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La Barre, Weston (1989). The Peyote Cult. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press.
For half a century, readers on peyotism have devoured La Barre's fascinating, original study, which began when the author, at age twenty-four, studied the rites of fifteen American Indian tribes using Lophophora williamsii, the small, spineless, carrot-shaped peyote cactus growing in the Rio Grande Valley and southward.

Continuing his research from the 1930s through the 1980s, Weston La Barre reviews topics such as the Timothy Leary-Richard Alpert "experiments" with peyote and other psychotropic substances, the Carlos Castaneda phenomenon, the progress of the Native American Church toward acceptance as a religious denomination, the presumptions of the Neo-American Church, the legal ramifications of ritual drug use, and the spread of peyotism from the Southwest to other North American tribes.

This new edition of La Barre's classic study includes 334 new entries in the latest of his highly valued bibliographical essays on works relating to peyote, not just in anthropology but in a variety of fields including archaology, economics, botany, chemistry, and pharmacology. The bibliography lists important contributions in popular media such as newspapers, audiotapes, and films, as well as in scholarly journals.

"The Peyote Cult is still quite generally considered to be the one outstanding work on peyote. La Barre follows the search for the 'mystic experience' through the use of chemical substances--a new fashion albeit as old as history--in an unusually objective manner."- Ricard Evans Schultes, Psychedelic Review.

Lacey, A. R. (1986). A Dictionary of Philosophy. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Providing an illuminating and informed introduction to central philosophical issues, concepts and perspectives in the core fields of metaphysics, epistemology and philosophical logic, the Dictionary takes the most commonly-used terms and notions and clarifies what they mean to the philosopher and what sort of problems the philosopher finds associated with them.

Lacoursière, Jacques and Robin Philpot, tr. (2009). A People's History of Quebec. Montreal, Baraka Books.
A concise history of Quebec, from the earliest days of colonization to the aftermath of the most recent sovereignty referendum, rendered in an easily read 200 pages. As fascinating as the march of great figures and the mapping of landmark events are the details of how they affected the ordinary life of their times.

Lacouture, Jean (1990). De Gaulle: The Rebel 1890-1944 (Vol. 1); De Gaulle: Ruler 1945-1970 (Vol 2). New York, Norton.
The first installment [De Gaulle: The Rebel 1890-1944] of a two-volume biography is a searching, masterful exploration of Charles de Gaulle from his birth in 1890 to the liberation of Paris in 1944. Lacouture describes de Gaulle's family background, education, exploits as a soldier in the first World War and his service as staff officer between wars, when his published writings brought him into conflict with orthodox military opinion. Exiled in London during WW II, de Gaulle proclaimed himself the incarnation of France, put himself at the head of the Free French movement, organized the Resistance and sought a decisive role in the Allied war effort. Lacouture traces de Gaulle's equivocal relations with Churchill, who alternately supported him and abandoned him in exasperation, and Roosevelt, who ignored and humiliated him, and concludes with a moving account of de Gaulle's vindication in August 1944 when he marched into a liberated Paris. Volume 2 [De Gaulle: Ruler 1945-1970] traces how the triumphant leader of the Free French consolidated his position as the colossus bestriding his country's political institutions. The author sees in de Gaulle a ``grand nomad'' who sometimes had to forsake power and ``take to the wilderness for his true stature and the sheer gap left by his absence to be perceived.'' Correctly predicting the fatal legislative wrangling and executive impotence of the new French constitution, the general resigned as head of the provisional government in 1946, then waited 12 years before the Algerian crisis forced the nation to turn to him, at age 67, as president of the Fifth Republic. Gaullist diplomacy gets the lion's share of coverage here, including the confrontation with the military over Algeria, the attempt to assert European independence from the superpowers while opposing Marxism, the shift toward Israel's Arab foes, and the May 1968 student rebellion that hastened the end of the general's career. Unlike many Anglo-Saxon biographers, Lacouture ascribes de Gaulle's prickly postwar relations with former American and British allies less to his arrogance than to his refusal to diminish French sovereignty. De Gaulle's policies are explained, but not his mastery of men, and criticism is limited (notably, of the general's manipulating the threat of an army coup d'etat to return to power, and of his deciding to make France an atomic power, even though the move increased the danger of nuclear proliferation). A leisurely biography that stints on explaining how de Gaulle worked his imperious will, but scores in detailing his evolution as a symbol of national unity and as a geopolitical realist.

Lagasse, Paul and Columbia University. (2000). The Columbia Encyclopedia. New York. [Detroit], Columbia University Press; Sold and distributed by Gale Group.
The 5th edition continues to earn its encomiums, with 50,000 entries, 65,000 cross-references, and 40,000 bibliographical citations. Sixty percent of the previous entries have been revised, and thousands of new entries have been added. And the events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, together comprising the single greatest change in the world since the last edition, have been assimilated and rendered intelligible, and every map revised.

Laing, R. D. and D. G. Cooper (1983). Reason & Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950-1960. New York, Pantheon Books.
Reason and Violence has been influencial in presenting to the English reader aspects of Sartre's thought embodied in his three major books published between 1950 and 1960.

The three volumes included in this exposition - Saint Genet, Comedein et Martyr; Questions de Methodes; and Critique de la Raison Dialectique - span the distance from individual biography to the basic theory of groups and social organization: from Saint Genet, perhaps the most penetrating attempt by one man to understand the life of another living man, to the Critique, which seeks to establish the dialectical bases for a structural and historical anthropology. This body of thought represents more than another synthesis of social theories and the insights of individual psychologies; it is the contribution of one of the most radical thinkers of the century to a revolution in man's understanding of himself.

Lakoff, George (2014). The All New Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. White River Junction, Vermont, Chelsea Green Publishing.
Called the "father of framing" by The New York Times, Lakoff explains how framing is about ideas -- ideas that come before policy, ideas that make sense of facts, ideas that are proactive not reactive, positive not negative, ideas that need to be communicated out loud every day in public. The All New Don't Think of an Elephant! picks up where the original book left off -- delving deeper into how framing works, how framing has evolved in the past decade, how to speak to people who harbor elements of both progressive and conservative worldviews, how to counter propaganda and slogans, and more.

Lakoff, George (2016). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Third Edition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff reveals radically different but remarkably consistent conceptions of morality on both the left and right. Moral worldviews, like most deep ways of understanding the world, are unconscious -- part of our "hard-wired" brain circuitry. When confronted with facts that don't fit our moral worldview, our brains work automatically and unconsciously to ignore or reject these facts, and it takes extraordinary openness and awareness of this phenomenon to pay critical attention to the vast number of facts we are presented with each day. For this new edition, Lakoff has added a new preface and afterword, extending his observations to major ideological conflicts since the book's original publication, from the Affordable Care Act to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recent financial crisis, and the effects of global warming.

Lakoff, George and Elisabeth Wehling (2016). Your Brain's Politics: How the Science of Mind Explains the Political Divide. Exeter, UK, Imprint Academic.
In this brief introduction, Lakoff and Wehling reveal how cognitive science research has advanced our understanding of political thought and language, forcing us to revise common folk theories about the rational voter.

Lamming, George (1991). In the Castle of My Skin. New York, Penguin.
In a sleepy fishing village in 1930s Barbados, nine-year-old G. leads a life of quiet mischief. While the village lies tranquil in the shadow of its English landlord, Mr. Creighton, and his towering house on the hill, G. makes his own fun, crab catching, teasing preachers, and playing among the pumpkin vines. Yet from this world of boyish pursuits, the precocious G. finds himself slowly awakening to strange goings-on in adult society. All around him, sudden bursts of violence-a devastating flood on the morning of his birthday; the headmaster unduly flogging his schoolmates on Empire day-hint at a brutality and destruction lurking beneath the apparently peaceful order things. As the mounting wrongs of the present drive the villagers to rise up against Mr. Creighton, the fissures in the façade of his Barbadian 'little England' begin to crack open, laying bare the central, bruising secret at the heart of their shared past. And as the world he knows crumbles before his eyes, G. is spurred ever closer to a life-changing decision, to secure his own freedom as he moves into adulthood.

Poetic, unsettling, this classic coming-of-age novel is a story of tragic innocence, as a poor village boy comes to consciousness amid the collapse of colonial rule in mid-century Barbados.

Lamrani, Salim (2013). The Economic War against Cuba: A Historical and Legal Perspective on the U.S. Blockade. New York, NY, Monthly Review Press.
In this concise and sober account, Salim Lamrani explains everything you need to know about U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba: their origins, their provisions, how they contravene international law, and how they affect the lives of Cubans. He examines the U.S. government's own official documents to expose what is hiding in plain sight: an indefensible, vicious, and wasteful blockade that has been roundly condemned by citizens around the world.

