In this celebration of contemporary American fiction, Kathryn Hume explores how estrangement from America has shaped the fiction of a literary generation, which she calls the Generation of the Lost Dream. In breaking down the divisions among standard categories of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, Hume identifies shared core concerns, values, and techniques among seemingly disparate and unconnected writers including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ralph Ellison, Russell Banks, Gloria Naylor, Tim O'Brien, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walker Percy, N. Scott Momaday, John Updike, Toni Morrison, William Kennedy, Julia Alvarez, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Don DeLillo. Hume explores fictional treatments of the slippage in the immigrant experience between America's promise and its reality. She exposes the political link between contemporary stories of lost innocence and liberalism's inadequacies. She also invites us to look at the literary challenge to scientific materialism in various searches for a spiritual dimension in life. The expansive future promised by the American Dream has been replaced, Hume finds, by a sense of tarnished morality and a melancholy loss of faith in America's exceptionalism. American Dream, American Nightmare examines the differing critiques of America embedded in nearly a hundred novels and points to the source for recovery that appeals to many of the authors.

Homeowners who can't borrow from banks have long turned to the subprime lending industry for mortgages. Increasingly, that industry has turned on them by charging outrageous fees and usurious interest, and then taking their homes through foreclosure. Richard Lord explores the spread of predatory lending practices. And it tells the stories of borrowers who've been taken, contractors and brokers who've been co-opted, lenders who've cheated--and the world's biggest financial titans, who've cashed in. A battle is taking shape that could determine whether home ownership for working people will be an achievable dream or an American nightmare. Richard Lord is a writer for the "Pittsburgh City Paper" whose work on subprime lending has won numerous awards.

Suge Knight, the founder of Death Row Records, the man at the center of the gangsta rap and hip-hop explosion, is a singular combination of showman, businessman, and Godfather, and a natural-born storyteller. In American Nightmare American Dream, he delivers the most candid, unflinching, and thoughtful account of his many lives. American Nightmarechronicles the inspirational story of Suge Knight's emergence from the ghetto streets of Compton to become one of the most significant and controversial personalities in the music industry. For the first time, Knight publicly addresses such subjects as the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls; his notorious run-ins with music executives and producers; and countless provocative incidents involving former colleagues and friends, including Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Vanilla Ice, Berry Gordy, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, and Jennifer Lopez. In harrowing detail, he tells of the five years he spent behind bars-the shock and sadness of arriving at a place that he already knew intimately from stories heard since childhood, and the wisdom gained from being cut off from his former life. American Nightmareis also the story of a uniquely self-made man. The success of Death Row Records turned him into a multimillionaire who crossed impossible borders. He counted himself a friend of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and paid with hard time for his alleged association with known felons. His style of doing business-"bringing the ghetto into the boardroom"-has inspired admiration and fear in equal measure. Even as some in the music business profess to be afraid of him, he is hailed as a hero in Compton, for giving back to the community. He has instituted programs for single-parent families and children of incarcerated parents. In American Nightmare, he tells young people how terrible prison is, how important it is to get an education, and that there are more ways to get out of the ghetto than by being an athlete or a rapper. Suge Knight wants them to dream about success and then make it happen. Suge Knight's life story is a contemporary, urban version of the American rags-to-riches saga. It also uniquely illuminates the most important revolution in popular music of the past few decades-the emergence of gangsta rap and hip-hop into the mainstream. With dead-on humor and bracing candor, Suge Knight pays tribute to the hard lessons of his past, and offers a powerful answer to anyone who feels trapped by circumstances beyond their control: the example of a life lived boldly.

The American Dream turned into a nightmare when the housing bubble burst, and people have been trying to figure out who to blame- Greedy bankers? Corrupt politicians? Ignorant homeowners? In American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership, Randal O'Toole explores the forces at play in the housing market and shows how we can rebuild the American dream of homeownership by eliminating federal, state, and local policies that distort the free market for housing.

As a child growing up in Malaysia, Shing Yin Khor had two very different ideas of what “America” meant. The first looked a lot like Hollywood, full of beautiful people and sunlight and freeways. The second looked more like The Grapes of Wrath - a nightmare landscape filled with impoverished people, broken-down cars, barren landscapes, and broken dreams. Those contrasting ideas have stuck with Shing ever since, even now that she lives and works in LA. The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66 is Shing’s attempt to find what she can of both of these Americas on a solo journey (small adventure-dog included) across the entire expanse of that iconic road, beginning in Santa Monica and ending up Chicago. And what begins as a road trip ends up as something more like a pilgrimage in search of an American landscape that seems forever shifting, forever out of place.

The book demonstrates how politicians and federal agencies dominated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and took just thirteen years to wreck the American dream of home ownership.

Classic film noir offers more than pesky private eyes and beautiful bad girls—it explores the quest for the not-so-attainable American dream. Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL Desperate young lovers on the lam (They Live by Night), a cynical con man making a fortune as a mentalist (Nightmare Alley), a penniless pregnant girl mistaken for a wealthy heiress (No Man of Her Own), a wounded veteran who has forgotten his own name (Somewhere in the Night)—this gallery of film noir characters challenges the stereotypes of the wise-cracking detective and the alluring femme fatale. Despite their differences, they all have something in common: a belief in self-reinvention. Nightmare Alley is a thorough examination of how film noir disputes this notion at the heart of the American Dream. Central to many of these films, Mark Osteen argues, is the story of an individual trying, by dint of hard work or, more often, illicit enterprises, to overcome his or her origins and achieve material success. In the wake of World War II, the noir genre tested the dream of upward mobility and the ideas of individualism, liberty, equality, and free enterprise that accompany it. Employing an impressive array of theoretical perspectives (including psychoanalysis, art history, feminism, and music theory) and combining close reading with original primary source research, Nightmare Alley proves both the diversity of classic noir and its potency. This provocative and wide-ranging study revises and refreshes our understanding of noir's characters, themes, and cultural significance.