Between the Lines

Twelve

From the most popular routines and the most ingenious physical shtick to the snappiest wisecracks and the most biting satire of the last century, Make Em’ Laugh illuminates who we are as a nation by exploring what makes us laugh, and why. Written by Laurence Maslon and Michael Kantor, this companion to the six-part PBS series draws on countless sources to chronicle the past century of American comedy and the geniuses who created and performed it—melding biography, American history, and a lotta laughs into an exuberant, important book.

Each of the six chapters focuses a different style or archetype of comedy, from the slapstick pratfalls of Buster Keaton and Lucille Ball through the wiseguy put-downs of Groucho Marx and Larry David, to the incendiary bombshells of Mae West and Richard Pryor. And at every turn the significance of these comedians—smashing social boundaries, challenging the definition of good taste, speaking the truth to the powerful—is vividly tangible. Make Em’ Laugh is more than a compendium of American comic genius; it is a window into the way comedy both reflects the world and changes it—one laugh at a time.

Starting from the groundbreaking PBS series, the authors have gone deeper into the works and lives of America’s great comic artists, with biographical portraits, archival materials, cultural overviews, and rare photos. Brilliantly illustrated, with insights—and jokes—from comedians, writers, and producers, as well as film, radio, television, and theater historians, Make Em’ Laugh is an indispensable, definitive book about comedy in America.

Laurence Maslon is an associate arts professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His books include Broadway: The American Musical, with Michael Kantor, as well as The Sound of Music Companion, The South Pacific Companion, and the Library of America edition of George S. Kaufman’s comedies. He lives in New York City and on the North Fork of Long Island with his wife and son.

Michael Kantor is the Emmy award-winning filmmaker who created the landmark documentary series, Broadway: The American Musical, for PBS. A nominator for the Tony Awards, he is president of Ghost Light Films and Almo Inc., companies dedicated to bringing the arts to film and television. He lives 28 minutes from New York City.

Random House

A tall, yellow-haired, young European traveler calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal empire, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the imperial capital, a tale about a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, and her impossible journey to the far-off city of Florence.

The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It is the story of two cities, unknown to each other, at the height of their powers—the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way, about the true brutality of power.

Vivid, gripping, irreverent, bawdy, profoundly moving, and completely absorbing, The Enchantress of Florence is a dazzling book full of wonders by one of the world’s most important living writers.

Salman Rushdie is the author of nine previous novels: Grimus; Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and, in 1993, was judged to be the “Booker of Bookers,” the best novel to have won that prize in its first twenty-five years); Shame (winner of the French Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger); The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers Guild Award); The Moor’s Last Sigh (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); The Ground Beneath Her Feet (winner of the Eurasian section of the Commonwealth Prize); Fury (a New York Times Notable Book); and Shalimar the Clown (a Time Book of the Year). He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and three works of nonfiction— Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and The Wizard of Oz. He is co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing.

Counterpoint Press

Legacy of Secrecy tells the full story of JFK’s murder and the tragic results of the cover-ups that followed, as revealed by two dozen associates of John and Robert Kennedy, backed by thousands of files at the National Archives. The result of twenty years of research, it finally tells the full story long withheld from Congress and the American people.

Lamar Waldron’s groundbreaking research has been featured by hundreds of newspapers and radio stations. His book Ultimate Sacrifice has been the subject of its own special on the Discovery Channel, produced by NBC (“Conspiracy Files: JFK Assassination”). A new special about Ultimate Sacrifice aired on German Public Television in October 2007. The author has been featured on “Geraldo Rivera” and Fox News, and his work has been acclaimed by publications ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle to foreign publications such as the Sunday London Telegraph and Germany’s Der Spiegel. He is the co-author of Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination.

And

Thom Hartmann is a best-selling author and national radio host for Air America. Heard by millions of radio listeners daily, Hartmann is the author of seventeen books, including The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, which helped to inspire Leonardo DiCaprio’s recent documentary “The 11th Hour,” which features Hartmann. His other books include: We the People; Unequal Protection; What Would Jefferson Do; and Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination.

Riverhead Books

From the bestselling author of The Wife and The Position, a feverishly smart novel about female ambition, money, class, motherhood, and marriage—and what happens in one community when a group of educated women chooses not to work.

For a group of four New York friends, the past decade has been largely defined by marriage and motherhood. Educated and reared to believe that they would conquer the world, they then left jobs as corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and film scouts to stay home with their babies. What was meant to be a temporary leave of absence has lasted a decade. Now, at age forty, with the halcyon days of young motherhood behind them and without professions to define them, Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen face a life that is not what they were brought up to expect but seems to be the one they have chosen.

But when Amy gets to know a charismatic and successful working mother of three who appears to have fulfilled the classic women’s dream of having it all—work, love, family—without having to give anything up, a lifetime’s worth of concerns, both practical and existential, opens up. As Amy’s obsession with this woman’s bustling life grows, it forces the four friends to confront the choices they’ve made in opting out of their careers—until a series of startling events shatters the peace and, for some of them, changes the landscape entirely.