Land, Jeff (1999). Active Radio: Pacifica's Brash Experiment. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the independent Pacifica Radio Network, Land, a media critic and activist, recounts the network's history in a tight, accessible narrative. Land details how Lewis Hill and other pacifist conscientious objectors formed the Pacifica Foundation in 1946 to take their agenda beyond "ivory towerism" and to resist the "mediocrity and exploitation" that they believed defined commercial radio. After the FCC, in an era of intensified regulation, denied their idealistic AM application, Pacifica began to broadcast on FM via KPFA in the California Bay Area. Despite the network's populist intent, the station initially merited the sobriquet "Highbrow's Delight," offering classical music, intellectual roundtables and poetry alongside controversial politics. After its first decade, Pacifica expanded to New York and L.A., and as the countercultural movement gained momentum, the young network embraced the folk revival and became embroiled in a series of censorship trials over broadcasts of Ginsberg's Howl and George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." In 1962, the year longtime commentator Pauline Kael resigned in protest of Hill's domineering management of KPFA, Pacifica's New York outlet, WBAI, aired a former agent's then-shocking expose of illegal FBI activities, a story no other network would touch. WBAI was also a leader in Vietnam coverage, sending one of the first American correspondents to Hanoi and broadcasting Seymour Hersh breaking the My Lai incident. Land acknowledges that Pacifica, like most progressive organizations, endured passionate disagreements about everything from socialist theory to air time for classical music. But unlike Matthew Lasar's Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network, Land is less concerned with such internal divisions than with Pacifica's larger role in American culture. For Land, Pacifica embodies the power of the First Amendment, exemplifying the salutary effects of the "disruption of convention encouraged by vigorous public dissent."

Landauer, Susan (2016). Of Dogs and Other People: The Art of Roy De Forest. Oakland, California, University of California Press.
Roy De Forest's brightly colored, crazy-quilted jungles dotted with nipples of paint and inhabited by a cast of characters uniquely his own (a perennial favorite being his wild-eyed, pointy-eared dogs) appeal to a broad spectrum of viewers from young to old, from the casual visitor to the most sophisticated art aficionado. OMCA's project aims to reassess De Forest's art-historical position, placing him in a national rather than solely regional/West Coast context. Landauer positions De Forest as part of a bicoastal alternative current of American art that has been poorly documented and deliberately ran counter to better publicized tendencies of the 1960s and 1970s, notably Pop, Minimalism, and post-painterly abstraction. Despite the playfulness of his work, close study of De Forest's art reveals deep layers of meaning. He was a fan of popular science fiction and adventure stories, but he was also well versed in Australian aboriginal art, ukiyo-e prints, poetry, literature, and the history of philosophy. He enjoyed secreting obscure art-historical references into his work: animals might assume postures found in Medieval or Renaissance art, or a drawing that appears to depict a comic-book character may in fact refer to Titian's triple-headed allegory of Prudence. This engaging publication presents gorgeous color reproductions of 150 of De Forest's finest artworks, plus a variety of figure illustrations that illuminate the artist's diverse sources and freewheeling social and creative milieu in Northern California.

Lane, Richard J. (2000). Jean Baudrillard. London; New York, Routledge.
Jean Baudrillard is one of the most famous and controversial of writers on postmodernism. But what are his key ideas? Where did they come from and why are they important? This book offers a beginner's guide to Baudrillard's thought, including his views on technology, primitivism, reworking Marxism, simulation and the hyperreal, and America and postmodernism. Richard Lane places Baudrillard's ideas in the contexts of the French and postmodern thought and examines the ongoing impact of his work. Concluding with an extensively annotated bibliography of the thinker's own texts, this is the perfect companion for any student approaching the work of Jean Baudrillard.

Lange, Susanne and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl (2002). August Sander: People of the 20th Century (7 Volume Set). New York, Harry N. Abrams.
Revered as a father of modern photography, August Sander (1876-1964) so refined the art of portraiture that his moving images of his fellow countrymen have been heralded both as an important sociological document and a photographic masterpiece. But those images make up only a portion of this deluxe seven-volume set, which will stand as the definitive collection of Sander's considerable achievement. The books include some 150 never-before-seen images and essays by leading experts on the German photographer's work. Praising Sander's "vision . . . his knowledge, and his immense photographic talent," the writer Alfred D' Blin said: "Those who know how to look will learn from his clear and powerful photographs, and will discover more about themselves and more about others."

The son of a carpenter, August Sander was born in 1876, in a farming and mining community east of Cologne. His introduction to photography came while working as a young apprentice in the mines, when a visiting photographer asked the boy to serve as his guide. Despite his provincial background, Sander became involved with many of the avant-garde artistic ideas of his day, among them the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a movement led by his friend, the painter Otto Dix, which advocated a return to realism and social commentary in art.

Around 1922, Sander conceived and embarked on a magnum opus to be called People of the Twentieth Century, intended, as he stated, to be "a physiognomic image of an age," and a catalogue of "all the characteristics of the universally human." His portrait images were grouped into seven categories, which, in and of themselves, reveal Sander's views of the German social order. Sander prefaced the project with a Portfolio of Archetypes, which he then expanded to form the first group, the Farmer; six other categories followed: the Skilled Tradesman; the Woman; Classes and Professions; the Artists; the City; and, the last and perhaps most compelling category, the Last People, comprising the elderly, the deformed, and the dead.

Sander's inclusion of these and other marginal elements of German society - gypsies and the unemployed also figured in his work - incurred the disapproval of the National Socialist party. In 1936, the Nazis confiscated his first published version of the project, Face of Our Time (Antlitz der Zeit), and destroyed all the printing plates. Some years later Sander left Cologne and moved to the relative safety of the countryside, taking with him some 10,000 negatives. The remaining 25,000 to 30,000 negatives were destroyed by fire before he was able to transport them to the Westerwald. The project remained incomplete at his death in 1964.

Langewiesche, William (2002). American Ground, Unbuilding the World Trade Center. New York, North Point Press.
Langewiesche had unrestricted access to Manhattan's Ground Zero during the post-September 11 cleanup, and his triptych of articles (originally published in the Atlantic Monthly) takes readers through what became known to its denizens as the Pile, from the moment of destruction to the departure of the last truckload of rubble from the ruins a little less than nine months later. He gives a calm, precise account of the air traffic controllers trying to understand what was happening to the hijacked planes and explains precisely how the towers collapsed. The stars of the rest of this story are people one doesn't usually read about: administrators, engineers and construction workers in charge of the cleanup-a process in which, as Langewiesche describes it, order emerged from chaos by the sheer force of will of those in charge. One such outsize personality is David Griffin, a demolition expert who drove up from North Carolina, bluffed his way onto the restricted site, and quickly wound up in a position of authority. There's also a frank account of the tensions between police and firefighters at Ground Zero. Most fascinating, though, Langewiesche takes readers right inside the smoking Pile, as he joins workers on dangerous underground expeditions to see whether the slurry walls that keep out the Hudson will hold, or whether freon might be leaking from underground refrigerators. This is a genuinely monumental story, told without melodrama, an intimate depiction of ordinary Americans reacting to grand-scale tragedy at their best-and sometimes their worst.

Langewiesche, William (2004). The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime. New York, North Point Press.
"Our world is an ocean world, and it is wild," Langewiesche writes. He then poses a powerful question: have the industrialized nations of the world given up control of the shipping industry to the demands of the free market? And if this free market is indeed the most efficient and profitable system, what price, socially, politically and environmentally will it extract from the human beings who use it? From the panic-stricken bridge of a sinking oil tanker to the filth-clogged beaches resulting from a destroyed ship in India, Langewiesche (American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center) vividly describes a global cabal of unscrupulous ship owners, well-intentioned but overmatched regulators, and poorly trained and poorly paid seamen who risk their lives every day to make this new global economy function."It is not exactly a criminal industry," Langewiesche explains, "but it is an amoral and stubbornly anarchic one." Accidents happen with alarming regularity. A sobering account of the 1994 sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in the Baltic is the centerpiece of this book. Brutally handled, poorly maintained and perhaps fatally flawed in design, the ship capsized and sank in a raging gale, taking 852 unsuspecting people to a watery grave. Langewiesche painstakingly details the botched accident investigation-complete with bureaucratic incompetence, backpedaling elected officials and the persistent efforts of a German journalist with conspiracy on her mind. In the end, no conclusion was drawn, and the Estonia sits at the bottom of the Baltic, a silent monument to the cost of a free market gone awry. Equal parts incisive political harangue and lyrical reflection on the timelessness of the sea, this book brilliantly illuminates a system the world economy depends upon, but will not take responsibility for.

Langum, David J. (1999). William M. Kunstler: The Most Hated Lawyer in America.. New York, New York University Press.
Defending those most loathed by mainstream, conventional America, William Kunstler delighted in taking on fiercely political cases, usually representing society's outcasts and pariahs free of charge and often achieving remarkable courtroom results in seemingly hopeless cases. Though Kunstler never gave up his revolutionary underpinnings, he gradually turned from defending clients whose political beliefs he personally supported to taking on apolitical clients, falling back on the broad rationale that his was a general struggle against an oppressive government.

What ideological and tactical motives explain Kunstler's obsessive craving for media attention, his rhetorical flourishes in the courtroom and his instinctive and relentless drive for action? How did Kunstler migrate from a comfortable middle-class background to a life as a staunchly rebellious figure in social and legal history? David Langum's portrait gives depth to the already notorious breadth of William Kunstler's life.

