A powerful, funny, and wise debut from a writer Esquire praises as “the second coming of Denis Johnson.” In this widely acclaimed story collection, Jim Gavin delivers a hilarious and panoramic vision of California, in which a number of down-on-their-luck men, from young dreamers to old vets, make valiant forays into middle-class respectability. Each of the men in Gavin’s stories is stuck somewhere in the middle, caught halfway between his dreams and the often crushing reality of his life. A work of profound humanity that pairs moments of high comedy with searing truths about life’s missed opportunities, Middle Men brings to life unforgettable characters as they learn what it means to love and work and exist in the world as a man. Hailed as a “modern-day Dubliners” (Time Out ) and “reminiscent of Tom Perotta’s best work” (The Boston Globe), this stellar debut has the Los Angeles Review of Books raving, “Middle Men deserves its hype and demonstrates a top-shelf talent. . . . A brilliant sense of humor animates each story and creates a state of near-continuous reading pleasure.”

With the rise of the Internet, many pundits predicted that middlemen would disappear. But that hasn't happened. Far from killing the middleman, the Internet has generated a thriving new breed. In The Middleman Economy , Silicon Valley-based reporter Marina Krakovsky elucidates the six essential roles that middlemen play.

In this widely acclaimed story collection, Jim Gavin delivers a hilarious and panoramic vision of California, in which a number of down-on-their-luck men, from young dreamers to old vets, make valiant forays into middle-class respectability. Each of the men in Gavin's stories is stuck somewhere in the middle, caught halfway between his dreams and the often crushing reality of his life. A work of profound humanity that pairs moments of high comedy with searing truths about life's missed opportunities, Middle Men brings to life unforgettable characters as they learn what it means to love and work and exist in the world as a man.

Explores how people at the margins of American politics (America's middlemen) have historically shaped war, peace, expansion, and empire.

New York Times bestselling author Olen Steinhauer's next sweeping espionage novel traces the rise and fall of a domestic left-wing terrorist group.

This volume studies local priests as central players in small communities of early medieval Europe. As clerics living among the laity, priests played a double role within their communities: that of local representatives of the Church and religious experts, and that of owners of land and other goods. By virtue of their membership of both the ecclesiastical and the secular world, they can be considered as ‘men in the middle’: people who brought politico-religious ideas and ideals to secular communities, and who linked the local to the supra-local via networks of landownerhsip. This book addresses both roles that local priests played by approaching them via their manuscripts, and via the charters that record transactions in which they were involved. Manuscripts once owned by local priests bear witness to their education and expertise, but also indicate how, for instance, ideals of the Carolingian reforms reached the lowest levels of early medieval society. The case-studies of collections of charters, on the other hand, show priests as active members of networks of the locally powerful in a variety of European regions. Notwithstanding many local variations, the contributions to this volume show that local priests as ‘men in the middle’ are a phenomenon shared by the early medieval world as a whole.