Written in Meg Wolitzer’s inimitable, glittering style, The Ten-Year Nap is wickedly observant, knowing, provocative, surprising, and always entertaining, as it explores the lives of these women with candor, wit, and generosity.

Meg Wolitzer grew up around books. Her mother, Hilma Wolitzer, published two novels while Meg was still in school, and weekly trips to the library were a ritual the entire family looked forward to. Not surprisingly, Meg served as editor for her junior high and high school literary magazines. She graduated from Brown University in 1981. One year later, she published her debut novel, Sleepwalking, the story of three college girls bonded by an unhealthy fascination with suicidal women poets. It marked the beginning of a successful writing career that shows no sign of slacking.

Over the years, Wolitzer has proven herself a deft chronicler of intense, unconventional relationships, especially among women. She has explored with wit and sensitivity the dynamics of fractured families (This Is Your Life, The Position), the devastating effects of death (Surrender, Dorothy), the challenges of friendship (Friends for Life), and the prospective minefield of gender, identity, and dashed expectations (Hidden Pictures, The Wife, The Ten-Year Nap).

In addition to her bestselling novels, Wolitzer has written a number of screenplays. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and she has also taught writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and at Skidmore College.

Shaye Areheart Books

Alice Hoffman is one of our most beloved writers. Here on Earth was an Oprah Book Club selection. Practical Magic and Aquamarine were both bestselling books and Hollywood movies. Her novels have received mention as notable books of the year by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and People magazine, and her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, Redbook, Architectural Digest, Gourmet, and Self.

Now this stunningly original and magical story follows three women in love with the wrong men. Headstrong Madeline Heller finds herself hopelessly attracted to her sister’s fiancé…Frieda Lewis, a doctor’s daughter who has run off to London, becomes the muse of an ill-fated rock star…and beautiful, reckless Bryn Evans is set to marry an Englishman while she’s secretly obsessed with her ex-husband, a dangerous and love-besotted New Yorker. At the heart of the novel is Lucy Green, who blames herself for a tragic accident she witnessed at the age of twelve in the same London hotel where the others have found themselves. Lucy has spent four decades searching out the Third Angel, the angel on Earth who will renew her faith.

Alice Hoffman is the author of nineteen novels, two books of short stories, and eight books for children and young adults. Her work has been published in more than twenty translations and in more than one hundred foreign editions.

Random House

Annie Leibovitz describes how her pictures were made, starting with Richard Nixon’s resignation, a story she covered with Hunter S. Thompson, and ending with Barack Obama’s campaign. In between are a Rolling Stones Tour, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, The Blues Brothers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keith Haring, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patti Smith, George W. Bush, William S. Burroughs, Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. The most celebrated photographer of our time discusses portraiture, reportage, fashion photography, lighting, and digital cameras.

Farrar Strauss and Giroux

Did you know that both mammal and matter derive from baby talk? Have you noticed how wince makes you wince? Ever wonder why so many h-words have to do with breath? Roy Blount Jr. certainly has, and after forty years of making a living using words in every medium, print or electronic, except greeting cards, he still can’t get over his ABCs. In Alphabet Juice, he celebrates the electricity, the juju, the sonic and kinetic energies, of letters and their combinations. Blount does not prescribe proper English. The franchise he claims is “over the counter.”

Three and a half centuries ago, Thomas Blount produced Blount’s Glossographia, the first dictionary to explore derivations of English words. This Blount’s Glossographia takes that pursuit to other levels, from Proto-Indo-European roots to your epiglottis. It rejects the standard linguistic notion that the connection between words and their meanings is “arbitrary.” Even the word arbitrary is shown to be no more arbitrary, at its root, than go-to guy or crackerjack. From sources as venerable as the OED (in which Blount finds an inconsistency, at whisk) and as fresh as Urbandictionary.com (to which Blount has contributed the number-one definition of “alligator arm”), and especially from the author’s own wide-ranging experience, Alphabet Juice derives an organic take on language that is unlike, and more fun than, any other.

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty previous books, covering subjects from the Pittsburgh Steelers to Robert E. Lee to what dogs are thinking. He is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!

Harper Entertainment

In this moving memoir, actor Robert J. Wagner opens his heart to share the romances, the drama, and the humor of an incredible life. He grew up in Bel Air next door to a golf course that changed his life. As a young boy, he saw a foursome playing one morning featuring none other than Fred Astaire, Clark Gable, Randolph Scott, and Cary Grant. Seeing these giants of the silver screen awed him and fueled his dreams of becoming a movie star. Under the mentorship of stars like Spencer Tracy, he would become a salaried actor in Hollywood’s studio system among other hot actors of the moment such as his friends Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis. With color photographs and never-before-told stories, this is a quintessentially American story of one of the great sons of Hollywood.

