An autobiography of growing up as an Iranian-American describes the author's family's 1971 move from Iran to Southern California, the members of her diverse family, and their struggle with culture shock.

First published in book form 1985, Table of Contents is a collection of eight pieces written by John McPhee between 1981 and 1984. Geographically and thematically, they range from Alaska to New Jersey, describing, for example, the arrival of telephones in a small village near the Arctic Circle and the arrival of wild bears in considerable numbers in New Jersey, swarming in from the Poconos in search of a better life. The essays in this collection,...

"Devastatingly handsome and insanely rich, Farrell Covington is capable of anything and impossible to resist. He's a clear-eyed romantic, an aesthete but not a snob, self-indulgent yet wildly generous. He's the son of one of the country's most powerful and ferociously conservative families, so the world could be his. But when he falls for Nate Reminger, an aspiring writer from a nice Jewish family in Piscataway, New Jersey, the results are passionate...

"Now back in print, author of The Unspeakable Meghan Daum's acclaimed cult classic that revitalized the personal essay for a new generation of writers. Meghan Daum is one of the most celebrated nonfiction writers working today, widely recognized for the fresh, provocative approach with which she unearths hidden fault lines in the American landscape. From her well-remembered New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition and the...

"In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without educational interventions, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps...

"Essays about 1990s popular culture, politics, sports, literature, music"-- From the New York Times bestselling author of But What if We're Wrong", a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history. It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between,...

For more than fifteen years, bestselling author and historian Hampton Sides has traveled widely across the continent exploring the America that lurks just behind the scrim of our mainstream culture. In these two dozen pieces, collected here for the first time, Sides gives us a fresh, alluring, and at times startling America brimming with fascinating subcultures and bizarre characters who could live nowhere else. Following Sides, we crash the redwood...

A work combining fiction and history in a collaboration that encompasses fifty years gives readers a glimpse into the realities upon which America's modern culture is based and explores the complex relationship between "waste analyst" Nick Shay and artist Klara Sax.