Colby's post-high school plans have long been that he and his best friend Beth would tour with her band, then spend a year in Europe, but when she announces that she will start college just after the tour, Colby struggles to understand why she changed her mind and what losing her means for his future.

Renowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. An enthralling parable (or a cheap metaphor) of the American Dream as a beckoning finger toward a con game, a kind of virus infecting artists of all sorts over nearly a century, Fitzgerald's story has become a key to American culture and American life itself. Marcus follows the arc of The Great Gatsby from 1925 into the ways it has insinuated itself...

The second of two volumes that present for the first time in English the complete "Alack Sinner" comics by the Argentine-born team of artist José Muñoz and writer Carlos Sampayo. Sinner is a hard-boiled private detective whose adventures are played out to a jazz soundtrack in a noir New York from 1975 through the 2000s. The stories are imbued with a deep political conscience and present a scathing critique of corruption in society, juxtaposed with...

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason A. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized...

"The Invention of Science goes back five hundred years in time to chronicle this crucial transformation, exploring the factors that led to its birth and the people who made it happen. Wootton argues that the Scientific Revolution was actually five separate yet concurrent events that developed independently, but came to intersect and create a new worldview. Here are the brilliant iconoclasts--Galileo, Copernicus, Brahe, Newton, and many more curious...

The great artistic clash between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci marks the true beginning of the High Renaissance. Re-creating sixteenth-century Florence with astonishing verve and aplomb, the author not only sheds new light on the making of the modern world but, in its portrait of two cultural titans going toe to toe, rewires our understanding of the personalities of the Renaissance's greatest icons.

"Far from displacing religions, as has been supposed, capitalism became one, with money as its deity. Eugene McCarraher reveals how Mammon ensnared us and how we can find a more humane, sacramental way of being in the world. If socialists and Wall Street bankers can agree on anything, it is the extreme rationalism of capital. At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the "disenchantment" of the world, stripping material objects...

"A generation of Americans grew up worshipping self-styled hero Evel Knievel, watching him every Saturday on Wide World of Sports and buying his ideal toys. For producer/subject Johnny Knoxville and so many others, he was the ultimate antidote to the disenchantment of the 70's. But few knew the incredible and often complex aspects of his epic life, which, like his jumps, was sometimes glorious and sometimes disastrous. With an entire genre of sports...

Included in this remarkable anthology of African American short stories is a rich, cultural mixture of the assortment of African American experiences we are confronted with in our daily lives. From the disenchantment of recent high school basketball phenomenon Malik Sorvino to Aunt Mattie's retirement which suddenly has her experiencing motherhood again for not one but five children at the ripe of old age of sixty. These remarkable stories so rich...

Sigue Eric, un periodista jóven en la Ciudad de México quien deja de escribir después de recibir amenazas de muerte. Obsesionado con un anciano sin tech quien tiene Alzheimer y un ser mítico quien se cuida de niños abandonados, decide escribir de nuevo, aun se lo tiene que pagar con la vida. Desde el 2000, al menos 133 periodistas se han asesinado en México--calificado por la organización Reporters Without Borders como el país sin guerra más...