Harper Collins

Louise Erdrich’s mesmerizing new novel, her first in almost three years, centers on a compelling mystery. The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation. The descendants of Ojibwe and white intermarry, their lives intertwine; only the youngest generation, of mixed blood, remains unaware of the role the past continues to play in their lives.

Evelina Harp is a witty, ambitious young girl, part Ojibwe, part white, who is prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina’s grandfather, is a seductive storyteller, a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. Nobody understands the weight of historical injustice better than Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, a thoughtful mixed blood who witnesses the lives of those who appear before him, and whose own love life reflects the entire history of the territory. In distinct and winning voices,

Erdrich’s narrators unravel the stories of different generations and families in this corner of North Dakota. Bound by love, torn by history, the two communities’ collective stories finally come together in a wrenching truth revealed in the novel’s final pages.

The Plague of Doves is one of the major achievements of Louise Erdrich’s considerable oeuvre, a quintessentially American story and the most complex and original of her books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Louise Erdrich is the author of twelve novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Grand Central Publishing

A shrewd businessman, an outspoken maverick, and a generous philanthropist, Ted Turner’s story is the stuff of legend. But what drives him? Where did he get such a powerful will to succeed? What has he learned over his illustrious life? Never before has the controversial businessman shared his personal story. Here, for the first time, he will.

From his difficult and troubling childhood to his hard-partying college life, from his vision of CNN to the drama and turmoil of the AOL / Time Warner deal, and from his ownership of the Braves to his news-making philanthropy, Turner spares no details of his extraordinary career and provides fascinating businesses insights along the way - many of which are sure to surprise.

Turner will also reveal the never-before-told details of his personal life. He frankly discusses a childhood of loneliness (he was sent to boarding school at the tender age of 4), the impact of devastating loss (his sister died at 17 and his hard-charging father committed suicide when Ted was in his early 20s). Turner also goes into great detail about his marriages, including his marriage to Jane Fonda, the “love of my life.”

It’s been a helluva life. Ted Turner truly is the great American maverick of our time. His story will educate, enlighten, entertain, and inspire - for the first time, Turner will tell the public how he went from being a young billboard salesman in the South to being the largest private landowner in the country. The release of this long-awaited memoir will be a major media event, and Ted’s captivating story promises to deliver on the hype.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Since the early 1970’s, Ted Turner has stepped into the international spotlight with one accomplishment after another. Whether in billboard advertisement, cable television, sports team ownership, sailing, environmental initiatives or philanthropy—Turner’s vision, determination, generosity and forthrightness have consistently given the world reason to take notice.

Turner now dedicates his time and resources to making the world a better, safer place for future generations. His current philanthropic interests include: the Turner Foundation, the United Nations Foundation, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Captain Planet Foundation, and the Turner Endangered Species Fund.

In addition, he remains actively involved in business with the rapidly expanding Ted’s Montana Grill restaurant chain.

William Morrow

Since Wicked was first published in 1995, millions of readers have discovered Gregory Maguire’s fantastically encyclopedic Oz, a world filled with characters both familiar and new, darkly conceived and daringly reimagined. In the much-anticipated third volume of the Wicked Years, we return to Oz, seen now through the eyes of the Cowardly Lion—the once tiny cub defended by Elphaba in Wicked.

While civil war looms in Oz, a tetchy oracle named Yackle prepares for death. Before her final hour, an enigmatic figure known as Brrr—the Cowardly Lion—arrives searching for information about Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West. As payment, Yackle, who hovered on the sidelines of Elphaba’s life, demands some answers of her own.

Brrr surrenders his story to the ailing maunt: Abandoned as a cub, his earliest memories are gluey hazes, and his path from infancy in the Great Gillikin Forest is no Yellow Brick Road. Seeking to redress an early mistake, he trudges through a swamp of ghosts, becomes implicated in a massacre of trolls, and falls in love with a forbidding Cat princess. In the wake of laws that oppress talking Animals, he avoids a jail sentence by agreeing to serve as a lackey to the war-mongering Emperor of Oz.

A Lion Among Men chronicles a battle of wits hastened by the Emerald City’s approaching armies. What does the Lion know of the whereabouts of the Witch’s boy, Liir? What can Yackle reveal about the auguries of the Clock of the Time Dragon? And what of the Grimmerie, the magic book that vanished as quickly as Elphaba? Is destiny ever arbitrary? Can those tarnished by infamy escape their sobriquets—cowardly, wicked, brainless, criminally earnest—to claim their own histories, to live honorably within their own skins before they’re skinned alive?

At once a portrait of a would-be survivor and a panoramic glimpse of a world gone shrill with war fever, Gregory Maguire’s new novel is written with the sympathy and power that have made his books contemporary classics.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gregory Maguire received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Tufts University. His work as a consultant in creative writing for children has taken him to speaking engagements across the United States and abroad. He is a founder and codirector of Children’s Literature New England, Incorporated, a non-profit educational charity established in 1987. The author of numerous books for children, Mr. Maguire is also a contributor to Am I Blue?: Coming Out From the Silence, a collection of short stories for gay and lesbian teenagers.

