An Oregon musician pursues his dreams but eventually must choose between his celebrity lifestyle and the woman he loves.Set on the West Coast during George W. Bush's first term, Out of What Chaos showcases the escapades of Rex and The Brains as they settle into the Portland rock scene, record their first album, and tour from Vancouver to LA behind their chart-topping single, "F U. I Just Want To Get My Rocks Off."The boys party on, finding their way ...

Lee Oser's Old Enemies is a joy to read, clever and astute, sharp and funny, satiric but humane. We have the issues of our time in dramatic light. . . .Through it all courses Moses Shea, an advertising whiz who is brilliant with languages, a reader of the classics, not very attractive or heroic, but with a moral center that brings the sad and galling truths of life in the 2020s to piercing light. His verbal joustings with the personalities around him are gems of wit worthy of a Restora...

This is a posthumously published collection of Nalin Ranasinghe's sharp analyses of Shakespeare's five heavy dramas: Hamlet, King John, Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. True to form, Ranasinghe serves up philosophical and literary genius for the reader's benefit and delight."I will try to claim that Shakespeare offers an esoteric vindication of the human soul itself, not merely poetry, against the looming backdrop of the Counter-Reformation in Europe and the Puri...

T. S. Eliot was raised in the Unitarian faith of his family in St. Louis but drifted away from their beliefs while studying philosophy, mysticism, and anthropology at Harvard. During a year in Paris, he became involved with a group of Catholic writers and subsequently went through a gradual conversion to Catholic Christianity.Many studies of Eliot's writings have mentioned his religious beliefs, but most have failed to give the topic due weight, and many have misunderstood or misrep...

A young New Yorker grieving his mother's death is pulled into a gritty underworld of art and wealth in this “extraordinary” and beloved novel that "connects with the heart as well as the mind" (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review), named a New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century.Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a weal...

The mesmerizing bestseller that combines the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt and the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock—A New York Times Ten Best Book of the YearSpecial Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age tale and a richly plotted suspense story, told with dazzling intelligence and wit. At the center of the novel is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic know...

No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note...

Does true love have supernatural power?Where Did You Sleep Last Night is a love story about a teenage girl who embarks on a relationship with Kurt Cobain.Evelyn Gray is a sad and lonely sixteen-year-old from Carnation, Washington who is terrorized by her classmates at school. She spends most of her time in her room reading, writing letters to dead people, listening to old records and talking to the poster of Kurt Cobain above her bed.Her mother is an alcoho...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author presents a sterling selection of short fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, Jeffrey Eugenides, and others."As soon as you complete a description of what a good story must be, a new example flutters through an open window, lands on your sleeve, and proves your description wrong," writes Anthony Doerr about the task of selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019. The year's best stories are a diverse, addictive group exploring e...

In The Last Night of the Earth Poems, Charles Bukowski reckons with writing, death and immortality, literature, city life, illness, war, and the past.“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter The poems in the first three sections of this book were published in three volumes: It Catches My Heart in its Hands, Crucifix in a Deat...

The National Book Award–winning coming-out memoir. "One of the most complex, moral, personal, and political books to have been written about gay life" ( LA Weekly).Paul Monette grew up all-American, Catholic, overachieving . . . and closeted. As a child of the 1950s, a time when a kid suspected of being a "homo" would routinely be beaten up, Monette kept his secret throughout his adolescence. He wrestled with his sexuality for the first thirty years of his...

**NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • This dazzling memoir from the former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars is the story of a young artist struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America."Engrossing in its spare, simple understatement.... Evocative ... luminous." —The Washington Post**In Ordinary Light, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith tells her...