Lapham, Lewis H. (2016). Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy. London; New York, Verso.
America's leading essayist on the frantic retreat of democracy, in the fire and smoke of the war on terror. In twenty-five years of imperial adventure, America has laid waste to its principles of democracy. The self-glorifying march of folly steps off at the end of the Cold War, in an era when delusions of omnipotence allowed the market to climb to virtual heights, while society was divided between the selfish and frightened rich and the increasingly debt-ridden and angry poor. The new millennium saw the democratic election of an American president nullified by the Supreme Court, and the pretender launching a wasteful, vainglorious and never-ending war on terror, doomed to end in defeat and the loss of America's prestige abroad. All this culminates in the sunset swamp of the 2016 election--a farce dominated by Donald Trump, a self-glorifying photo-op bursting star-spangled bombast in air. This spectacle would be familiar to Aristotle, whose portrayal of the "prosperous fool" describes a class of people who "consider themselves worthy to hold public office, for they already have the things that give them a claim to office.

Lapham, Lewis H. (1988). Money and Class in America. New York, OR Books.
"Money and Class is, on every page, a pleasure to read. Lapham’s sentences simply radiate elegance."

Lappe, Frances Moore (1971). Diet for a Small Planet. New York, Ballantine Books.
Here again is the extraordinary bestselling book that taught America the social and personal significance of a new way of eating-- one that remains a complete guide for eating well in the 90s. Featuring: simple rules for a healthy diet; a streamlined, easy-to-use format; delicious food combinations of protein-rich meals without meat; hundreds of wonderful recipes, and much more.

Laqueur, Walter and Barry M. Rubin (2008). The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict. New York, Penguin Books.
In print for forty years , The Israel-Arab Reader is a thorough and up-to-date guide to the continuing crisis in the Middle East. It covers the full spectrum of the Israel-Arab conflict - including a new chapter recounting the Gaza withdrawal, the Hamas election victory, and the Lebanon-Israel War. Featuring a new introduction that provides an overview of the past 115 years of conflict, and arranged chronologically and without bias, this comprehensive reference includes speeches, letters, articles, timelines, and reports dealing with all the major interests in the area.

Larimore, Taylor, Mel Lindauer, et al. (2007). The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing. Hoboken, N.J., J. Wiley & Sons.
The Bogleheads' Guide is both a textbook for beginners and a refresher course for old hands. It blends elements of financial-planning primers like 'The Wealthy Barber' with tips on why it pays to be cheap, a la The Millionaire Next Door. The Bogleheads march readers smartly through the basics of how much they need to save for retirement, how to allocate their assets and when to rebalance their portfolios. The authors steer through the minefield of taxes and warn neophytes to master portfolio-gutting emotions including greed and fear.

Larimore, Taylor; et al. (2009). The Bogleheads' Guide to Retirement Planning.. Hoboken, N.J., Wiley.
Whatever your current situation, you must continue to strive for a viable retirement plan by finding the most effective ways to save, the best accounts to save in, and the right amount to save, as well as understanding how to insure against setbacks and handle the uncertainties of our new financial world. Fortunately, the Bogleheads'a group of like-minded individual investors who follow the general investment and business beliefs of John C. Bogle, founder and former CEO of the Vanguard Group, are here to help. Valuable advice on a wide range of retirement planning issues.

Larrain, Sergio with Pablo Neruda and Agnès Sire, text and Henri Cartier-Bresson, correspondence (2017). Sergio Larrain: Valparaiso.. New York, Aperture.
Larrain's Valparaíso, began in 1957 while he was traveling with poet Pablo Neruda for Du magazine. When the photographs were first published in 1991, Larrain informed the publishers that he had made his own facsimile of the book, reflecting how he would have constructed the layout, and now this facsimile is beautifully produced for the first time in book form. Including text by the celebrated Pablo Neruda as well as correspondence between Larrain and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Valparaíso presents the long-awaited return of this rare and renowned body of work.

Lasar, Matthew (2000). Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network. Philadelphia, Pa., Temple University Press.
In the public radio landscape, the Pacifica stations stand out as innovators of diverse and controversial broadcasting. Pacifica's fifty years of struggle against social and political conformity began with a group of young men and women who hoped to change the world with a credo of non-violence. Pacifica Radio traces the cultural and political currents that shaped the first listener-supported radio station, KPFA FM in Berkeley, and accompanied Pacifica's gradual expansion to a five-station network.

In this expanded paperback edition, Lasar provides a postscript that examines the external pressures and organizational problems within the Pacifica Foundation that led, in early 1999, to the police shutdown of network stations KPFA. Lasar, an admittedly pro-KPFA partisan in the conflict, gives a first-person account, calling it "the worst crisis in the history of community radio."

Yet Pacifica Radio is about more than just the network's recent troubles. It is the story of visionary Lewis Hill and the small band of pacifists who in 1946, set out to build institutions that would promote dialog between individuals and nations. KPFA took to the air in 1949 with stunningly unconventional programs that challenged the dreary cultural consensus of the Cold War. No one in the Bay Area, or anywhere else, had heard anything like it on the airwaves.

The first edition of Pacifica Radio, which made the, San Francisco Chronicle's non-fiction bestseller list, was praised as "fascinating reading" by In These Times.

Lasn, Kalle (1999). Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America. New York, Eagle Brook.
America is no longer a country but a multimillion-dollar brand, says Kalle Lasn and his fellow "culture jammers ". The founder of Adbusters magazine, Lasn aims to stop the branding of America by changing the way information flows; the way institutions wield power; the way television stations are run; and the way the food, fashion, automobile, sports, music, and culture industries set agendas. With a courageous and compelling voice, Lasn deconstructs the advertising culture and our fixation on icons and brand names. And he shows how to organize resistance against the power trust that manages the brands by "uncooling" consumer items, by "dermarketing" fashions and celebrities, and by breaking the "media trance" of our TV-addicted age.

A powerful manifesto by a leading media activist, Culture Jam lays the foundations for the most significant social movement of the early twenty-first century -- a movement that can change the world and the way we think and live.

Laroque, François (1991). Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage. Cambridge England; New York, Cambridge University Press.
François Laroque's new perspective on Shakespeare's relation to popular culture has quickly become a classic of scholarship. Available now in paperback, the book opens new possibilities for Shakespeare studies, revealing the connections between his plays and the folklore, customs, games, and celebrations of the Elizabethan festive tradition. This acclaimed study shows how Shakespeare mingled popular culture with aristocratic and royal forms of entertainment in ways that combined or clashed to produce new meaning.

Larson, Gary (2003). The Complete Far Side 1980-1994. Kansas City, Mo., Andrews McMeel Pub.
Gary Larson calls The Complete Far Side, the massive two-volume collection of his Far Side cartoons, an "18-pound hernia giver." Sure to give any coffee table a solid workout, the handsome and heavy 1,272-page "legacy book" is a must for fervent fans; over 4,300 single-panel comics with more than half in color and 1,100 that have not appeared in any book form before (the popular--and far less weighty--paperback collections).

Set in rough chronological order, the comics share pages with occasional letters from fans, detractors, editors, folks made famous by a particular cartoon, and those begging for explanations. Though few explanations are provided (Larson personally supplies merely one, plus a single apology), this collection helps answer the inevitable "how do you think up these things" conundrum. Before each year's cartoons, Larson provides insight with essays about his childhood, various travels, occupational hazards, and his official rules for dealing with bedtime monsters (which often turned out to be his older brother). Most wonderful is the first essay on how the comic started. (His longtime editor Jake Morrissey's long introduction is a must read on The Far Side's story).

Despite no central characters, it's easy to spot patterns in Larson's wild and wacky cartoons. Animals, insects, and inanimate objects often exhibit all-too-human impulses. Larson's subjects are often in scenes of peril--disasters, visits to hell, and perhaps a hundred cartoons set on a one-palm tree deserted island. It is what Larson's fertile imagination mined from those situations that created fans and enemies for 14 years. (Larson retired at his peak and then went into jazz music). The comics are not indexed (how could they be--first lines? listings of cartoons with cows?); finding a favorite requires a great memory for its publication date. Best simply to peruse the pages of this beautiful collection in which you will certainly find more than a few new chuckles before landing on your beloved Larson sketch.

Larsson, Stieg and Reg Keeland (2010). The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
The exhilarating conclusion to bestseller Larsson's Millennium trilogy (after The Girl Who Played with Fire) finds Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant computer hacker who was shot in the head in the final pages of Fire, alive, though still the prime suspect in three murders in Stockholm. While she convalesces under armed guard, journalist Mikael Blomkvist works to unravel the decades-old coverup surrounding the man who shot Salander: her father, Alexander Zalachenko, a Soviet intelligence defector and longtime secret asset to Sweden's security police. Estranged throughout Fire, Blomkvist and Salander communicate primarily online, but their lack of physical interaction in no way diminishes the intensity of their unconventional relationship.

Larsson, Stieg (2009). The Girl Who Played with Fire. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.