Riverhead Books

The Wordy Shipmates is New York Times—bestselling author Sarah Vowell’s exploration of the Puritans and their journey to America to become the people of John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill”—a shining example, a “city that cannot be hid.”

To this day, America views itself as a Puritan nation, but Vowell investigates what that means— and what it should mean. What was this great political enterprise all about? Who were these people who are considered the philosophical, spiritual, and moral ancestors of our nation? What Vowell discovers is something far different from what their uptight shoe-buckles-and-corn reputation might suggest. The people she finds are highly literate, deeply principled, and surprisingly feisty. Their story is filled with pamphlet feuds, witty courtroom dramas, and bloody vengeance. Along the way she asks:

-Was Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop a communitarian, a Christlike Christian, or conformity’s tyrannical enforcer? Answer: Yes!
-Was Rhode Island’s architect, Roger Williams, America’s founding freak or the father of the First Amendment? Same difference.
-What does it take to get that jezebel Anne Hutchinson to shut up? A hatchet.
-What was the Puritans’ pet name for the Pope? The Great Whore of Babylon.

Sarah Vowell’s special brand of armchair history makes the bizarre and esoteric fascinatingly relevant and fun. She takes us from the modern-day reenactment of an Indian massacre to the Mohegan Sun casino, from old-timey Puritan poetry, where “righteousness” is rhymed with “wilderness,” to a Mayflower-themed waterslide. Throughout, The Wordy Shipmates is rich in historical fact, humorous insight, and social commentary by one of America’s most celebrated voices. Thou shalt enjoy it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sarah Vowell is the author of Assassination Vacation, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Take the Cannoli, and Radio On. A contributing editor for public radio’s This American Life, she lives in New York City.

Farrar Strauss and Giroux

Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.

Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.

Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Marilynne Robinson (born 1943) is an American author. Her 1980 novel Housekeeping won a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, Gilead, was acclaimed by critics and received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the 2005 Ambassador Book Award. Her third novel, Home, was published in 2008. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Randomhouse

Picking up where his bestselling memoir Never Have Your Dog Stuffed left off—having been saved by emergency surgery after nearly dying on a mountaintop in Chile—actor and acclaimed author Alan Alda offers an insightful look at some impossible questions he’s asked himself over the years: What do I value? What, exactly, is the good life? Here, Alda listens in on things he’s heard himself saying at critical points in his life—from the turbulence of the sixties, to his first Broadway show, to the birth of his children, to the ache of September 11, and beyond. Reflecting on the transitions in his life, he notices that “doorways are where the truth is told,” and wonders if there’s one thing—art, activism, family, money, fame—that could lead to a “life of meaning.” Alan Alda has won numerous awards, including six Emmys and six Golden Globes, and has been nominated for an Academy Award.

Better World Books

Sometimes a jam session includes trading fours, where each member of the band takes four measures to solo. If someone forgets to play his four, there is a flagrant void of sound. If you play one measure extra, you’re not respecting the form. In the jam session of a Jazzocracy, Americans trade fours with each other. Talk and listen. In the 1950s, jazz musicians became the literal embodiment of American democracy. Through one of the largest ever funded cultural projects, premier jazz musicians traveled to places beyond the Iron Curtain, and throughout the Third World in an effort to promulgate ideals of democracy. Now, from a new generation, we have a new challenge. It s the challenge to see the evolution of jazz and democracy as forming our next set of mythologies, ones that cast beyond the tired legacy of Billy the Kid, or the degraded trends of popular music. This young author asks the big question are we forgetting the very spirit that inspired jazz in the first place? Kabir Sehgal shows us how jazz can help us recapture America s rightful soul.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jazz bassist, political consultant, entrepreneur, and author Kabir Sehgal received degrees from Dartmouth College and the London School of Economics. While a high school student, Sehgal also won the “National Outstanding Soloist Award,” and was invited to join Wynton Marsalis to tour during the summer of 2004. During that same summer, Sehgal served as a special assistant to Senator Max Cleland on the John Kerry presidential campaign.

Jazzocracy first took form in the summer of 2005, when Sehgal served as a Visiting Fellow at the Roosevelt Center at Tulane University.

Jazzocracy: Jazz, Democracy, and the Creation of a New American Mythology is Sehgal’s first book. He currently works at JP Morgan and lives in San Francisco

W.W. Norton and Company

This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family’s dispersal after Jefferson’s death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings’s siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson’s wife, Martha. The Hemingses of Monticello sets the family’s compelling saga against the backdrop of Revolutionary America, Paris on the eve of its own revolution, 1790s Philadelphia, and plantation life at Monticello. Much anticipated, this book promises to be the most important history of an American slave family ever written. Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. She lives in New York City.

Farrar Strauss and Giroux

“So, what do you do?” Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter … But now he’s thirty-five years old and he’s still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn’t say tending bar. He was going places—until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that’s Eric’s version.

In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the “new” New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Richard Price is author of seven novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire.

