, during a single amazing month at the beginning of 1848, history lurches: America wins its war of manifest destiny against Mexico, gold is discovered in northern California, and revolutions sweep across Europe-sending one eager English gentleman off on an epic transatlantic adventure. . . .
Amid the tumult, aristocratic Benjamin Knowles impulsively abandons the Old World to reinvent himself in New York, where he finds himself embraced by three restless young Americans: Timothy Skaggs, muckraking journalist, daguerreotypist, pleasure-seeker, stargazer; the fireman Duff Lucking, a sweet but dangerously damaged veteran of the Mexican War; and Duff's dazzling sister Polly Lucking, a strong-minded, free thinking actress (and discreet part-time prostitute) with whom Ben falls hopelessly in love.
Beckoned by the frontier, new beginnings, and the prospects of the California Gold Rush, all four set out on a transcontinental race west-relentlessly tracked, unbeknownst to them, by a cold-blooded killer bent on revenge.
A fresh, impeccable portrait of an era startlingly reminiscent of our own times, "Heyday "is by turns tragic and funny and sublime, filled with bona fide heroes and lost souls, visionaries (Walt Whitman, Charles Darwin, Alexis de Tocqueville) and monsters, expanding horizons and narrow escapes. It is also an affecting story of four people passionately chasing their American dreams at a time when America herself was still being dreamed up-an enthralling, old-fashioned yarn interwoven with a bracingly modern novel of ideas.
"In this utterly engaging novel, the author of "Turn of the Century" brings 19th-century America vividly to life . . . While this is a long book, it moves quickly, with historical detail that's involving but never a drag on the action; the characters are beautifully drawn. A terrific book; highly recommended." -"Library Journal"
""Heyday" is fuled by manic energy, fanatical research, and a wicked sense of humor.... It's a joyful, wild gallop through a joyful, wild time to be an American." "-Vanity Fair"

"From the Hardcover edition."

Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Boll's powerful novel about a woman terrorized by the media
In an era in which journalists will stop at nothing to break a story, Henrich Boll's "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" has taken on heightened relevance. A young woman's association with a hunted man makes her the target of a journalist determined to grab headlines by portraying her as an evil woman. As the attacks on her escalate and she becomes the victim of anonymous threats, Katharina sees only one way out of her nightmare. Turning the mystery genre on its head, the novel begins with the confession of a crime, drawing the reader into a web of sensationalism, character assassination, and the unavoidable eruption of violence.

How an elite cabal rewrote the American dream for their gain - and left the rest of world behind. Evil Geniuses is the secret history of how, over the last half century, from even before Ronald Reagan through Donald Trump, America has sharply swerved away from its dream of progress for the many to a system of unfettered profit and self-interest for the few. As the social liberation of the 1960s finally ended in the chaos of Vietnam and Watergate, a cabal of rich industrialists, business chiefs, wide-eyed libertarians and right-wing economic radicals were waiting, determined to claw back everything they saw as rightfully theirs. Largely out of sight, they rapidly built and funded a new empire of think tanks and academic institutions and professional organisations, lobbying and political groups, using them to transform politics, media, finance, the legal system and US laws to reinvent and control the political economy. A throwback to the robber barons of a century earlier, they sold the remade system to the people as a nostalgic return to traditional American values. Within a decade, America's flourishing forward-thinking vision was incarcerated by the unchecked financial accumulation and political power of the super-rich. Now, the moneymen are running the show. In this hugely entertaining and deeply researched cultural and economic expose, New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen maps the rich history of intricate networks, unlikely connections and dark truths which are controlling a nation, revealing how on earth America got to where it is now - and what it might do to win its progressive future back.

