These wickedly authentic introductions to twenty-first-century books preface tomes on teaching English to bacteria, using animated X-rays to create "pornograms," and analyzing computer-generated literature through the science of "bitistics." "Lem, a science fiction Bach, plays in this book a googleplex of variations on his basic themes" (New York Times Book Review). Translated by Marc E. Heine. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

A humor classic by one of the funniest writers today, SIDE EFFECTS is a treat for all those who know his work and those just discovering how gifted he is. Included here are such classics as REMEMBERING NEEDLEMAN, THE KUGELMASS EPISODE, a new sory called CONFESSIONS OF A BUGLAR, and more. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Cult writer, author, podcaster and preeminent “Weird Al” Yankovic historian Nathan Rabin loves the objectively terrible. He's spent the last quarter century celebrating the spectacular garbage that makes life worth living. Rabin began his obsession with the abysmal at the The A.V. Club in 1996, where he worked for eighteen years, primarily as the site’s head writer. Rabin left The A.V. Club in 2013 to become a staff writer for the short-lived but much loved film website The Dissolve before starting Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place in 2017. The Joy of Trash collects the best pieces from the Happy Place alongside 8 new entries on both seasons of Baywatch Nights, Shasta McNasty, Robert Evans’ Get High On Yourself, Adrien Brody’s ad-libbed introduction for Sean Paul on Saturday Night Live, and more. The Flaming Garbage Fire extended edition of The Joy of Trash combines brand new pieces on the notorious Easy Rider sequel Easy Rider: The Ride Back and the infamous Kelsey Grammer vehicle Gary the Rat with classics from the Happy Place archives on everything from a coffee table book celebrating kiddie cigarette pitchman Joe Camel to John Kricfalusi’s reviled “Adult” Spike TV Ren & Stimpy reboot to a lengthy closing essay that uses an ill-fated Blues Brothers convention to explore multi-generational depression, the blues and the author’s complicated feelings about his hometown of Chicago. The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition is an even better book about very bad people and very bad entertainment from a true American original. PRAISE FOR The Joy of Trash “Being somewhat of an expert on Nathan Rabin’s entire body of work, I can honestly say that The Joy of Trash is absolutely one of the best non-weird Al rated books he’s ever written. Terrific.” -“Weird Al” Yankovic “This is not a condemnation, it’s a celebration of how, despite the pop-culture garbage we’re forced to wade through every day, we can still rise above it. And make fun of it. In a celebratory way. I think I mixed up my metaphors here.” - Patton Oswalt “Is anyone as adept at insightful dives into the bizarre avenues of pop culture as Nathan Rabin is with ‘The Joy of Trash’!?!” - Andrew Helm, writer of A Talking Cat!?! “Nathan Rabin does not merely poke fun at bad media. He exactingly, methodically lies each of its sins bare with the thrilling precision of Hercule Poriot revealing the true identity of the murderer. Except instead of explaining how some gardener shot poison through a blowgun he’s dismantling Loqueesha to its atomic components. It’s an incredible spectacle.” - Justin McElroy “Nathan Rabin is one of my favorite pop-culture critics and historians. He takes on the good, the bad, and what some might refer to as the “ugly.” To me, it’s all beautiful. Especially the ugly. Like a crab scuttling along this nation’s depths, he collects forgotten, shimmering, neglected objects and reveals them to a most grateful world." - Mike Sacks “I have been reading Nathan since I was a no-name improvisor riding the L Train. Now I am a no-name podcaster driving a station wagon, and STILL reading him. The Joy of Trash was a fast, funny, eye opening read. A dark trip down an awful memory lane. It seems made for me. I mean the dude even covers Steven Seagal’s book!” - Jon Gabrus “Nathan Rabin is one of the funniest pop-culture writers out there. He engages some truly twisted topics with a mix of humor, insight and true curiosity. Please read this fascinating and hilarious book so that his suffering will not be in vain!” - Jordan Morris

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating portrait of journalism and the people who make it, told through pieces collected from the incomparable six-decade career of bestselling author and longtime New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin “ The Lede contains profiles . . . that are acknowledged classics of the form and will be studied until A.I. makes hash out of all of us.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD I’ve been writing about the press almost as long as I’ve been in the game. At some point, it occurred to me that disparate pieces from various places in various styles amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer. Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker, covered the civil rights movement in the South for Time, and written comic verse for The Nation . But one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for his unique combination of reportage and humor—has been his own professional environment: the American press. In The Lede, Trillin gathers his incisive, often hilarious writing on reporting, reporters, and the media world that is their orbit. He writes about a legendary crime reporter in Miami, a swashbuckling New York Times reporter, and an erudite film critic in Dallas who once a week transformed himself from an appreciator of the French nouvelle vague into a crude connoisseur of movies like Mother Riley Meets the Vampire . There are pieces on the House of Lords aspirations of a North American press baron, the paucity of gossip columns in Russia, the embroilment of a weekly newspaper in a missing person case, and the founding of a publication called Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking . Uniting all of this is Trillin’s signature combination of empathy, humor, and graceful prose. The Lede is an unparalleled portrait of one of our fundamental American institutions from a master journalist.