Random House

In this shocking and sobering book, journalists Alice Shabecoff and Philip Shabecoff directly and definitively link industrial toxins to the current rise in childhood disease and death. In the tradition of Silent Spring, Poisoned Profits: the Toxic Assault on Our Children is a landmark investigation, an eye-opening account of a country that prizes money over children’s health.

With indisputable data, the Shabecoffs reveal that the children of baby boomers—the first to be raised in a truly “toxified world”—have higher rates of birth defects, asthma, cancer, autism and a frightening range of other neurological illnesses from ADHD to mental retardation, and other serious chronic illnesses compared to previous generations.

Poisoned Profits is in the end a book about hope and optimism. Now we know what is happening. These poisons are manmade; manufacturers can take them out of our children´s lives and make profits from safe products. Find here the policy changes to spur this shift. Find here the solutions to reduce your child´s risk and to alter the system.

Powerful, unflinching, and eminently readable, POISONED PROFITS is a wake up call that is bound to inspire talk and force change.

Other Press

Nidali, the rebellious daughter of an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, narrates the story of her childhood in Kuwait, her teenage years in Egypt (to where she and her family fled the 1990 Iraqi invasion), and her family’s last flight to Texas. Nidali mixes humor with a sharp, loving portrait of an eccentric middle-class family, and this perspective keeps her buoyant through the hardships she encounters: the humiliation of going through a checkpoint on a visit to her father’s home in the West Bank; the fights with her father, who wants her to become a famous professor and stay away from boys; the end of her childhood as Iraq invades Kuwait on her thirteenth birthday; and the scare she gives her family when she runs away from home.

Funny, charming, and heartbreaking, A Map of Home is the kind of book Tristram Shandy or Huck Finn would have narrated had they been born Egyptian-Palestinian and female in the 1970s.

Random House

USA Today called Stephen L. Carter’s last novel “the perfect summer read … Carter slips in so many original, thought-provoking observations that the reader is sad the killer has been caught.” Now Carter, the best-selling author of New England White, is back with Palace Council, a gripping political thriller set in the era of Watergate and Vietnam. Suspenseful, provocative, and witty, Palace Council turns our assumptions inside out and reminds us how the struggles of that era set the stage for America today. Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has taught since 1982. He is the author of the best-selling novel The Emperor of Ocean Park, and seven acclaimed nonfiction books.

Farrar Strauss and Giroux

In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress, only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine. The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told, until The Ten-Cent Plague. David Hajdu’s remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority. When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. The Ten-Cent Plague shows how, years before music, comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Author David Hajdu radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between “high” and “low” art.

Viking (Penguin Group)

In Susan Choi’s new novel A Person of Interest, Professor Lee, an Asian-born mathematician, would seem the last person likely to attract the attention of FBI agents. Yet after a popular young colleague becomes the latest victim of a serial bomber, Lee’s detached response and maladroit behavior lead the FBI, the national news media, and even his own neighbors to regard him with damning suspicion. Amid campus-wide grief over the murder, Lee receives a cryptic letter from a figure out of his past. The letter unearths a lifetime of shortcomings toward his dead wife, his estranged only daughter, and a long-denied son. Caught between his guilty recollections and the scrutiny of the murder investigation, determined to face his tormentor and exonerate himself, Lee sets off on a journey that will bring him face-to-face with his past. Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize.

Random House

It is 1959 when Haruko, a young woman of good family, marries the Crown Prince of Japan, the heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne. She is the first non-aristocratic woman to enter the longest-running, almost hermetically sealed, and mysterious monarchy in the world. Met with cruelty and suspicion by the Empress and her minions, Haruko is controlled at every turn. The only interest the court has in her is her ability to produce an heir. After finally giving birth to a son, Haruko suffers a nervous breakdown and loses her voice. However, determined not to be crushed by the imperial bureaucrats, she perseveres. Thirty years later, now Empress herself, she plays a crucial role in persuading another young woman, a rising star in the foreign ministry, to accept the marriage proposal of her son, the Crown Prince. The consequences are tragic and dramatic. John Burnham Schwartz is also author of the novels Claire Marvel, Bicycle Days, and Reservation Road, which was made into a motion picture based on his screenplay, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, and Jennifer Connelly.

Broadway Books

From the bestselling author of She’s Not There comes another unforgettable memoir - I’m Looking Through You is about growing up in a haunted house…and making peace with the ghosts that dwell in our hearts. For Jennifer Finney Boylan, creaking stairs, fleeting images in the mirror, and the remote whisper of human voices were everyday events in the Pennsylvania house in which she grew up in the 1970s. But these weren’t the only specters beneath the roof of the mansion known as the “Coffin House.” Jenny herself, born James, lived in a haunted body, and both her mysterious, diffident father and her wild, unpredictable sister would soon become ghosts to Jenny as well. Looking back on the spirits who invaded her family home, Boylan launches a full investigation with the help of a group of earnest, if questionable, ghost busters. Jennifer Finney Boyland is Professor of English at Colby College and author of the bestseller She’s Not There.

