Books like Red Lobster, White Trash, & the Blue Lagoon by Joe Queenan

Dave Eggers' 2000 memoir chronicles his struggles and resilience after the cancer-related deaths of his parents, as he assumes responsibility for his younger brother and confronts the challenges of growing up alone.

Donald Ray Pollock’s "Knockemstiff" presents a gritty, interconnected series of short stories set in a Midwestern town, exploring the hard, unvarnished lives of its residents from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Thirteen‑year‑old Koly in India faces an arranged marriage that turns into deception when she learns her life has been sold for dowry. The novel follows her brave journey to reclaim her future amid rigid tradition.

The forefront British dance critic and award-nominated author of Bloomsbury Ballerina presents a revisionist assessment of the movement that shattered the boundaries of conventional femininity through the lives of six figures that exemplified it, including Lady Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka. Glamorised, mythologised and demonised, the women of the 1920s prefigured the 1960s in their determination to reinvent the way they lived. This is in part a biography of that restless generation: starting with its first fashionable acts of rebellion just before the Great War, and continuing through to the end of the decade when the Wall Street crash signal led another cataclysmic world change. It focuses on six women who between them exemplified the range and daring of that generation's spirit, women who, in their very different ways, epitomise the decade in which they came of age, the 1920s. Contains primary source material

What's it like to witness the moments that define a culture? Marshall Blonsky spent four years on three continents as a fly on the wall--albeit one with a doctorate in semiotics--watching the dreammakers of international culture construct the attitudes and lifestyles of the early 90s: Giorgio Armani, in his Milan studio, sketching a faux-humble sack suit that will usher in the penitent 90s. . . Vanna White in gold lame, sitting in her private hair studio wondering if Ted Koppel is mocking her. . . Costa-Gavras, cradling his son in Paris, revealing a secret about TV commercials. . . Stephen King describing a ghost he saw while laying his wife's coat on a bed at a party. . .Peter Greenaway turning deconstruction into chic films for those of us with a case of culture-ache. . . Yevgeny Yevtushenko cooking lunch in Moscow, telling a hair-raising tale about the former Soviet Union. Logging the air miles from Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Paris, Milan, Moscow, and Beverly Hills, Blonsky tells a mischievous, impudent tale of life and thought at the top of the cultural tower. When Russian TV star Vladimir Pozner calls him an agent (in whose service, he doesn't know) he touches on a device of this book. The author made himself a protean character, a soft-outlined creature now giving advice to "Nightline" producers, now pitching in on a porn shoot, now falling in behind Donald Trump on the dais of a Reagan banquet. He lived four years like an inquiring Rohrschach?sic? test, making his subjects show and tell "too much"--And thus give away the store. "He tricked me, seduced me," Merv Griffin said after the encounter. But the author is too mercurial to be merely a trickster. He is more a kind of Don Quixote travelling across our landscape of ugliness and deadly play, convening what is, in effect, a global town-meeting. TV anchors, artists, film directors, designers, photographers, writers, and editors: what they comprise is no less than a hidden order--a cultural power structure as important as the economic one. Whether grave, frivolous, boastful, or drunk, they enable us to grasp the logic of the ethical and cultural systems they are concocting to suit our new age of faxes and cellular phones, laptops and robots. They are creating a United States of Capitalism, an archipelago of privilege in a sea of misery. Who's in this archipelago? Who's out? American Mythologies decodes the unforeseen shifts in world power (including America's much debated "decline") while sketching in the coming shape of the world.

Explores how 'hip' evolved from underground culture to a global cultural touchstone, charting its influence on music, fashion, gender, race, and mainstream commerce over the twentieth century.

A timeless romance adventure centered on a shipwreck and the castaways who survive, blending sea adventure with classic literary themes for readers of all ages.