See America with 50 of Our Finest, Funniest, and Foremost Writers Anthony Bourdain chases the fumigation truck in Bergen County, New Jersey

Dave Eggers tells it straight: Illinois is Number 1

Louise Erdrich loses her bikini top in North Dakota

Jonathan Franzen gets waylaid by New York's publicist...and personal attorney...and historian...and geologist

John Hodgman explains why there is no such thing as a "Massachusettsean"

Edward P. Jones makes the case: D.C. should be a state

Jhumpa Lahiri declares her reckless love for the Rhode Island coast

Rick Moody explores the dark heart of Connecticut's Merritt Parkway, exit by exit

Ann Patchett makes a pilgrimage to the Civil War site at Shiloh, Tennessee

William T. Vollmann visits a San Francisco S&M club and Many More

"The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup" features original pieces by thirty-two leading writers and journalists about the thirty-two nations that have qualified for the world's greatest sporting event. In addition to all the essential information any fan needs--the complete 2006 match schedule, results from past tournaments, facts and figures about the nations, players, teams, and referees--here are essays that shine a whole new light on soccer and the world.

Former Foreign Minister of Mexico Jorge G. Castaneda invites George W. Bush to watch a game.

Novelist Robert Coover remembers soccer in Spain after the death of General Francisco Franco.

Dave Eggers on America, and the gym teachers who kept it free from communism. "

Time" magazine's Tokyo bureau chief Jim Frederick shows how soccer is displacing baseball in Japan.

Novelist Aleksandar Hemon proves, once and for all, that sex and soccer do not mix.

Novelist John Lanchester describes the indescribable: the beauty of Brazilian soccer. "

The New Yorker"'s Cressida Leyshon on Trinidad and Tobago, 750-1 underdogs.

"Fever Pitch" author Nick Hornby on the conflicting call of club and country.

Plus an afterword by Franklin Foer on the form of government most likely to win the World Cup.

From the pages of The Baffler, the most vital and perceptive new magazine of the nineties, sharp, satirical broadsides against the Culture Trust.

In the "old" Gilded Age, the barons of business accumulated vast wealth and influence from their railroads, steel mills, and banks. But today it is culture that stands at the heart of the American enterprise, mass entertainment the economic dynamo that brings the public into the consuming fold and consolidates the power of business over the American mind.

For a decade The Baffler has been the invigorating voice of dissent against these developments, in the grand tradition of the muckrakers and The American Mercury. This collection gathers the best of its writing to explore such peculiar developments as the birth of the rebel hero as consumer in the pages of Wired and Details; the ever-accelerating race to market youth culture; the rise of new business gurus like Tom Peters and the fad for Hobbesian corporate "reengineering"; and the encroachment of advertising and commercial enterprise into every last nook and cranny of American life.

With its liberating attitude and cant-free intelligence, this book is a powerful polemic against the designs of the culture business on us all.