In Gates of Eden, Ethan Coen exhibits on the printed page the striking, twisted, yet devastatingly on-target vision of modern American life familiar from his movies. The world within the world we live in comes alive in fourteen brazenly original tragicomic short stories—from the Midwest mob war that fizzles due to the principals' ineptness to the trials of a deaf private eye with a blind client to a fugitive's heartbreaking explanation for having beheaded his wife, alarming in that it almost makes sense.

What happened to the idealism of the 1960s? This question has haunted a generation. 'Outside the Gates of Eden' follows two men from their first meeting in high school to their final destination in the 21st century. Alex is torn between his father's business empire and his own artistic yearnings. Cole, constantly uprooted in his childhood, finds his calling at a Bob Dylan concert in 1965. From the Summer of Love in San Francisco to the Woodstock festival in upstate New York, from campus protests to the Soho art scene, from a communal farm in Virginia to the mariachis of Guanajuato, Mexico, the novel charts the rise and fall of the counterculture - and what came after.

The cultural historian and author of Atomic Spaces offers a comprehensive account of the Baby Boomer years—from the atomic age to the virtual age. Born under the shadow of the atomic bomb, with little security but the cold comfort of duck-and-cover drills, the postwar generations lived through—and led—some of the most momentous changes in all of American history. In this new cultural history, Peter Bacon Hales explores those decades through a succession of resonant moments, spaces, and artifacts of everyday life. Finding unexpected connections, he traces the intertwined undercurrents of promise and peril. From newsreels of the first atomic bomb tests to the invention of a new ideal American life in Levittown; from the teen pop music of the Brill Building and the Beach Boys to Bob Dylan’s canny transformations; from the painful failures of communes to the breathtaking utopian potential of the digital age, Hales reveals a nation in transition as a new generation began to make its mark on the world it was inheriting. Outside the Gates of Eden is the most comprehensive account yet of the baby boomers, their parents, and their children, as seen through the places they built, the music and movies and shows they loved, and the battles they fought to define their nation, their culture, and their place in what remains a fragile and dangerous world.

Widely admired as the definitive cultural history of the 1960s, this groundbreaking work finally reappears in a new edition. The turbulent 1960s, almost from its outset, produced a dizzying display of cultural images and ideas that were as colorful as the psychedelic T-shirts that became part of its iconography. It was not, however, until Morris Dickstein's landmark Gates of Eden, first published in 1977, that we could fully grasp the impact of this raucous decade in American history as a momentous cultural epoch in its own right, as much as Jazz Age America or Weimar Germany. From Ginsberg and Dylan to Vonnegut and Heller, this lasting work brilliantly re-creates not only the intellectual and political ferment of the decade but also its disillusionment. What results is an inestimable contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century American culture.

From the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden is an extraordinary feat of the imagination and a page-turning adventure about parallel universes and the monsters that they hide. They thought we were safe. They were wrong. Four years ago, two girls went looking for monsters on Bodmin Moor. Only one came back. Lee thought she'd lost Mal, but now she's miraculously returned. But what happened that day on the moors? And where has she been all this time? Mal's reappearance hasn't gone unnoticed by MI5 officers either, and Lee isn't the only one with questions. Julian Sabreur is investigating an attack on top physicist Kay Amal Khan. This leads Julian to clash with agents of an unknown power - and they may or may not be human. His only clue is grainy footage, showing a woman who supposedly died on Bodmin Moor. Dr Khan's research was theoretical; then she found cracks between our world and parallel Earths. Now these cracks are widening, revealing extraordinary creatures. And as the doors crash open, anything could come through. "Tchaikovsky weaves a masterful tale... a suspenseful joyride through the multiverse." (Booklist)

By the Wainwright-Conservation-Prize-winning author of Rebirding Spend a year in an orchard, celebrating its imperilled, overlooked abundance of life.

Despite the development of a faster-than-light drive, Earth's space program has been in the doldrums for centuries, as has the Earth itself. Hyperspace being impossible to navigate without beacons at which to aim, there is no alternative but to wait for vessels sent out at sub-light speed decades previously to find somewhere worth going. Unfortunately, when one finally does, it doesn't take long for political conflicts to materialize over the exploitation of the few seemingly-Earthlike world in question. When an entire survey team dies, the problems intensify. Lee Caretta is the man most likely to solve the problem, if his conflict-ridden employers will let him, if he can keep his tendency to suffer unexplained blackouts under control, and if the world really is sufficiently Earthlike not to be deadly to all who investigate. And then the humans begin dying!