LA detective, Drew Steele, takes on a new case while still recovering from life-threatening wounds he suffered in an IED explosion in Iraq where he was working for "the company" as a private contractor. The doctors told him he would never walk again, but he proved them wrong. After multiple surgeries, he is able to walk again using a high-tech prosthetic foot (which provides a convenient place to hide a tiny gun). Although he walks with a limp, don't call him a cripple; he's still one of the most successful and sought-after detectives in LA. His first case back in LA seems routine – a missing Las Vegas casino boss - and unrelated to what he was doing in Iraq, but the case turns decidedly dangerous when the missing man turns up dead with a strange message burned into the flesh of his forehead. When the autopsy reveals a grisly surprise in the dead man's stomach, Steele suspects it was put there to suggest the murder is somehow connected to drug trafficking in Crueltown, the criminal hideout in a toxic swamp near the LA-harbor where police are not allowed. But is Crueltown really at the center of this mystery, or is it one of his old enemies trying to draw him into a deadly trap? Crueltown is a Noir murder mystery that pits two brilliant minds against each other in a life and death struggle against a backdrop of the darker side of LA and Vegas.

The modern traffic system is ecologically unsustainable, emotionally stressful, and poses a physical threat to individuals and communities alike. Traffic is not only an ecological and social problem but also a political one. Modern traffic reproduces the rule of the state and capital and is closely linked to class society. It is a problem of power. At its core lies the notion of “automobility,” a contradictory ideal of free movement closely linked to a tight web of regulations and control mechanisms. This is the main thesis of the manifesto The Traffic Power Structure, penned by the Sweden-based activist network Planka.nu. Planka.nu was founded in 2001 to fight for free public transport. Thanks to creative direct action, witty public interventions, and thought-provoking statements, the network has become a leading voice in Scandinavian debates on traffic. In its manifesto, Planka.nu presents a critique of the automobile society, analyzes the connections between traffic, the environment, and class, and outlines its political vision. The topics explored along the way include Bruce Springsteen, high-speed trains, nuclear power, the security-industrial complex, happiness research, and volcano eruptions. Planka.nu rejects demands to travel ever-longer distances in order to satisfy our most basic needs while we lose all sense for proximity and community. The Traffic Power Structure argues for a different kind of traffic in a different kind of world. The book has received several awards in Sweden and has been hailed by Swedish media as a “manifesto of striking analytical depth, based on profound knowledge and a will to agitation that demands our respect” (Ny Tid).

In the watershed year of 1962, events and people came together to reshape baseball like never before. The season saw five no-hitters, a rare National League playoff between the Giants and the Dodgers, and a thrilling seven-game World Series where the Yankees, led by Mickey Mantle, won their twentieth title, beating the San Francisco Giants, led by Willie Mays, in their first appearance since leaving New York. Baseball was expanding with the Houston Colt .45s and the New York Mets, who tried to fill the National League void in New York but finished with 120 losses and the worst winning percentage since 1900. Despite their record, the ’62 Mets revived National League baseball in a city thirsty for an alternative to the Yankees. As the team struggled through a disastrous first year, manager Casey Stengel famously asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Earlier that year in Los Angeles, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley launched Dodger Stadium, a state-of-the-art ballpark in Chavez Ravine and a new icon for the city. For the Dodgers, Sandy Koufax pitched his first of four career no-hitters, Maury Wills set a record for stolen bases in a season, and Don Drysdale won twenty-five games. Beyond baseball, 1962 was also a momentous year in American history: Mary Early became the first Black graduate of the University of Georgia, First Lady Jackie Kennedy revealed the secrets of the White House in a television special, John Glenn became the first astronaut to orbit Earth, and JFK stared down Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Weaving the 1962 baseball season within the social fabric of this era, David Krell delivers a fascinating book as epochal as its subject.

A #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and “one of the finest and most gripping political novels of our era”(The New York Times). Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent is one of the high points of twentieth-century literature, a seminal work of political fiction by a Washington DC insider that is as relevant today as when it was first published in 1959. Drury has penetrated the world’s stormiest political battleground—the smoke-filled committee rooms of the United States Senate—to reveal the bitter conflicts set in motion when the President calls upon the Senate to confirm his controversial choice for Secretary of State. This novel is a true epic showing in fascinating detail the minds and motives of the statesmen, the opportunists, the idealists. From a Senate old-timer’s wily maneuvers, a vicious demagogue’s blistering smear campaign, the ugly personal jealousies that turn a highly qualified candidate into a public spectacle, to the tragic martyrdom of a presidential aspirant who refuses to sacrifice his principles for his career—never has there been a more revealing picture of Washington’s intricate political, diplomatic, and social worlds. Advise and Consent is a timeless story with clear echoes of today’s headlines. Includes Allen Drury’s never-before-published original preface to Advise and Consent, his essay for the Hoover Institution on the writing of the book, as well as poignant personal memoirs from Drury’s heirs. “Fifty years after its publication and astounding success . . . Allen Drury's novel remains the definitive Washington tale.” —The Wall Street Journal

Set in turn-of-the-century Washington, DICKFISH is a prurient peek into the limousine lives of six frisky young professionals, whose twisted histories, complex values and subterranean tunes ultimately reflect or reject the modern America of our imaginings. Its tongue-in-cheek tone lifts the randy tale to wild heights of irony, as left-wing elitists lampoon right-wing extremists and raging narcissists skewer noisome Neoconservatives. Nobody winds up covered in glory. But, in the end, as in life, decadent Democrats always find a way to have fun and dour Republicans never know why.