Though you may not know the man, you probably know his music. Arkansas-born Louis Jordan's songs like "Baby, It's Cold Outside," "Caldonia" and "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" can still be heard today, decades since Jordan ruled the charts. In his five-decade career, Jordan influenced American popular music, film and more and inspired the likes of James Brown, B.B. King, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles. Known as the "King of the Jukeboxes," he and his combo played a hybrid of jazz, swing, blues and comedy music during the big band era that became the start of R&B.

In a stunning narrative portrait of Louis Jordan, author Stephen Koch contextualizes the great, forgotten musician among his musical peers, those he influenced and the musical present.

On 7 November 1938, an impoverished seventeen-year-old Polish Jew living in Paris, obsessed with Nazi persecution of his family in Germany, brooding on revenge - and his own insignificance - bought a handgun, carried it on the Metro to the German Embassy in Paris and, never before having fired a weapon, shot down the first German diplomat he saw. When the official died two days later, Hitler and Goebbels used the event as their pretext for the state-sponsored wave of anti-Semitic violence and terror known as Kristallnacht, the pogrom that was the initiating event of the Holocaust. Overnight this obscure young man, Herschel Grynszpan, found himself world-famous, his face on front pages everywhere, and a pawn in the machinations of power. Instead of being executed, he found himself a privileged prisoner of the Gestapo while Hitler and Goebbels prepared a show-trial. The trial, planned to the last detail, was intended to prove that the Jews had started the Second World War. Alone in his cell, Herschel soon grasped how the Nazis planned to use him, and set out to wage a battle of wits against Hitler and Goebbels, knowing perfectly well that if he succeeded in stopping the trial, he would certainly be murdered. Until very recently, what really happened has remained hazy. Hitler's Scapegoat, based on the most recent research - including access to a heretofore untapped archive compiled by a Nuremberg rapporteur - tells Herschel's extraordinary story in full for the first time.

After a long, critical appraisal of Warhol's career and social presence up to the time of his death, Koch examines the cultural vortex in which the artist first existed: his old sixties studio, the Factory. It was here, that Warhol produced his films, notorious underground classics whose radical esthetics are discussed in depth--from the silent marathon, "Sleep, " to "Chelsea Girls."

When American authors John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway went to Spain in 1937 to witness the Spanish Civil War firsthand, the devastation they encountered was far from impersonal: As Spain was unraveling thread by thread, so was the relationship between these two literary titans. They had arrived in Spain as comrades, leftist writers-in-arms. But a real-life literary mystery unfolded when Dos Passos' friend Jose Robles--a Spanish-born Johns Hopkins professor--disappeared. Written from a novelist's eye for detail, "The Breaking Point" is the story of two lives at the intersection of friendship and murder, of love and death, and of literature and history.

“Make [your] characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.” —Kurt Vonnegut

“‘The cat sat on the mat’ is not the beginning of a story, but ‘the cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is.” —John Le Carré

Nothing is more inspiring for a beginning writer than listening to masters of the craft talk about the writing life. But if you can’t get Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, and Gabriel García Márquez together at the Algonquin, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop gives you the next best thing. Stephen Koch, former chair of Columbia University’s graduate creative writing program, presents a unique guide to the craft of fiction. Along with his own lucid observations and commonsense techniques, he weaves together wisdom, advice, and inspiring commentary from some of our greatest writers. Taking you from the moment of inspiration (keep a notebook with you at all times), to writing a first draft (do it quickly! you can always revise later), to figuring out a plot (plot always serves the story, not vice versa), Koch is a benevolent mentor, glad to dispense sound advice when you need it most. The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop belongs on every writer’s shelf, to be picked up and pored over for those moments when the muse needs a little help finding her way.