Random House

A tall, yellow-haired, young European traveler calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal empire, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the imperial capital, a tale about a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, and her impossible journey to the far-off city of Florence. The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It is the story of two cities, unknown to each other, at the height of their powers - the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. Salman Rushdie is the author of nine previous novels: Grimus; Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981); Shame (winner of the French Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger); The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers Guild Award); The Moor’s Last Sigh (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); The Ground Beneath Her Feet (winner of the Eurasian section of the Commonwealth Prize); Fury (a New York Times Notable Book); and Shalimar the Clown (a Time Book of the Year).

Riverhead, Penguin Books

Nowhere has the drama of American slavery played itself out with more tension than in the swamps of Maryland’s eastern shore, where abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman faced off against slave traders in a catch-me-if-you-can game that fueled fear in both white and black families. Trapped in the middle were the watermen, a group of America’s most original pioneers, poor oystermen who often found themselves caught between the needs of rich plantation owners and the roaring Chesapeake, which often claimed their lives. In James McBride’s latest novel, Song Yet Sun, the web of relationships in a small Chesapeake Bay town collapses as two souls face off in a gripping page-turner. McBride’s memoir, The Color of Water, is an American classic, and is required reading in high schools and colleges across America. It has sold almost two million copies worldwide, spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list and is published in more than 16 languages.

Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation

Personal reminiscences of a young girl growing up in pre-WWII Poland and struggling to survive during the Nazi occupation. The gradual changes from an idyllic childhood with a loving family to the inferno of Nazi ghettoes and labor camps. The book is the realization of the author’s mother’s last plea: to survive to tell the world. When the labor camp was finally liberated by the Soviet army, Tosia was the only survivor of her family. The sixteen-year old survivor now struggles to return to normalcy and prepare for the future, but can never forget the horrors of the past. The book chronicles her valiant attempts to acquire an education in Europe and the United States, her home since 1949. This book fulfills her mother’s last wish and is also an accounting of her remarkable achievement of rebuilding a family in a free country. Tosia Szechter Schneider came to the U.S.A. in 1949. She studied at the Hebrew Union College and taught Hebrew for thirty years at Reform religious schools in Morristown, NJ; Augusta, GA; and Atlanta, GA. She and her husband of forty-eight years Alfred Schneider live in Atlanta.

W.W. Norton

While Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris, large parts of France were still terra incognita. Even in the age of railways and newspapers, France was a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks, and pre-Christian beliefs. Author Graham Robb describes that unknown world, recounting the epic journeys of mapmakers, scientists, soldiers, administrators, and intrepid tourists, of itinerant workers, pilgrims, and herdsmen. We learn how France was explored, charted, and colonized, and how the imperial influence of Paris was gradually extended throughout a kingdom. The Discovery of France explains how the modern nation came to be and how poorly understood that nation still is today.

Graham Robb is the author of award-winning biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Rimbaud, each one selected by the New York Times as one of the best books of the year.

New Page Books

In dreams, he foresaw his sudden death. He consulted oracles, and at age 22 was told by a seer that he would become President of the United States.

Obscurantists and historians have dismissed Abraham Lincoln’s psychic involvements which, in his own time, were profound state secrets. But Lincoln’s rise to power coincided with the Great Age of Spiritualism and, as a Mystical Unionist, he felt he was controlled by “some other power.”

Susan B. Martinez, Ph.D., is an independent scholar, journalist, and activist who received her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University in the 1970s. Raised by agnostic/intellectual parents in Brooklyn, New York, she found her way to Spiritualism in the early 1980s and has since researched and wrote on psychic phenomena, specializing in modern spiritualism in the Victorian era. Currently Book Review Editor at the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, she lives in the north Georgia mountains.

Author Jerome Charyn reanimates a war-torn Manhattan overrun by Redcoats and deserted by all but the Loyalists—and Mrs. Gertrude Jennings, the tempestuous, redheaded queen of Manhattan’s most spectacular bordello. When the novel opens, young double agent John Stocking is being interrogated by Washington, a rebel commander far removed from the dour, silent man of most history books. As Johnny seeks to unlock the mystery of his birth and grapples with his allegiances, he falls in love with Clara, a gorgeous, green-eyed octoroon, the most coveted harlot of Gertrude’s house. The wild parade of characters he encounters includes Benedict Arnold, the Howe brothers, “Sir Billy” and “Black Dick,” and a manipulative Alexander Hamilton.

Jerome Charyn has lived in Barcelona, Houston, Austin, and San Francisco, and now shuttles back and forth between New York and Paris, where he teaches film theory at the American University and regularly writes for the Cahiers du Cinema. He is currently working on a novel about Stalin and his deeply ambiguous relationship with writers, actors, and other artists during the 1930s.