True stories of sudden death in the classic collection by a master of American journalism “Reporters love murders,” Calvin Trillin writes in the introduction to Killings. “In a pinch, what the lawyers call ‘wrongful death’ will do, particularly if it’s sudden.” Killings, first published in 1984 and expanded for this edition, shows Trillin to be such a reporter, drawn time after time to tales of sudden death. But Trillin is attracted less by violence or police procedure than by the way the fabric of people’s lives is suddenly exposed when someone comes to an untimely end. As Trillin says, Killings is “more about how Americans live than about how some of them die.” These stories, which originally appeared in The New Yorker between 1969 and 2010, are vivid portraits of lives cut short. An upstanding farmer in Iowa finds himself drastically changed by a woman he meets in a cocktail lounge. An eccentric old man in Eastern Kentucky is enraged by the presence of a documentary filmmaker. Two women move to a bucolic Virginia county to find peace, only to end up at war over a shared road. Mexican American families in California hand down a feud from generation to generation. A high-living criminal-defense lawyer in Miami acquires any number of enemies capable of killing him. Stark and compassionate, deeply observed and beautifully written, Killings is “that rarity, reportage as art” (William Geist, The New York Times Book Review ). Praise for Killings “Riveting tales of murder and mayhem. . . . [Calvin] Trillin is a superb writer, with a magical ability to turn even the most mundane detail into spellbinding wonder. Armed with this wealth of material, he utterly shines. Every piece here is a gem.” — The Seattle Times “What Mr. Trillin does so well, what makes Killings literature, is the way he pictures the lives that were interrupted by the murders. Even the most ordinary life makes a terrible noise . . . when it’s broken off.” —Anatole Broyard, The New York Times “Fascinating, troubling . . . In each of these stories is the basis of a Dostoevskian novel.” —Edward Abbey , Chicago Sun-Times “The stories . . . are unforgettable. They leave us, finally, with the awareness of the unknowable opacity of the human heart.” —Bruce Colman , San Francisco Chronicle “[Trillin] writes brilliantly. . . . These stories still hold up, as classics.” — The Buffalo News “In his artful ability to conjure up a whole life and a whole world, Trillin comes as close to achieving the power of a Chekhov short story as can anyone whose material is so implacably tied to fact.” —Frederick Iseman , Harper’s Bazaar “I have a book for you true-crime addicts if you’re caught up on the podcast Serial, the cascade on TV of 48 Hours and Dateline NBC episodes. . . . It’s time to pick up Calvin Trillin’s Killings .” — The New York Times Book Review “Well-crafted and thoughtfully composed, lacking judgment and admonishment, these are a true piece of quality journalism, which clearly continues to captivate audiences.” — Library Journal “With telling detail and shrewd insights, [Calvin Trillin] masterfully evokes the places and personalities that hatched these grim episodes.” — Publishers Weekly

"The bestselling author of Girls & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter delivers her first ever collection of essays--funny, poignant, deeply personal and sharply observed pieces, drawn from three decades of writing, which trace girls' and women's progress (or lack thereof) in what Orenstein once called a "half-changed world." Named one of the "40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years" by Columbia Journalism Review, Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls' sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics. In Don't Call Me Princess, Orenstein's most resonant and important essays are available for the first time in collected form, updated with both an original introduction and personal reflections on each piece. Her takes on reproductive justice, the infertility industry, tensions between working and stay-at-home moms, pink ribbon fear-mongering and the complications of girl culture are not merely timeless--they have, like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, become more urgent in our contemporary political climate. Don't Call Me Princess offers a crucial evaluation of where we stand today as women--in our work lives, sex lives, as mothers, as partners--illuminating both how far we've come and how far we still have to go"--

Assembled here are Robert Bloch's best essays from fan-produced magazines, including such classics as "The Seven Ages of Fan," "Through a Picture-Tube, Darkly," "The Demolished Fan," "Poe and Me," "In Memoriam: Weird Tales," and "The Incredible Head-Shrinking Man." Bloch's blend of wry humor, insight, awful puns, and verbal play make the 46 essays and 3 poems in The Eighth Stage of Fandom some of the most interesting and remarkable work in a career filled with the interesting and remarkable.

Buchwald, Buchwald, oh time in thy flight/ is best read on the run/ than pondered by night. The annual crop from the daily columns -- a smattering of classics (the Old and New Nixon dialogues), a number of lotus-eating position papers on continuing debates (Vietnam, Henry Kissinger, football TV weekends, Women's Lib, etc.), and a few highly volatile contributions, marvelous when first read on the 8:32, now faded by time but always with a hint of hilarity. There's Scotty Reston's mysterious Chinese appendectomy during which a bug was undoubtedly sewn in, one which operates on monosodium glutamate; or snatches from the ""Poems of Richard Nixon"" (""lakes sparkle as birds sing/ it's a good day to bomb Cambodia""); or an interview with Apathy who won by a landslide or. . . . Perhaps you won't want to read them all, but it's nice to know they're here.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.