But he has no idea just how explosive the story will be until, on the eve of publication, the two investigating reporters are murdered. And even more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander - the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker who came to his aid in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and who now becomes the focus and fierce heart of The Girl Who Played with Fire.

As Blomkvist, alone in his belief in Salander's innocence, plunges into an investigation of the slayings, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all.

Larsson, Stieg (2008). The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family's remote island retreat north of Stockholm, nor do fiction debuts hotter than this European bestseller by muckraking Swedish journalist Larsson. At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden's dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title, Men Who Hate Women), this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail for libeling a shady businessman, and the multipierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable superhacker. Hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, who wants to find out what happened to his beloved great-niece before he dies, the duo gradually uncover a festering morass of familial corruption - at the same time, Larsson skillfully bares some of the similar horrors that have left Salander such a marked woman. Larsson died in 2004, shortly after handing in the manuscripts for what will be his legacy.

Latham, Alison (2002). The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press.
First published in 1938, The Oxford Companion to Music has been the first choice for authoritative information on all aspects of music. Now, 17 years since the last edition, the Companion is here to serve a new generation of students, teachers, performers, concert goers, record collectors, and music lovers.

Completely revised and updated by a distinguished team of contributors, the Oxford Companion to Music features more than 1,000 new entries than the previous edition; more than 70 percent of the entire text is either new or entirely rewritten. Here, in articles that range from clear, concise definitions of musical ideas and terms to extended surveys of musical forms and styles, is authoritative coverage of virtually every musical subject. Embracing the world of music in all its variety--including jazz, popular music, and dance--the Companion offers a concentrated focus on the Western classic tradition, from the Middle Ages to the present day.

More than 8,000 articles sweep across an extraordinary range of subjects: composers, performers, conductors, individual works, instruments and notation, forms and genres. From the study of music--theory, aesthetics, scholarship--to the way it is performed and disseminated, the Companion provides comprehensive, accessible coverage of music in all its artistic, historical, cultural, and social dimensions. Comprehensive, authoritative, up-to-date, and designed throughout for clarity and accessibility, the new Oxford Companion to Music, like every edition before it, will immediately become an indispensable resource for all who wish to enrich their love and knowledge of music.

Lawrence, D. H. (1961). The Complete Short Stories [of] D. H. Lawrence. New York, Viking Press.
Lawrence contributed to the development of the modern short story by following the post Chekhov approach, which excludes high drama and easy snap endings. Instead, he focuses on moments of personal revelation in the same way as James Joyce did with his 'epiphanies'. He also features symbolism and a flexible prose style which changes according to its subject. His central theme is personal and sexual relationships and dramas acted out in those parts of the English class system which had been previously left unexamined.

Lawrence, D. H. (1993). The Rainbow. New York, Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
Pronounced obscene when it was first published in 1915, The Rainbow is the epic story of three generations of the Brangwens, a Midlands family. A visionary novel, considered to be one of Lawrence's finest, it explores the complex sexual and psychological relationships between men and women in an increasingly industrialized world. "Lives are separate, but life is continuous - it continues in the fresh start by the separate life in each generation," wrote F. R. Leavis. "No work, I think, has presented this perception as an imaginatively realized truth more compellingly than The Rainbow."

Lawrence, D. H. (1997). D.H. Lawrence and Italy. New York, Penguin Books.
A collection of three travel sketches on Italy, written when Lawrence was at the height of his creative powers.

Lawrence, Jerome and Robert Edwin Lee (2000). Inherit the Wind. New York, NY, Dramatists Play Service.
Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee wrote Inherit the Wind as a response to the threat to intellectual freedom presented by the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. Lawrence and Lee used the Scopes Trial, then safely a generation in the past, as a vehicle for exploring a climate of anxiety and anti-intellectualism that existed in 1950.

Inherit the Wind does not purport to be a historically accurate depiction of the Scopes trial. The stage directions set the time as "Not long ago." Place names and names of trial participants have been changed. Lawrence and Lee created several fictional characters, including a fundamentalist preacher and his daughter, who in the play is the fiance of John Scopes. Henry Drummond is less cynical and biting than the Darrow of Dayton that the Drummond character was based upon. Scopes, a relatively minor figure in the real drama at Dayton, becomes Bertram Cates, a central figure in the play, who is arrested while teaching class, thrown in jail, burned in effigy, and taunted by a fire-snorting preacher. William Jennings Bryan, Matthew Harrison Brady in the play, is portrayed as an almost comical fanatic who dramatically dies of a heart attack while attempting to deliver his summation in a chaotic courtroom. The townspeople of fictional Hillsboro are far more frenzied, mean-spirited, and ignorant than were the real denizens of Dayton.

Nonetheless, Lawrence and Lee did draw heavily from the Scopes trial. A powerful Darrow condemnation of anti-intellectualism, an exchange between Darrow and Judge Raulston that earned Darrow a contempt citation, and portions of the Darrow examination of Bryan are lifted nearly verbatim from the actual trial transcript.

Although Lawrence and Lee completed Inherit the Wind in 1950, the play did not open until January 10, 1955. The Broadway cast included Paul Muni as Henry Drummond, Ed Begley as Matthew Harrison Brady, and Tony Randall as E. K. Hornbeck (H. L. Mencken). The play received rave reviews and was a box office success.

Nathan Douglas and Harold Smith wrote the play into a screen script in 1960. The Douglas and Smith screenplay differs from the stage version in several respects, most notably perhaps in its downplaying of some academic and theological points, and its playing up of the trial's circus atmosphere.

A made-for-TV rewrite of the 1960 Stanley Kramer movie ran on NBC in 1988. In this Inherit the Wind adaptation, Jason Robards played Darrow, Kirk Douglas played Bryan, and Darren McGavin played Mencken. The TV rewrite departed in only minor respects from the plot of the earlier Hollywood version.

Laxer, James (2004). The Border: Canada, the U.S. and Dispatches from the 49th Parallel. Toronto, Doubleday Canada.
A useful primer on the shared and distinct histories of Canada and the U.S. and the often antagonistic relationship between the neighbors.

Lay, Carol (2024). My Time Machine: A Graphic Novel. Seattle, Fantagraphics.
My Time Machine unfolds across the socially and politically confused landscape of early 2020, where Carol Lay’s middle-aged female protagonist (who bears a suspicious resemblance to the author), embarks on a time-hopping odyssey that takes her from the addled and anxious “contemporary” America to the farthest reaches of time. Finding the blueprints belonging to the eponymous Time Traveler of H.G. Wells’ novel, our reluctant and all-too-human heroine enlists her ex-husband Rob’s engineering genius in constructing the same kind of machine capable of the same awesome power. With a (more or less) functioning time machine at her disposal, she decides there’s no better time to do her part to save humanity from itself and starts looking for (figurative) butterflies to pin down in hopes of altering the history of human civilization and averting the impending effects of climate change.

le Carré, John (1991). The Secret Pilgrim. New York, Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
Nothing is as it was. Old enemies embrace. The dark staging grounds of the Cold War -- whose shadows barely obscure the endless games of espionage -- are flooded with light. The rules are rewritten, the stakes changed and the future unfathomable.

Le Corbusier and Frederick Etchells (1929). The City of to-Morrow and Its Planning. London, J. Rodker.
The great revolutionary architect's probing analysis of urban problems and their origins, and his bold solutions, which include the "Voisin" scheme for the center of Paris, and the more developed scheme for a "City of Three Million Inhabitants." Introduction. Foreword. 133 black-and-white illus. 82 black-and-white halftones.

Ned has worked for the British Intelligence all of his life -- a loyal, shrewd officer of the Cold War. Now approaching the end of his career, he revisits his own past. He invites us on a tour of three decades in the Circus, burrowing deep in the world of spies from every corner of the globe.

Le Cordon Bleu (2000). Kitchen Essentials: The Complete Illustrated Reference to the Ingredients, Equipment, Terms, and Techniques Used by Le Cordon Bleu. New York, Wiley.
This comprehensive, highly illustrated book is chock-full of enlightening and eye-opening culinary information, covering a vast range of topics that teach readers what they need to know to be successful in the kitchen - from cooking techniques and equipment to essential ingredients. Le Cordon Bleu Kitchen Essentials offers expert guidance on everything from choosing pots and pans to deboning poultry to storing ingredients - as well as logical solutions to common mistakes. The easy-to-follow text, clearly defined terms, and uncommonly helpful tips make this reference a must-have for all modern kitchens. It demonstrates techniques with 1,100 step-by-step color photographs. Plus, the book outlines the vast range of equipment, along with buying tips and cleaning and care information. Le Cordon Bleu Kitchen Essentials illustrates the cleaning and preparation of food, as well as cooking times and features classic recipes to teach the principal uses of each ingredient.

Le Goff, Jacques (1988). Medieval Civilization 400-1500. Oxford, UK; New York, NY, USA, Blackwell Publishing.
This one thousand year history of the civilization of western Europe has already been recognized in France as a scholarly contribution of the highest order and as a popular classic. Jacques Le Goff has written a book which will not only be read by generations of students and historians, but which will delight and inform all those interested in the history of medieval Europe. Part one, Historical Evolution, is a narrative account of the entire period, from the barbarian settlement of Roman Europe in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries to the war-torn crises of Christian Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Part two, Medieval Civilization, is analytical, concerned with the origins of early medieval ideas of culture and religion, the constraints of time and space in a pre-industrial world and the reconstruction of the lives and sensibilities of the people during this long period. Medieval Civilization combines the narrative and descriptive power characteristic of Anglo-Saxon scholarship with the sensitivity and insight of the French historical tradition.