Viking Penguin

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March comes an ambitious novel that traces the journey of a rare Hebrew manuscript from Spain to the ruins of Sarajevo, from the Silver Age of Venice to the sunburned rock faces of northern Australia. Inspired by the true story of a mysterious codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, People of the Book is an adventure through five centuries of history. From its creation in Muslim-ruled, medieval Spain, the illuminated manuscript makes a series of perilous journeys: through Inquisition-era Venice, fin-de-siecle Vienna, and the Nazi sacking of Sarajevo.

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, and attended Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. In 1982 she won the Shackleton Australian Correspondents scholarship at Columbia University. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March, and her novel Year of Wonders is an international bestseller.

Doubleday

For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.” Now Pulitzer Prize—winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. Legacy of Ashes is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/11.

Tim Weiner is a reporter for The New York Times. He has written on American intelligence for twenty years, and won the Pulitzer Prize for his work on secret national security programs. He has traveled to Afghanistan and other nations to investigate CIA covert operations firsthand.

From the bestselling author of The Wife and The Position, a feverishly smart novel about female ambition, money, class, motherhood, and marriage-and what happens in one community when a group of educated women chooses not to work.

For a group of four New York friends, the past decade has been largely defined by marriage and motherhood. Educated and reared to believe that they would conquer the world, they then left jobs as corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and film scouts to stay home with their babies. What was meant to be a temporary leave of absence has lasted a decade. Now, at age forty, with the halcyon days of young motherhood behind them and without professions to define them, Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen face a life that is not what they were brought up to expect but seems to be the one they have chosen.

Meg Wolitzer grew up around books. Her mother, Hilma Wolitzer, published two novels while Meg was still in school, and weekly trips to the library were a ritual the entire family looked forward to. Over the years, Wolitzer has proven herself a deft chronicler of intense, unconventional relationships, especially among women. In addition to her bestselling novels, Wolitzer has written a number of screenplays. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and she has also taught writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and at Skidmore College.

Penguin Press

From more than ten thousand interviews, StoryCorps-the largest oral history project in the nation’s history-presents a tapestry of American stories, told by the people who lived them to the people they love.

In Listening Is an Act of Love, StoryCorps founder and legendary radio producer Dave Isay selects some of the most remarkable stories from the already vast collection and arranges them thematically into a moving portrait of American life. The voices here connect us to real people and their lives-to their experiences of profound joy, sadness, courage and despair, to good times and hard times, to good deeds and misdeeds.

Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and its parent company, Sound Portraits Productions. Over the past two decades his radio documentary work has won nearly every award in broadcasting, including five Peabody awards. Dave has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a United States Artists Fellowship. He is the author (or coauthor) of four books based on Sound Portraits radio stories, including Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago and Flophouse. He and his wife, Jennifer Gonnerman, live in Brooklyn.

Simon and Schuster

Jimmy Carter has lived the most admired and productive post-presidency in the nation’s history. Through The Carter Center, which he and Rosalynn Carter founded in 1982, President Carter has fought neglected diseases, waged peace in war zones, and built hope among some of the most forgotten and needy people in the world. Serving in more than seventy nations, he has led peacekeeping efforts for Ethiopia, North Korea, Haiti, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Uganda and Sudan. With his colleagues from The Carter Center, he has monitored more than sixty-five elections in troubled nations, from Palestine to Indonesia. Carter’s bold initiatives, undertaken with dedicated colleagues, have eliminated, prevented, or cured an array of diseases that have been characterized as “neglected” by WHO and that afflict tens of millions of people unnecessarily. The Carter Center has taught millions of African families how to increase the production of food grains, while Rosalynn Carter has led a vigorous war against the stigma of mental illness around the world. Beyond the White House is the story of Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency

Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, and served as thirty-ninth President of the United States. He and his wife, Rosalynn, founded The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that prevents and resolves conflicts, enhances freedom and democracy, and improves health around the world. He is the author of numerous books, including Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, An Hour Before Daylight and Our Endangered Values.

Pantheon

The Corpse Walker is a compilation of twenty-seven oral histories that opens a window onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Author Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese society: people for whom the “new” China—the China of economic growth and globalization—-is no more beneficial than the old. By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, he manages to get his subjects to talk openly about their lives. Liao crafted the interviews with sensitivity and patience, working both from notes and from his own memory of these remarkable conversations. The result is a revealing portrait of a people, a time, and a place we might otherwise have never known. Liao Yiwu is a poet, novelist, and screenwriter. In 1989, he published an epic poem, “Massacre,” that condemned the killings in Tiananmen Square and for which he spent four years in prison. In 2003, he received a Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett Grant, and in 2007, he received a Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Center. Translator Yen Huang is a writer and freelance journalist whose articles and translations have appeared in The Wall Street Journal Asia, the Chicago Tribune, the South China Morning Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Paris Review.

Harcourt Books

Life of Pi, winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, became an international bestseller since its first publication in 2002. Pi Patel, the son of a zookeeper, has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with the tiger for 227 days lost at sea. In 2005 an international competition was held to find the perfect artist to illustrate Yann Martel’s prize—winning novel. From thousands of entrants, Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac was chosen. This lavishly produced edition features forty of Torjanac’s four-color illustrations, bringing Life of Pi to life.