You're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts Fantasy is the USA's primary product. From the Pilgrim Fathers onward America has been a place where renegades and freaks came in search of freedom to create their own realities with little objectively regulated truth standing in their way. The freedom to invent and believe whatever the hell you like is, in some ways, an unwritten constitutional right. But, this do-your-own-thing freedom also is the driving credo of America's current transformation where the difference between opinion and fact is rapidly crumbling. So how did we get to this weird pseudo-reality, where science and objective facts are dismissed in favour of opinions and wild speculation, or indeed, fantasies? The post truth, fake news, free-for-all mentality isn't exactly a new phenomenon. If you want to understand Trump's America, how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you have to go back to the very beginning and take a dizzying road trip across five centuries of crackpot delusion and make-believe from Salem to Scientology. Fantasyland is a journey that connects the dots between crazed franchises of true believers - a rich freak show tapestry from Mormons to Flat-Earthers and satanic panic, new age quacks to anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists of every stripe, creationists to climate change deniers, UFO-obsessives to gun-toting libertarians, showmen hucksters from P T Barnum to Trump himself, all topped off with a dangerous dose of anti-government paranoia and pseudoscience. Along the way, New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen has created a unique and raucous history of America and a new paradigm for understanding our post-factual world.

How did Richard Ford's cat influence his work as a novelist? How is Chuck Close's portraiture driven by his inability to remember faces? What pivotal moment helped Rosanne Cash understand the healing power of the stage? Creativity is an elusive subject. We enjoy its fruits-movies, novels, paintings, songs-but rarely are we privy to what happens in the creative process. In "Spark", Julie Burstein traces the roots of some of the twenty-first century's most influential and creative thinkers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Yo-Yo Ma, David Milch, Isabel Allende, and Joshua Redman. Burstein pulls back the curtain to reveal the sources of these artists' inspiration and the processes that bring their work into being. These artists may not change lead into gold, Burstein writes, but they lift materials from their familiar contexts, combining, reshaping, transforming them into works of art that change the way we see the world. "Spark" is an invaluable resource for the aspiring writer and artist, but the need for creativity extends well beyond the world of paintbrushes and typewriters. Creativity is integral to business, parenting, education, science, and, perhaps most poignantly, our personal relationships. Rarely do books on creativity illuminate and inspire; this marvelous volume will help you find a spark of your own.

Ever wanted to be that fly on the wall? To listen in on conversations that were meant to be intimate, private affairs? To overhear, verbatim, the words of famous entertainers, distinguished politicians, princes, potentates, and petty criminals? Welcome to an eavesdropper's jamboree, where you can revel in the real, unexpurgated words of real people in all their astonishing, appalling, and hilarious entirely - taken from sources like transcripts of testimony that was sealed, depositions that had been buried, recordings of exchanges that were cut from the official broadcasts, conversations considered so confidential, so off-the-record, so privileged and personal that we thought, Hey, why not share them with the whole world? Here is: Michael Jackson's housekeeper describing life chez Jacko; Prince Charles telling his lover his fondest hopes regarding reincarnation; pickup lines from Clarence Thomas; Senators Bob Dole and Alan Simpson trying to reach out and touch Saddam Hussein; Tommy Lasorda revealing what managers really say to pitchers out on the mound; Spike Lee on the importance of higher education; tobacco executives who can't quite make the connection between smoking and lung cancer; and lots more, word for regrettable word - in short, a feast of the famous and infamous caught with their guards down and their mikes on.

You may already know that Belgium is the most boring country on planet Earth, but do you know why? Or what makes the Mark 44, Model O Lazy Dog Missile Cluster, the sexiest piece of military hardware on wheels? Or how LSD edged out all contenders as the Platonic Ideal of illicit drugs?
From cities to sitcoms, from scotch to soda, from English monarchs to French movies, "The Real Thing" is a compendium of the quintessential, providing definitive answers to some of the most compelling questions of our time: What confection out-cholesterols the competition? Why is The Country Club "the" country club? Which Charlie Chan proved the least scrutable?
Author Kurt Andersen's pithy pronouncements sparkle with wit, sophistication, and a healthy dose of skeptical good humor as he strips world culture of accumulated hype and accepted wisdom, laying bare the sine qua nons and the ne plus ultras in a sassy series of satirical essays that give credit where credit is due while simultaneously foreclosing on the bogus, the ersatz, the would-be, and the has-been. "The Real Thing" is the real thing. These days, that's really something.