Le Goff, Jacques (1988). The Medieval Imagination. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
To write this history of the imagination, Le Goff has recreated the mental structures of medieval men and women by analyzing the images of man as microcosm and the Church as mystical body; the symbols of power such as flags and oriflammes; and the contradictory world of dreams, marvels, devils, and wild forests.

Le Guin, Ursula K. (2014). The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. New York, NY, Harper Perennial Modern Classics Reprint Edition.
A bleak moon settled by utopian anarchists, Anarres has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras-a civilization of warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to reunite the two planets, which have been divided by centuries of distrust. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart.

Le Guin, Ursula K. (2008). The Lathe of Heaven. New York, NY, Scribner Reprint Edition.
George Orr has dreams that come true--dreams that change reality. He dreams that the aunt who is sexually harassing him is killed in a car crash, and wakes to find that she died in a wreck six weeks ago, in another part of the country. But a far darker dream drives George into the care of a psychotherapist--a dream researcher who doesn't share George's ambivalence about altering reality.

The Lathe of Heaven is set in the sort of worlds that one would associate with Philip K. Dick, but Ms. Le Guin's treatment of the material, her plot and characterization and concerns, are more akin to the humanistic, ethically engaged, psychologically nuanced fiction of Theodore Sturgeon. The Lathe of Heaven is an insightful and chilling examination of total power, of war and injustice and other age-old problems, of changing the world, of playing God.

Le Guin, Ursula K. (2000). The Left Hand of Darkness. New York, NY, Ace Trade Reissue Edition.
Genly Ai is an emissary from the human galaxy to Winter, a lost, stray world. His mission is to bring the planet back into the fold of an evolving galactic civilization, but to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own culture and prejudices and those that he encounters. On a planet where people are of no gender--or both--this is a broad gulf indeed. The inventiveness and delicacy with which Le Guin portrays her alien world are not only unusual and inspiring, they are fundamental to almost all decent science fiction that has been written since. If there were a canon of classic science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness would be included without debate. Certainly, no science fiction bookshelf may be said to be complete without it.

Leach, Maria and Jerome Fried (1972). Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. New York, Funk & Wagnalls.
Draws materials together from scattered sources in a systematic, though necessarily selective, fashion. Entries range from brief descriptions of motifs (correlated to Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature), legendary people or deities, songs, biographical entries on folklore scholars to signed survey articles on such topics as African and New World Folklore, Games, and Fairy Tales.

Lebowitz, Michael A. (2015). The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Lebowitz explores the obvious but almost universally ignored fact that as human beings work together to produce society's goods and services, we also produce something else: namely, ourselves. Human beings are shaped by circumstances, and any vision of socialism that ignores this fact is bound to fail, or, at best, reproduce the alienation of labor that is endemic to capitalism. But how can people transform their circumstances in a way that allows them to re-organize production and, at the same time, fulfill their human potential? Lebowitz sets out to answer this question first by examining Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, and from there investigates the experiences of the Soviet Union and more recent efforts to build socialism in Venezuela. He argues that socialism in the twenty-first century must be animated by a central vision, in three parts: social ownership of the means of production, social production organized by workers, and the satisfaction of communal needs and communal purposes. These essays repay careful reading and reflection, and prove Lebowitz to be one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of this era.

Lee, Martin A. and Bruce Shlain (1992). Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. New York, Grove Weidenfeld.
This fascinating study examines how the CIA tested LSD on unwitting residents of Greenwich Village and San Francisco. Of particular interest are profiles of Timothy Leary, LSD chemist Ronald Stark and others.

Lederer, William J. and Eugene Burdick (1994). The Ugly American. Thorndike, Me., G.K. Hall.
The multi-million-copy bestseller that coined the phrase for tragic American blunders abroad. First published in 1958, The Ugly American became a runaway national bestseller for its slashing expos of American arrogance, incompetence, and corruption in Southeast Asia. Based on fact, the book's eye-opening stories and sketches drew a devastating picture of how the United States was losing the struggle with Communism in Asia. Combining gripping storytelling with an urgent call to action, the book prompted President Eisenhower to launch a study of our military aid program that led the way to much-needed reform.

Lefebvre, Georges (1989). The French Revolution. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.

"In this grand synthesis, in which every sentence could be backed up by a footnote, Lefebvre displays his judgment, his superb grasp of the sources, and the fresh insights he wrestled from his materials. All these qualities make The French Revolution a masterpiece." -- Peter Gay

LeGates, Richard T. and Frederic Stout (2003). The City Reader. London ;, New York: Routledge.
The third edition of the highly successful The City Reader juxtaposes the very best of publications on the city. It has been extensively updated to reflect the latest thinking on globalization, information technology and urban theory. Classic writings from such authors as Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs and Le Corbusier, meet the best contemporary writings of, among others, Peter Hall, Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells.

Fifty generous selections are included: a combination of thirty-four readings from the second edition and sixteen entirely new selections. Structured to aid student understanding, the anthology features main and part introductions, as well as individual introductions to the selected articles. The latter contain a brief intellectual biography and a review of the author's writings and related literature. Furthermore they provide an explanation of how the piece fits into the broader context of urban history and practice, competing ideological perspectives on the city and the major current debates concerning race and gender, global restructuring, sustainable urban development and the impact of technology and postmodernism.

The City Reader provides the comprehensive mapping of the terrain of Urban Studies, old and new. It is illustrated with over 40 photographs the text is essential reading for anyone interested in the city.

Legg, Joshua (2011). Introduction to Modern Dance Techniques. Hightstown, NJ, Princeton Book Company.
Brings together all of the major modern dance techniques from the last 80 years, this engaging account is the first of its kind. The informative discussion starts by mapping the historical development of modern dance: in the late 19th century, a new dance emerged-not yet known as modern dance-that rejected social strictures and ballet as well. With insight into the personalities and purposes of modern dance's vanguard-including Martha Graham, Lester Horton, Jose Limón, and Merce Cunningham-this compilation provides a comparative approach that will enable students to discern which technique best suits them and dispel the idea that there is a single, universal modern dance technique. There are also ideas for experimentation so that students can begin developing an aesthetic sense for not only what is pleasing to their artistic eye, but also for what technical ideas are exciting while their own body is in motion. Sample lessons are included for teachers to incorporate the text into courses.

Leland, John (2004). Hip: The History. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press.
Hip: The History is the story of how American pop culture has evolved throughout the twentieth century to its current position as world cultural touchstone. How did hip become such an obsession? From sex and music to fashion and commerce, John Leland tracks the arc of ideas as they move from subterranean Bohemia to Madison Avenue and back again. Hip: The History examines how hip has helped shape -- and continues to influence -- America's view of itself, and provides an incisive account of hip's quest for authenticity.

Lem, Stanislaw (1999). His Master's Voice. Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University Press.
A witty and inventive satire of "men of science" and their thinking, as a team of scientists races to decode a mysterious message from space.

Lem, Stanislaw (1988). Fiasco. San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
The planet Quinta is pocked by ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. In stark contrast, the crew of the spaceship Hermes represents a knowledge-seeking Earth. As they approach Quinta, a dark poetry takes over and leads them into a nightmare of misunderstanding. Translated by Michael Kandel.

Lenfestey, Tom and Facts on File Inc. (1994). The Facts on File Dictionary of Nautical Terms. New York, NY, Facts on File.
A comprehensive dictionary covering terms related to piloting and celestial navigation; winds, weather, tides, and ice; the shipping business; deck equipment and rigging; knots and marlinespike seamanship; small-boat handling; U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ranks; and flags and signalling. Definitions are clear and brief, with parts of speech identified, cross references, and pronunciation for selected terms. The authors have done a fine job of including every imaginable nautical term. Starting with "aback" (where you don't want the wind to be on your sails), the 8500 entries range from the old (e.g., "Periplus," the first known sailing directions) to the contemporary (e.g., "PHRF," or, "Performance Handicap Racing Fleet," the largest racing class in the world). They include the very useful phonetic alphabet ("alpha," "bravo," "charlie," etc.), ending with "Zulu time" and an extensive use of abbreviations. Illustrations and tables add to the book's usefulness.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1971). Selected Works of V.I. Lenin; One-Volume Edition. New York, International Publishers.

Lennon, John and Yōko Ono (2014). John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band. Richmond, Calif., Weldon Owen Publishing.
Described by Lennon as 'the best thing I've ever done,' and widely regarded as his best solo album, 'John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band' was released on 11 December 1970. With first-hand commentary by Lennon, Ono, and other members of the band, and packed with previously unseen photographs by those who documented their lives, this incisive volume offers new insights into the raw emotions and open mindset of Lennon after marriage to Ono and the breakup of the Beatles, to the making of the album and revealing interview with Jann Wenner in December 1970.

