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Title	Author	Description
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain Masscult and Midcult	Dwight Macdonald Macdonald	Essayist and provocateur Dwight Macdonald was not afraid to slay sacred cows, and he did so with glee. In this newly gathered collection, Macdonald takes on Ernest Hemingway, James Agee, Tom Wolfe, Webster’s Dictionary, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and, most famously, the possibly pernicious ascendancy of popular culture. Contributors: John Summers , Louis Menand
Ride a Cockhorse Ride a Cockhorse	Raymond Kennedy Kennedy	Who knows why meek, middle-aged Frances suddenly gets a libido, a new hairstyle, the desire to take over the bank that employs her—and a serious case of grandiosity. But it’s a hell of a ride. Raymond Kennedy has created in Ride a Cockhorse a rollicking cautionary tale of small-town demagoguery that prefigures both America’s current financial woes and the rise of the likes of Sarah Palin. Contributors: Katherine A. Powers
The Expendable Man Expendable Man	Dorothy B. Hughes Hughes	Young doctor Hugh Denismore would seem to have everything going for him. Why then is he the first suspect when a hitchhiking teen goes missing? Dorothy B. Hughes was one of the great novelists of the golden age of noir. Here she not only takes up the subject of American social injustice, she delivers a supremely suspenseful story. Contributors: Walter Mosley
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age Dancing Lessons	Bohumil Hrabal Hrabal	An elderly roué, passing a group of sunbathing women, reminisces about the women he has known. Part drunken boast, part confession, part metaphysical poem on the nature of love and time, this astonishing novel (which unfolds in a single monumental sentence) shows why Milan Kundera called Hrabal “our very best writer today.” Contributors: Adam Thirlwell , Michael Henry Heim
The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick	Elizabeth Hardwick Hardwick	Celebrated stories of living, loving, and surviving in New York's bohemian and literary circles. This collection is the first to gather the short fiction of Elizabeth Hardwick, one of the leading figures of twentieth-century American letters. Contributors: Darryl Pinckney
Nightmare Alley Nightmare Alley	William Lindsay Gresham Gresham	Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek— the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way that anything like that will ever happen to him. Contributors: Nick Tosches
Red Shift Red Shift	Alan Garner Garner	Red Shift is a passionate fever-dream of a novel. It time-slips through English history and circles around the troubled mind of Tom, a love-struck teenager in tense rebellion against the strictures of his lower middle-class upbringing. “A bitter, complex, brilliant book.” —Ursula K. Le Guin
The Abandoned Abandoned	Paul Gallico Gallico	Young Peter sees a striped kitten in a park across the road from his house. As he crosses the street, he is struck by a truck. When he awakes, he discovers he has been transformed into a cat. Luckily, he is befriended by the street-smart stray, Jennie, who shows him how to survive in a world where dangers are many and humans are cruel.
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page Book of Ebenezer Le Page	G.B. Edwards Edwards	Curmudgeonly and wise, Ebenezer le Page recounts his eighty years on the small island of Guernsey. "A true epic, as sexy as it is hilarious." — Allan Gurganus, O, The Oprah Magazine Contributors: John Fowles
The World As I Found It World as I Found It	Bruce Duffy Duffy	An enthralling experiment that goes beyond biography to reveal the imagined lives of some of the greatest thinkers of the last century: Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell. “One of the more astonishing literary debuts in recent memory.... Mr. Duffy gave...more than 500 pages of dazzling language and dizzying speculation on the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein.” —A.O. Scott Contributors: David Leavitt