Circus of the Absurd is a funny, earthy, entertaining slice of life in a war that never seems far from the public consciousness. This sometimes outrageous and often funny view of the Vietnam War is seen through the eyes of a low level enlisted soldier assigned to USARV headquarters in 1967-68. It's definitely NOT a typical "tip of the spear" combat focused book. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army are minor players in this adrenaline fueled trip through insane incidents and free-wheeling sex, interspersed with brutality, rape, killing, corruption, and other travesties of war. The author lures you into a tantalizing netherworld of hedonistic pleasures and exciting adventures that could be mistaken for a young man's concept of heaven, then periodically punches you in the gut with disturbing and sometimes horrific incidents to remind you that you really are in hell. It's a road rarely traveled in most books on Vietnam but Circus of the Absurd is fascinating, darkly humorous, and packed with little details that may help fill in some of the blanks many people have about the conduct of that controversial war.

Neil Cornwell's study, while endeavouring to present an historical survey of absurdist literature and its forbears, does not aspire to being an exhaustive history of absurdism. Rather, it pauses on certain historical moments, artistic movements, literary figures and selected works, before moving on to discuss four key writers: Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien. The absurd in literature will be of compelling interest to a considerable range of students of comparative, European (including Russian and Central European) and English literatures (British Isles and American) – as well as those more concerned with theatre studies, the avant-garde and the history of ideas (including humour theory). It should also have a wide appeal to the enthusiastic general reader.

The Routledge Circus Studies Reader offers an absorbing critical introduction to this diverse and emerging field. It brings together the work of over 30 scholars in this discipline, including Janet Davis, Helen Stoddart and Peta Tait, to highlight and address the field’s key historical, critical and theoretical issues. It is organised into three accessible sections, Perspectives, Precedents and Presents, which approach historical aspects, current issues, and the future of circus performance. The chapters, grouped together into 13 theme-based sub-sections, provide a clear entry point into the field and emphasise the diversity of approaches available to students and scholars of circus studies. Classic accounts of performance, including pieces by Philippe Petit and Friedrich Nietzsche, are included alongside more recent scholarship in the field. Edited by two scholars whose work is strongly connected to the dynamic world of performance, The Routledge Circus Studies Reader is an essential teaching and study resource for the emerging discipline of circus studies. It also provides a stimulating introduction to the field for lovers of circus.

Richard Lindner (1901-1978), a German-born refugee from Nazi oppression who settled in New York, created a bold and deeply disturbing body of work completely at odds with that city's vanguard of the 195Os. A former commercial artist, Lindner drew on personal memory and his emigre cultural heritage to fashion images of a bizarre and lurid humanity. Grotesque children, automaton couples, and denizens of the urban underworld populate his canvases. While his bold, precision-tooled figurative paintings found an appreciative audience in the 196Os with the advent of Pop Art, Lindner nonetheless remained a resolutely independent artist whose paintings speak to the alienation and moral crises of this century and evoke the absurdity of the human condition. Richard Lindner: Paintings and Watercolors, 1948-1977 includes 73 oil paintings and watercolors in full color, some of which have never before been exhibited or published. The book is based on the first exhibition of Lindner's work in a generation, organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which reexamines Lindner's life and traces the unfolding thematic content of his art from the late 194Os until his death in 1978. Essays are by organizing curator Judith Zilczer, Curator of Paintings at the Hirshhorn Museum, and Peter Selz, Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Zilczer explores the biographical and cultural sources for Lindner's figurative symbolism, while Professor Selz analyzes Lindner's controversial images of women.

In a brilliant performance worthy of the composer, M. T. Anderson and Petra Mathers present a picture-book biography of the singular Erik Satie. Throughout his life, Erik Satie wanted to make a new kind of music, a kind of music both very young and very old, very bold and very shy, that followed no rules but its own. At first glance, Erik Satie looked as normal as anyone else in Paris one hundred years ago. Beyond his shy smile, however, was a mind like no other. When Satie sat down at the piano to compose or play music, his tunes were strange and dreamlike, his melodies topsy-turvy and discordant. Many people hated his music. Few understood it. But to Erik Satie there was sense in nonsense, and the vibrant, surreal compositions of this eccentric man-child would go on to influence many artists.

The circus has been both one of the most influential forms of international popular entertainment and yet at the same time remains almost entirely absent from academic studies of popular theatrical forms. This book offers readers an introduction to the cultural history of the circus and gives an account of the dominant characteristics of the circus's aesthetic practices and relates these to the sometimes precarious developments, changes and variations in its economic organization, architecture and social status. The book goes on to outline the particular challenges that this essentially live, dangerous and body-centred form presents to literary and film representation and does so through the particular examples of works by Charles Dickens, Federico Fellini and Wim Wenders. This wide-ranging and accessible book offers ways of thinking about the meaning and significance of the circus as a specifically modern form of art and entertainment.