Lennon, John and Scott Gutterman, Yōko Ono (2014). John Lennon: The Collected Artwork. San Rafael, Calif., Insight Editions.
The definitive collection of John Lennon’s artwork, spanning his early childhood to his untimely death in 1980. Lennon’s artwork predated his success with the Beatles and remained a passion throughout his years as a music legend. During his lifetime, he produced numerous series of sketches and lithographs, which were published starting in the early 1960s. Often surreal and composed through a method of free association, his drawings from this period were widely considered some of the finest interpretive artworks of the era.

Leon, Donna (2003). A Noble Radiance: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin.
Providing insight into Venetian society through the lens of a gripping intellectual mystery, this atmospheric tale from Leon (Uniform Justice, etc.) finds Inspector Guido Brunetti investigating an aristocratic family with a shady past. When a rural landowner discovers the body of Roberto Lorenzoni, who was kidnapped two years earlier, Brunetti immediately suspects the victim's family. The Lorenzoni clan bears the legacy of betraying the Jews of Venice during World War II, and from these ashes, its members have created a thriving enterprise. Roberto's cousin Maurizio, who's next in line to inherit the family fortune and business, is the logical suspect, but Brunetti senses something more insidious at play. As he works his way through Italian three-course meals and family crises, he uncovers disturbing details about the Lorenzoni family. Leon deftly depicts the tensions between Brunetti and his ambitious Sicilian boss, as well as the irony of the justice system ("Imprisoned parricides receive fan mail; officialdom and Mafia dance hand in hand toward the ruin of the state"). Brunetti emerges as an intelligent, somewhat world-weary individual who believes in his cause if not the system itself. In short, he's the ideal protagonist for this culturally rich mystery.

Leon, Donna (2010). A Question of Belief: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press: Distributed by Publishers Group West.
Set during an oppressive Venetian August, Leon's masterful 19th Commisario Guido Brunetti mystery (after 2009's About Face) presents Brunetti with two puzzles that impinge on his most intimate beliefs. Close associate Ispettore Vianello, who's worried about his elderly aunt's involvement with an astrologer, nudges Brunetti toward ruminations on the differences in male and female evidences of affection. Meanwhile, Toni Brusca, head of employment records at the Commune, who's perplexed by a female judge's erratic court case postponements, surprises Brunetti by implying that a woman could be more criminal than a man. Brunetti patiently untangles a sordid skein of desires warped, trusts abused, and loves distorted into depravity. As one good man who still believes in the rule of law despite his disgust at Italy's mounting corruption, Brunetti allows readers to share his belief that decency and honesty can, for a little while, stave off the angst of the modern world.

Leon, Donna (2009). A Sea of Troubles: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin Books.
When Commissario Brunetti investigates the murder of two local fishermen on the island of Pellestrina, the small community closes ranks, forcing him to accept Signorina Elettra's offer to visit her relatives there to search for clues. Though loyal to his beloved wife, Paola, he must admit that less-than-platonic emotions underlie his concern for his boss's beautiful secretary.

Leon, Donna (2010). About Face: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin Books.
In About Face, Leon returns with a dazzling mystery that puts Brunetti's own family at risk. Soon after meeting Franca Marinello, the wife of a wealthy Venetian businessman, Brunetti comes across her name in his investigation of a trucking company owner found murdered in his offices. Though charmed by Franca's love of Virgil and Cicero, he must now unravel her connection to the Carabinieri's prime suspect. As Brunetti delves into the murder, he comes face to face with violence and corruption as dangerous as he's ever seen.

Leon, Donna (1996). Acqua Alta [aka Death in High Water]: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin.
Intelligent and charming Guido Brunetti, the commissioner of police in Venice (seen before in Death at La Fenice and Death in a Strange Country), continues to confront corruption in his fifth adventure. His moral anger pervades and gives substance to this mystery, from its peripheral incidents to the resolution, in which the villain explains all and which occurs in the rising waters of the title. Investigating an assault on American archeologist Brett Lynch, Brunetti wonders whether the two men who beat her are simply homophobic (Lynch's lover is a popular soprano) or, as Lynch suggests, whether they were trying to prevent her planned meeting with museum director Francesco Semenzato. Five years earlier, Lynch and Semenzato brought a touring display of Chinese antiquities to Venice. Recently, Lynch, on a dig in China, saw the same pieces and realized some had been replaced by fakes. Brunetti's sources suggest that Semenzato's interests in antiques are more diverse than is proper for a powerful museum director, but there's no opportunity for a confrontation: only four days after the beating, Semenzato is murdered. As Brunetti wends his way around the insider's Venice and through accumulating information (not all obtained entirely honestly), he also deals with his superiors, his wife and teenage daughter, all the while remaining the thoughtful, sensitive sleuth readers have come to expect.

Leon, Donna (2013). Beastly Things: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin Books.
When the body of man is found in a canal, damaged by the tides, carrying no wallet, and wearing only one shoe, Brunetti has little to work with. No local has filed a missing-person report, and no hotel guests have disappeared. Where was the crime scene? And how can Brunetti identify the man when he can't show pictures of his face? The autopsy shows a way forward: it turns out the man was suffering from a rare, disfiguring disease. With Inspector Vianello, Brunetti canvasses shoe stores, and winds up on the mainland in Mestre, outside of his usual sphere. From a shopkeeper, they learn that the man had a kindly way with animals. At the same time, animal rights and meat consumption are quickly becoming preoccupying issues at the Venice Questura, and in Brunetti's home, where conversation at family meals offer a window into the joys and conflicts of Italian life. Perhaps with the help of Signorina Elettra, Brunetti and Vianello can identify the man and understand why someone wanted him dead.

Leon, Donna (2005). Blood from a Stone: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press.
In this stunning novel, the 14th to feature the dogged, intuitive Venetian police detective Guido Brunetti (after 2004's Doctored Evidence), Leon combines an engrossing, complex plot with an indictment of the corruption endemic to Italian society. The murder of an anonymous African street vendor, an inoffensive, possibly illegal Senegalese immigrant, explodes into a many-layered conundrum. Italian attitudes toward "Senegali" range from the bargain shoppers' approval of their harmless efforts to earn money selling knock-off accessories to legitimate merchants' outrage at competition from the cheaper goods. After Brunetti discovers uncut diamonds hidden in the victim's spartan room and evidence the room was searched, the Interior and Foreign Affairs Ministries take over the case and all of Brunetti's pertinent files, papers and computer disappear. Enraged, Brunetti sidesteps normal police procedures and taps into personal and professional sources, uncovering evidence linking the victim, the Angolan civil war, the Italian secret service and an industrial giant with government connections. Many of Leon's favorite characters appear, including the gourmand Brunetti's family, the obsequious Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta and Patta's irreverent secretary, Signorina Elletra. They balance this dark, cynical tale of widespread secrecy, violence and corruption.

Leon, Donna (2014). By Its Cover: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press.
One afternoon, Commissario Guido Brunetti gets a frantic call from the director of a prestigious Venetian library. Someone has stolen pages out of several rare books. After a round of questioning, the case seems clear: the culprit must be the man who requested the volumes, an American professor from a Kansas university. The only problem--the man fled the library earlier that day, and after checking his credentials, the American professor doesn't exist. As the investigation proceeds, the suspects multiply. And when a seemingly harmless theologian, who had spent years reading at the library turns up brutally murdered, Brunetti must question his expectations about what makes a man innocent, or guilty.

Leon, Donna (2006). Death and Judgment: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery [aka A Venetian Reckoning]. New York, Penguin Books.
The heady atmosphere of Venice and a galaxy of fully realized characters enrich this intriguing and finally horrifying tale, the fourth featuring Guido Brunetti, the stalwart and worldly Commissioner of Police in Venice. Shortly after the bodies of eight women are found near a truck that has been in a mountainside accident, Brunetti begins to investigate the shooting death of attorney Carlo Trevisan, counselor to influential industrialists and bankers. Two days later an accountant for politically active manufacturers is found murdered in his car. Both men, Brunetti discovers, had been placing calls to Eastern Europe, Ecuador and Thailand from a pay phone in a disreputable bar in Padua. Probing for more information, Brunetti relies on unique sources: his boss's secretary, who is particularly adept at using computers; a judge who owes him a favor; even his sergeant's wife, who raises gossip to an art form. Brunetti's wife, a professor of English, and his teenaged daughter offer invaluable aid. With consummate skill, Leon (Dressed for Death) gradually reveals the broad reaches of a corrupt network linking the privileged and powerful.

Leon, Donna (2004). Death at La Fenice: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Harper Paperbacks.
A breathless beginning and an unexpected lack of reference to the lush setting mark this lively launch of a projected series of Venetian mysteries. When legendary German conductor Helmut Wellauer is found dead in his dressing room two acts into a performance of La Traviata , police commissario Guido Brunetti is called in. Among those who might have provided the cyanide poison that killed the maestro, immediate suspects include the vaunted conductor's coolly indifferent young wife and those many in the music industry who are offended by his homophobia. Methodically probing into the victim's past, Brunetti also uncovers Wellauer's Nazi sympathies and a lead to a trio of singing sisters from yesteryear--one now destitute, one dead and the other missing. Though burdened by a dictatorial superior and two lumpen subordinates, Brunetti gets help from his aristocratic wife and her well-connected parents. The narrative's best moments involve Brunetti's wry exchanges with his colleagues and the cunningly masked, obvious solution.

