Popular Literature

Briallen Hopper's Hard to Love honours the categories of loves and relationships beyond marriage, the ones that are often treated as invisible or seen as secondary - friendships, kinship with adult siblings, care teams that form in times of illness, or various alternative family formations. She also values difficult and amorphous loves like loving a challenging job or inanimate objects that can't love you back.

There's a new guidance counselor at Bailey Elementary School and he's giving the kids the creeps. No one understands why his skin is so pale, why he hides from the sun, or why his skin is deathly cold to the touch. But Counselor Drake couldn't really be Count Dracula, could he?

The new swimming instructor at Camp Lone Wolf, Nessie McFarland, is anything but normal. And when she's in her scuba gear, Nessie's skinny black body, long neck, and little head remind the kids of the great legend of Lock Ness. But Nessie can't really be a monster, could she?

Tacky is about the power of pop culture - like any art - to imprint itself on our lives and shape our experiences, no matter one's commitment to "good" taste. These 14 essays are a nostalgia-soaked antidote to the millennial generation's obsession with irony, putting the aesthetics we hate to love - snakeskin pants, Sex and the City, Cheesecake Factory's gargantuan menu - into kinder and sharper perspective.

Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she has also has a secret history. Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator.

"An excellent book by a genius”, said Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., of this now-classic exploration of the 1960s from the founder of New Journalism and author of such influential works as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Tom Wolfe explores the style and culture of the 1960s in this dynamic collection of essays - originally stand-alone pieces, many of which were published in Esquire magazine - written in his unique, free-flowing style.

Do you want to be popular? Stephanie Landry does. That's why this year, she has a plan to get in with the It Crowd in no time flat. She's got a secret weapon: an old book called (what else?) How to Be Popular.

When a group of short construction workers begins building a school playground, Lisa begins to suspect that they are really Christmas elves, but Melody and Howie think Lisa has an overactive imagination.

What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Anita Heiss, showcases many diverse voices, experiences and stories in order to answer that question. Accounts from well-known authors and high-profile identities sit alongside those from newly discovered writers of all ages. All of the contributors speak from the heart - sometimes calling for empathy, oftentimes challenging stereotypes, always demanding respect.

In this 1976 collection of essays, Americana icon Tom Wolfe explores the social status strife of the 1970s, eviscerating trends of faux-sympathy and self-absorption, going as far as to coin the term "The 'Me' Decade" to describe the period’s narcissism. And when paired with the clear, confident delivery of storied narrator and stage-and-screen veteran Peter Berkrot, Wolfe’s incisive wit and cynical bite is more blistering than ever.

Ann Bannon was designated the “Queen of Lesbian Pulp” for authoring several landmark novels in the ’50s. Unlike many writers of the period, however, Bannon broke through the shame and isolation typically portrayed in lesbian pulps, offering instead characters who embraced their sexuality. With Beebo Brinker, Bannon introduces a butch 17-year-old farm girl newly arrived in Beat-era Greenwich Village.

The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it’s the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of color from some of America’s most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country’s youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language.

In the summer of 2012, Steve Jenkins was contacted by an old friend about adopting a micropiglet. Though he knew his partner, Derek, wouldn't be enthusiastic, he agreed to take the adorable little pig anyway, thinking he could care for her himself. Little did he know, that decision would change his and Derek's lives forever. It turned out there was nothing "micro" about Esther, and Steve and Derek had actually signed on to raise a full-size commercial pig. Within three years tiny Esther grew to a whopping 600 pounds.

Joshua Goldmann is the perfect student, perfect friend, perfect son—but the pressure of acting perfect all the time gets to him. One night, he finds himself standing on the edge of an abandoned bridge, when a stranger talks him down. The two begin a friendship that eventually deepens into something more, but as Josh deals with his personal and family issues, his new relationship is put at risk.

A former US naval intelligence worker, Milton William Cooper published his manifesto Behold a Pale Horse in 1991. Since then it has gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming the number-one best seller in the American prison system. According to Behold a Pale Horse, JFK was assassinated - because he was about to reveal that extraterrestrials were about to take over the earth - by his driver, an alien himself; AIDS is a government conspiracy; and much more.

The Lord of the Rings is intended to be applicable to the real world of relationships, religion, pleasure, pain, and politics. Tolkien himself said that his grand tale of wizards, orcs, hobbits, and elves was aimed at truth and good morals in the actual world.

Seventeen-year-old Sally Spitz is done with dating. Or at least, she's done with the horrible blind dates/hookups/sneak attacks her matchmaking bestie, Hooker, sets her up on. There's only so much one geek girl and Gryffindor supporter can take. Her solution: she needs a fake boyfriend. And fast. Enter Becks, soccer phenom, all-around-hottie, and Sally's best friend practically since birth. When Sally asks Becks to be her F.B.F. (fake boyfriend), Becks is only too happy to be used.

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind is a seminal work on crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), a French social psychologist. He observes that a crowd forms when an influential idea unites a number of individuals and prompts them to act towards a common goal. In a crowd, the conscious personality of the individual is submerged and dominated by the collective mind. Furthermore, every sentiment becomes contagious to a degree that individuals readily sacrifice their personal interest to the collective.

Chuck Klosterman IV consists of three parts:

THINGS THAT ARE TRUE
Profiles and trend stories: Britney Spears, Val Kilmer, McDonalds, '70s rock band nostalgia cruises. With new introductions and asides.

The Believer magazine presents a compendium of advice from producers, writers, and actors of The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, Parks and Recreation, Late Show with David Letterman, The Hangover, and The Colbert Report, along with other musicians, cartoonists, New Yorker writers, and those similarly unqualified to offer guidance.