Harper Collins

Louise Erdrich’s new novel centers on a compelling mystery. The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation. The descendants of Ojibwe and white intermarry, their lives intertwine; only the youngest generation, of mixed blood, remains unaware of the role the past continues to play in their lives. Erdrich’s narrators unravel the stories of different generations and families in this corner of North Dakota. Bound by love, torn by history, the two communities’ collective stories finally come together in a wrenching truth revealed in the novel’s final pages. Louise Erdrich is the author of twelve novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

St. Martin’s Press

In 1939 Tokyo, two orphaned brothers are growing up with their grandparents, who inspire them to dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy, Hiroshi, shows unusual skill at the national obsession of sumo wrestling, while Kenji is fascinated by the art of creating hard-carved masks for actors in the Noh theater. Across town, a renowned sumo master, Sho Tanaka, lives with his wife and their two young daughters: the delicate, daydreaming Aki and her independent sister, Haru. Life seems full of promise as Kenji begins an apprenticeship with the most famous mask-maker in Japan and Hiroshi receives an invitation to train with Tanaka. But then Pearl Harbor changes everything. As the ripples of war spread to both families’ quiet neighborhoods, all of the generations must put their dreams on hold—-and then find their way in a new Japan.

Gail Tsukiyama is a lecturer in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, as well as a freelance book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Random House

The vivid voices that speak from these pages are not those of historians or scholars. They are the voices of ordinary men and women who experienced — and helped to win — the most devastating war in history, in which between 50 and 60 million lives were lost. Focusing on citizens of four towns, The War follows more than forty people from 1941 to 1945. Woven largely from their memories, the narrative unfolds month by bloody month, with the outcome always in doubt. All the iconic events are here, from Pearl Harbor to the liberation of the concentration camps, but we also move among prisoners of war and Japanese American internees, defense workers and schoolchildren, and families who struggled simply to stay together while their men shipped off to Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa.

Ken Burns, producer and director of the film series The War, founded his own documentary company, Florentine Films, in 1976. His films include Jazz, Baseball, and The Civil War, which was the highest-rated series in the history of American public television. His work has won numerous prizes, including the Emmy and Peabody Awards, and two Academy Award nominations.

Shaye Areheart Books

Alice Hoffman’s stunningly original story follows three women in love with the wrong men. Headstrong Madeline Heller finds herself hopelessly attracted to her sister’s fiancé…Frieda Lewis, a doctor’s daughter who has run off to London, becomes the muse of an ill-fate rock start… and beautiful, reckless Bryn Evans is set to marry an Englishman while she’s secretly obsessed with her ex-husband, a dangerous and love-besotted New Yorker. At the heart of the novel is Lucy Green, who blames herself for a tragic accident she witnessed at the age of twelve in the same London hotel where the others have found themselves. Lucy has spent four decades searching out the Third Angel, the angel on Earth who will renew her faith. Evoking the worlds of Notting Hill, Kings Road, and Kensington while moving back and forth in time from the 90s, to the 60s, and then to the 50s, The Third Angel charts the unique, alchemical nature of love. Alice Hoffman is the author of nineteen novels, two books of short stories, and eight books for children and young adults. Her work has been published in more than twenty translations and in more than one hundred foreign editions.

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux

So, what do you do?” Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter … But now he’s thirty-five years old and he’s still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn’t say tending bar. He was going places—until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that’s Eric’s version. In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the “new” New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an Xray of the street in the age of no broken windows and “quality of life” squads, from a writer whose “tough, gritty brand of social realism … reads like a movie in prose” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). Richard Price is the author of seven novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire.

Farrar, Strauss & Giroux

In the years between World War II, American popular culture as we know it was first created—in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress—only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine. The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told—until The Ten-Cent Plague. David Hajdu’s new book opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority. When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. The Ten-Cent Plague shows how—years before music—comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish and often shocking comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public bonfires. Cities passed laws to outlaw comics. Congress took action with hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers. The Ten-Cent Plague revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between “high” and “low” art. David Hajdu is music critic for The New Republic and teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

McAdam Cage

From the best-selling author of Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, a tale that offers American readers unique insight into the inner workings of Iranian society. In the decade before the Islamic Revolution, Iran is a country on the brink of explosion. At once a cultural exploration of an as-yet-unfamiliar society and a psychological study of the effects of loss, Caspian Rain takes the reader inside the tragic and fascinating world of a brave young girl struggling against impossible odds.

Gina B. Nahai has lived in Iran, Switzerland, and the United States. Gina B. Nahai is the author of Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, and Sunday’s Silence. Her novels have been translated into sixteen languages, and her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune amd San Francisco Chronicle. She is a former consultant for the Rand Corporation, and has studied the politics of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran for the United States Department of Defense. Nahai currently is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.