Welcome to Ian Frazier's New York, where every block is an event, and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet landlord extraordinaire Zvi Hugo Segal, and the man who scaled the World Trade Center. Learn the location of Manhattan's antipodes, and mea
On the Rez is a sharp, unflinching account of the modern-day American Indian experience, especially that of the Oglala Sioux, who now live on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the plains and badlands of the American West. Crazy Horse, perhaps the great
Family tells the story of Ian Frazier's family in America from the early colonial days to the present. Using letters and other family documents, he reconstructs two hundred years of middle class life, visiting small towns his ancestors lived in, reading b
From the opening essay, "The Bloomsbury Group Live at the Apollo (Liner Notes from the New Best-Selling Album)" to the title piece that discusses ways in which you might begin a romance with your mother ("In today's fast-moving, transient, rootless societ
Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundred of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a
From "The Talk of the Town," Jamaica Kincaid's first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New YorkTalk Pieces is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town," composed during the time when she first came to the Un
An indispensable book by writers who have experienced firsthand the rewards and challenges of crafting a memoir Anyone undertaking the project of writing a memoir knows that the events, memories, and emotions of the past often resist the orderly structu
Seriously Funny Writing By Today's Most Celebrated AuthorsAt last, a premier showcase of fifty-four great literary humorists and masters of the journalistic jab, the social spoof, the parodic proof, the satire, the tirade, and the send-up. Here are those
When Ian Frazier's first collection of humorous essays, Dating Your Mom, was published in 1986, Time's reviewer Paul Gray called it "hilarious" and warned readers to" read sparingly... By 1996 another collection may appear." And he was rights. Frazier's n