Leon, Donna (2005). Death in a Strange Country: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin/Grove Press.
Something different for Venetian Commissario Guido Brunetti, whose first case (Death at La Fenice, 1992) so expertly resurrected the closed-circle whodunit. This time, the murder of Sgt. Michael Foster, public health inspector at the American military hospital at Vicenza, produces such a pronounced lack of reaction--Brunetti's officious boss Patti insists it be written off as a mugging; somebody plants cocaine in Foster's quarters in the hope of heading off further questions; even Foster's lover and commanding officer insists she has no idea why he's been killed--that the fix is clearly in with either the American military or the Italian police. Patti pulls Brunetti off the case to work a burglary from a Grand Canal palazzo, but that--and more sinister high-level skullduggery--are predictably tied in too. No whodunit, but a measured, thoughtful conspiracy investigation that goes a long way toward extending Leon's range. This is definitely an author to watch.

Leon, Donna (2004). Doctored Evidence: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press.
Commissario Guido Brunetti once again finds himself pursuing a puzzling case his fellow policemen would rather leave closed. After a wealthy elderly woman is found brutally murdered in her apartment, the authorities suspect her maid. But when the maid meets an untimely end trying to escape from border police, and it appears that the money she carried may not have been stolen, Commissario Guido Brunetti decides 'unofficially' to take the case on himself.

Leon, Donna (2012). Drawing Conclusions: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin Books.
Twenty years ago Venetian Commissario Guido Brunetti and his creator, Donna Leon, first introduced readers to the delights-and dangers-of Venice. Now they have millions of devoted fans. In Drawing Conclusions, a young woman arrives home and senses that all is not right in the apartment below. When she investigates, she finds her neighbor lying lifeless on the floor. The autopsy shows that the widow's death was due to a heart attack, but Brunetti is convinced that things are not as straightforward as they seem. With her signature combination of humanity, nuanced detail, and psychological insight, Leon's twentieth Brunetti mystery reaffirms her place in the pantheon of crime fiction.

Leon, Donna (2005). Dressed for Death [aka The Anonymous Venetian]: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin Books.
Brunetti's hopes of a refreshing family holiday in the mountains are once again dashed when a gruesome discovery is made in Marghera - a body so badly beaten the face is completely unrecognizable. Brunetti searches Venice for someone who can identify the corpse, but he is met with a wall of silence. Then he receives a telephone call from a contact who promises some tantalizing information. And before the night is out, Brunetti is confronting yet another appalling, and apparently senseless, death.

Leon, Donna (2018). Earthly Remains: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press.
At the start of Earthly Remains, Commissario Guido Brunetti, confronted once more by someone of privilege avoiding censure, loses patience at work, and in the aftermath realizes that he needs a break and is granted leave from the Questura. His wife, Paola, urges him to spend time at a villa owned by a wealthy relative on Sant’Erasmo, one of the largest islands in the laguna. There he passes his nights reading Pliny’s Natural History and his days rowing with the villa’s caretaker, Davide Casati, who is seeking the reason his bee colonies in the laguna are suffering. The recuperative stay goes according to plan until Casati goes missing following a sudden storm. Compelled to investigate, Brunetti sets aside his leave of absence to understand what happened to the man who has become his friend, in the process dredging up dark memories of an accident and cover-up years before.

Leon, Donna (2015). Falling in Love: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Grove Press.
Donna Leon's Death at La Fenice, the first novel in her beloved Commissario Guido Brunetti series, introduced readers to the glamorous and cutthroat world of opera and one of Italy's finest living sopranos, Flavia Petrelli-then a suspect in the poisoning of a renowned German conductor. Years after Brunetti cleared her name, Flavia has returned to Venice and La Fenice to sing the lead in Tosca. Brunetti and his wife, Paola, attend an early performance, and Flavia receives a standing ovation. Back in her dressing room, she finds bouquets of yellow roses-too many roses. Every surface of the room is covered with them. An anonymous fan has been showering Flavia with these beautiful gifts in London, St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, and now, Venice, but she no longer feels flattered. A few nights later, invited by Brunetti to dine at his in-laws' palazzo, Flavia confesses her alarm at these excessive displays of adoration. And when a talented young Venetian singer who has caught Flavia's attention is savagely attacked, Brunetti begins to think that Flavia's fears are justified in ways neither of them imagined. He must enter in the psyche of an obsessive fan before Flavia, or anyone else, comes to harm.

Leon, Donna (2007). Fatal Remedies: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin Books.
Donna Leon's multitude of fans around the world has grown with each new Commissario Brunetti novel, and now mystery lovers in the United States can enjoy another compelling episode. In Fatal Remedies, Brunetti's career is under threat when his professional and personal lives unexpectedly intersect. In the chill of the Venetian dawn, a sudden act of vandalism shatters the quiet of the deserted city, and Brunetti is shocked to find that the culprit waiting to be apprehended at the scene is a member of his own family. Meanwhile, he is also under pressure from his superiors to solve a daring robbery with connections to a suspicious accidental death. Could the two crimes be connected? And will Brunetti be able to prove his family's innocence before it's too late?

Leon, Donna (2000). Friends in High Places: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin Books.
Donna Leon's sophisticated Commissario Brunetti series has won her legions of fans over the years. In Friends in High Places, Brunetti is visited by a young bureaucrat investigating the lack of official approval for the building of Brunetti's apartment years before. What began as a red tape headache ends in murder when the bureaucrat is found dead after a mysterious fall from a scaffold. Brunetti starts an investigation that will take him into unfamiliar and dangerous areas of Venetian life, and will reveal, once again, what a difference it makes to have friends in high places.

Leon, Donna (2009). The Girl of His Dreams: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin Books.
Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti mysteries have won legions of fans for their evocative portraits of Venetian life. In her novels, food, family, art, history, and local politics play as central a role as an unsolved crime. In The Girl of His Dreams when a friend of Brunetti's brother, a priest recently returned from years of missionary work, calls with a request, Brunetti suspects the man's motives. A new, American-style Protestant sect has begun to meet in the city, and it's possible the priest is merely apprehensive of the competition. But the preacher could also be fleecing his growing flock, so Brunetti and Paola, along with Inspector Vianello and his wife, go undercover. But the investigation has to be put aside when, one cold and rainy morning, a body is found floating in a canal. It is a child, a gypsy girl. Brunetti suspects she fell off a nearby roof while fleeing an apartment she had robbed. He has to inform the distrustful parents, encamped on the mainland, and soon finds himself haunted by the crime--and the girl.

Leon, Donna (2013). The Golden Egg: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press.
In The Golden Egg, as the first leaves of autumn begin to fall, Vice Questore Patta asks Brunetti to look into a minor shop-keeping violation committed by the mayor's future daughter-in-law. Brunetti has no interest in helping his boss amass political favors, but he has little choice but to comply. Then Brunetti's wife, Paola, comes to him with a request of her own. The mentally handicapped man who worked at their dry cleaner has just died of a sleeping pill overdose, and Paola loathes the idea that he lived and died without anyone noticing him, or helping him.

Brunetti begins to investigate the death and is surprised when he finds nothing on the man: no birth certificate, no passport, no driver's license, no credit cards. As far as the Italian government is concerned, he never existed. Stranger still, the dead man's mother refuses to speak to the police, and assures Brunetti that her son's identification papers were stolen in a burglary. As secrets unravel, Brunetti suspects that the Lembos, an aristocratic family, might be somehow connected to the death. But why would anyone want this sweet, simple-minded man dead?

Leon, Donna (2007). Quietly in Their Sleep [aka The Death of Faith]: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin Books.
Donna Leon's mastery of plot, her understanding of Venetian manners and mores, and above all her philosophical, unfailingly decent protagonist have made the Commissario Brunetti mysteries bestsellers around the world, including an ever-growing American audience. In The Death of Faith, Brunetti comes to the aid of a young nursing sister who is leaving her convent following the unexpected death of five patients. At first Brunetti's inquiries reveal nothing amiss, and he wonders whether the nun is simply creating a smoke screen to justify abandoning her vocation. But perhaps she has stumbled onto something very real and very sinister - something that puts her life in imminent danger.

Leon, Donna (2008). Suffer the Little Children: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin/Grove Press.
In Leon's 16th Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery, at once astringent yet lyrical, two rival police forces - Brunetti and his Venetian colleagues and the carabinieri - are both interested in a doctor who illegally adopts an Albanian infant. When three carabinieri break into the doctor's apartment and seize the child at night, they injure the doctor, leaving him mute. Much of the early action takes place in a hospital, and because Venetian hospitals appear only slightly less bureaucratic and Kafkaesque than their stateside counterparts, Leon's marvelous insights into Italian life, so sharp when she explores a military academy in Uniform Justice or glassblowers in Through a Glass, Darkly, aren't as fresh, sinister or compelling here. But once the IVs and bandages give way to vandalism at a pharmacy and the family secrets of a neo-Fascist plumbing tycoon, Leon regains her stride and the novel's last fifth is first-rate and masterful. Leon seldom delivers a "feel good" ending, choosing instead conclusions that are wise and inevitable while still being unsettling.

