**Celebrate America's zaniest and most subversive magazine in 26 essays and comix from all-star contributors, including Roz Chast, Jonathan Lethem, and Grady Hendrix.Before SNL and the wise-guy sarcasm of Letterman and Colbert, before The Simpsons and online memes, there was . . .  MAD.**A mainstay of countless American childhoods, MAD magazine exploded onto the scene in the 1950s and gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties....

Reading, David Mikics says, should not be drudgery, and not mere information-gathering or escape either, but a way to live life at a higher pitch. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age is a practical guide for anyone who yearns for a more meaningful, satisfying reading experience, as well as sharper reading skills and improved concentration.

A leading literary critic’s innovative study of how the Nobel Prize–winning author turned life into art.Saul Bellow was the most lauded American writer of the twentieth century—the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and the only novelist to be awarded the National Book Award in Fiction three times. Preeminently a novelist of personality in all its wrinkles, its glories and shortcomings, Bellow filled his work with vibrant, ga...

An engrossing biography of one of the most influential filmmakers in cinematic history"A cool, cerebral book about a cool, cerebral talent. . . . A brisk study of [Kubrick's] films, with enough of the life tucked in to add context as well as brightness and bite.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times"An engaging and well-researched primer to the work of a cinematic legend."—Library JournalKubrick grew up i...

A New Handbook of Literary Terms offers a lively, informative guide to words and concepts that every student of literature needs to know. Mikics’s definitions are essayistic, witty, learned, and always a pleasure to read. They sketch the derivation and history of each term, including especially lucid explanations of verse forms and providing a firm sense of literary periods and movements from classicism to postmodernism. The Handbook also supplies a helpful map to the intrica...

Stanley Kubrick revolutionized Hollywood with movies like Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, and electrified audiences with The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. David Mikics takes listeners on a deep dive into Kubrick's life and work, illustrating his intense commitment to each of his films.Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, a doctor's son. From a young age he was consumed by photography, chess, and, above all else, movies. ...