Whether you tune in each week to see veteran Detective Lennie Briscoe analyze clues with wild-card partner Ed Green in the fist half of the show, or to see Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy invoke justice in the courtroom in the second half, you cannot help but get involved with the most human characters on television. With these powerful characters and socially relevant stories ripped from today's headlines, it is difficult to tell whether you are watching the evening news or one of the most intense dramas ever seen on television. Law & Order: The Unofficial Companion was written with the cooperation of the show's creator and executive producer, Dick Wolf, and features interviews with the stars, producers, and writers. It is the first-ever guide to this popular, Emmy award-winning police drama. You'll get the inside scoop on: -the past and current stars of the show-including Paul Sorvino, Jerry Orbach, Jesse L. Martin, Christopher Noth, S. Epatha Merkerson, Sam Waterston, Carey Lowell, Angie Harmon, and Michael Moriarty-and find out who was fired, who left willingly, and who remains -the show's continued problems with censorship issues and advertiser fallout -the behind-the-scenes anecdotes about cast regulars, including the fights-both verbal and physical-that have peppered the production -how Wolf was forced to increase the estrogen and decrease the testosterone on the show -the detailed history behind the creation and development of the show, and season-by-season critiques of each episode through the entire 1999 season

This book examines the most popular American television shows of the nineties—a decade at the last gasp of network television’s cultural dominance. At a time when American culture seemed increasingly fragmented, television still offered something close to a site of national consensus. The Lonely Nineties focuses on a different set of popular nineties television shows in each chapter and provides an in-depth reading of scenes, characters or episodes that articulate the overarching “ideology” of each series. It ultimately argues that television shows such as Seinfeld, Friends, Law & Order and The Simpsons helped to shape the ways Americans thought about themselves in relation to their friends, families, localities, and nation. It demonstrates how these shows engaged with a variety of problems in American civic life, responded to the social isolation of the age, and occasionally imagined improvements for community in America.

Brilliant in its stark depiction of trench warfare in World War I, this lost classic was privately printed in a limited edition in 1930. British censors initially suppressed the short novel because of its tough antiwar views and sympathetic portrayals of German soldiers, and even today's readers may be unprepared for its scenes of horrific battlefield carnage and men driven to madness by relentless psychological stress. Providing a new view of an underappreciated Canadian author, the book also stands as a fascinating addition to the comparatively small shelf of literature by writers who fought in the Great War.

It was the fabulous summer of 1929 when the literary capital of North America moved to La Rive Gauche—the Left Bank of the Seine River—in Paris. Ernest Hemingway was reading proofs of A Farewell to Arms, and a few blocks away F. Scott Fitzgerald was struggling with Tender Is the Night. As his first published book rose to fame in New York, Morley Callaghan arrived in Paris to share the felicities of literary life, not just with his two friends, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but also with fellow writers James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Robert McAlmon. Amidst these tangled relations, some friendships flourished while others failed. This tragic and unforgettable story comes to vivid life in Callaghan's lucid, compassionate prose.

Ripe with love, money, and power, the story of 35-year-old Rudolf--set in a fast-paced, urban environment--begs the question Do we only think we exist? Rudolf and his wife work day and night hoping for a better life--he is a philosophy graduate student and the manager of a car dealership. He also keeps up a heart-wrenching relationship with the chic Wanda. Then there is Nina, who studies logic but is secretly a prostitute, and Alfred, owner of a car-leasing company, seemingly upright, but actually an embezzler. Each character conceals something. Be it in Hungary or North America, the craving for existential clarity remains strong.