Leon, Donna (2006). Through a Glass Darkly: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press.
Brunetti investigates the murder of a night watchman, whose body is found in front of a blazing furnace at Giovanni De Cal's glass factory along with an annotated copy of Dante's Inferno. Did the cantankerous De Cal kill him? Will Brunetti make the connection between the work of literature and the murderer in time?

Leon, Donna (2018). The Temptation of Forgiveness: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press.
An accident involving the father of a boy suspected of doing drugs finds Commissario Guido Brunetti pursuing a series of false and contradictory leads before uncovering a long-standing scam and unleashing unintentional consequences.

Leon, Donna (2003). Uniform Justice: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press.
In this superb novel, Leon's latest in the Commissario Guido Brunetti series (A Noble Radiance, etc.), the Venetian police detective and family man is summoned to the exclusive San Martino Military Academy, where Cadet Ernesto Moro has been found dead, hanging in the lavatory. The other cadets and the academy brass give a chilly reception to any "civilians" who trespass into their midst, including the Venetian police. Believing Cadet Moro was the victim of homicide rather than suicide, Brunetti traces a sinister trail that leads to the dead boy's father, a doctor-turned-politician who once revealed then ducked the ramifications of a military procurement scandal. This is not the Venice of Thomas Mann or Henry James-the palazzos, gondoliers and Doges' monuments are all but overlooked. Leon's city is winter-cold and gray, with corruption rather than gilt glinting through the fog, and a culture in the grip of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that runs on secrets and bribes. Humane and intelligent, a good man working in an impossible system, Brunetti displays an acerbic, economical wisdom. The plot flows along like the Adriatic tide through a narrow canal-swift, none-too-clean and inevitable. This is an outstanding book, deserving of the widest audience possible, a chance for American readers to again experience a master practitioner's art.

Leon, Donna (2016). The Waters of Eternal Youth: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press.
Fifteen years ago, a teenage girl fell into a canal late at night. Unable to swim, she went under and started to drown, only surviving thanks to a nearby man, an alcoholic, who heard her splashes and pulled her out, though not before she suffered irreparable brain damage that left her in a state of permanent childhood, unable to learn or mature. The drunk man claimed he saw her thrown into the canal by another man, but the following day he couldn't remember a thing. Now, at a fundraising dinner for a Venetian charity, a wealthy and aristocratic patroness -- the girl's grandmother -- asks Brunetti if he will investigate. Brunetti's not sure what to do. If a crime was committed, it would surely have passed the statute of limitations. But out of a mixture of curiosity, pity, and a willingness to fulfill the wishes of a guilt-wracked older woman, who happens to be his mother-in-law's best friend, he agrees. Awash in the rhythms and concerns of contemporary Venetian life, from historical preservation, to housing, to new waves of African migrants, and the haunting story of a woman trapped in a damaged perpetual childhood, Brunetti soon finds himself unable to let the case rest, if indeed there is a case.

Leon, Donna (2010). Wilful Behaviour: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. New York, Penguin.
In Willful Behavior, Brunetti is approached for a favor by one of his wife's students. Intelligent and serious , Claudia Leonardo asks for his help in obtaining a pardon for a crime once committed by her now-dead grandfather. Brunetti thinks little of it-until Claudia is found dead. Soon, another corpse and an extraordinary art collection lead Brunetti to long-buried secrets of Nazi collaboration and the exploitation of Italian Jews-secrets few in Italy want revealed.

Leonard, Elmore and Gregg Sutter, editor (2014). Four Novels of the 1970s: Fifty-Two Pickup / Swag / Unknown Man No. 89 / The Switch. New York, The Library of America.
The four novels collected in this first volume re-invented the American crime novel and cemented Leonard’s reputation. All are set in his hometown Detroit, a hard-working "shot and a beer" kind of place whose lawless underside becomes a stage for an unforgettable cast of rogues, con artists, and psychopaths. Fifty-Two Pickup (1974), fast and sharply written, is an insidiously brutal book about an adulterous businessman who runs afoul of a crew of murderous blackmailers. Swag (1976) finds Leonard moving for the first time into the more comic mode that would become his signature, as he charts the small-time criminal careers of an amiable ex-con and an ambitious car salesman who share a bachelor pad and pursue their hedonistic dream of the good life through a string of armed robberies. Unknown Man No. 89 (1977) spins a complex web of crisscrossing rip-offs and con games, with process server Jack Ryan, a typically laid-back Leonard protagonist, caught in the middle. In The Switch (1978), one of Leonard’s funniest books, Mickey Dawson, a discontented housewife held for ransom, manages to turn the tables on her kidnappers while exacting overdue revenge on her scheming husband.

Leonard, Elmore and Gregg Sutter, editor (2015). Four Novels of the 1980s: City Primeval / Labrava / Glitz / Freaky Deaky. New York, The Library of America.
For three months in 1978, Leonard shadowed detectives from Detroit’s homicide squad for a profile commissioned by The Detroit News. From that experience came the inspiration for City Primeval, perhaps his greatest Detroit novel, a modern-day showdown between a lawman and an outlaw filled with echoes of the Westerns that were Leonard’s early specialty. (This volume presents, as a special feature, Impressions of Murder, the brilliant piece Leonard wrote for The Detroit News Sunday Magazine.) LaBrava moves the action to a steamy, seamy Miami, as a Secret Service agent turned photographer finds himself embroiled in a scheme involving a long-forgotten, but still alluring, film noir actress. Old-time movie lore, local Florida history, and the intricacies of a complex extortion plot are interwoven in one of Leonard’s richest and most entertaining works.

Glitz, the novel that marked Leonard’s breakthrough as a best-selling author, plunges into the casually corrupt world of Atlantic City casinos—"an old seaside resort being done over in Las Vegas plastic"—populated by small-time hoods and hustlers. A police detective looking into the death of a cocktail waitress finds himself following the twisted trail of the unforgettable Teddy Magyk, perhaps Leonard’s most indelibly chilling bad guy. Freaky Deaky, one of the author’s own favorites, returns to Detroit for a carnivalesque ’60s flashback in which festering grudges left over from counterculture days are churned up in a brew of blackmail, bombs, and sex.

Leonard, Elmore and Gregg Sutter, editor (2016). Four Later Novels: Get Shorty / Rum Punch / Out of Sight / Tishomingo Blues. New York, The Library of America.
These later works explore new terrain (including Hollywood itself), and enliven Leonard’s fictional universe with a succession of vividly imagined denizens, a tumultuous and expressive crew whom he delights in setting on intricate collision courses.

In Get Shorty (1990), a Miami loan shark hits on a way to break into Hollywood as a producer. Drawing on his long history in the film industry, Leonard offers up a sharp-edged satiric tour of the studios, gleefully demonstrating a professional criminal’s natural affinity for the scams of show business. Perhaps the funniest of Leonard’s novels, Get Shorty was memorably filmed with John Travolta and Gene Hackman.

Rum Punch (1992) fields a complex story involving drug dealers, Federal agents, and an airline stewardess under pressure. Its bittersweet center is Max Cherry, a West Palm Beach bail bondsman with heart and integrity who, in a way he could not have anticipated, is challenged to start over again in middle age. The source for Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, Rum Punch is both a superb caper and a wry and melancholy meditation on the hazards of staying honest and the stresses of getting older.

A real-life prison break provided the impetus for Out of Sight (1996). In this high-risk fusion of violent adventure and unlikely romance, Jack Foley, a career bank robber, and Karen Sisco, a deputy U.S. marshal, are flung together under unusual circumstances and embark on a manhunt that leads through Florida and back to Leonard’s original literary haunt, Detroit. Included as a special feature is "Karen Makes Out," the story in which Leonard first introduced Sisco.

Inspired by the subculture of Civil War reenactments, Leonard made it the background for Tishomingo Blues (2002), an exuberant tale in which a young high-diving daredevil, a washed-up ballplayer, and an assortment of heavies and tricksters both local and from out of town come together in Tunica—"the Las Vegas of the South"—to relive the Battle of Brice's Cross Roads.

Leonardo and H. Anna Suh (2005). Leonardo's Notebooks. New York, Black Dog & Leventhal.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) possessed arguably the greatest mind the world has ever known. Artist, draftsman, inventor, and philosopher, his contributions to modern society are profound and wide-reaching. Throughout his life, Leonardo kept dozens of notebooks, elegant studies on topics ranging from architecture to botany to philosophy - indeed nearly anything of which the human imagination could conceive.

Leonardo's Notebooks collects a variety of the most fascinating of these studies and compiles them into one monumental volume that demystifies his insights and clearly illustrates his ideas, experiments, and observations with hundreds of his original sketches, line drawings, and paintings. Topics include Anatomy and the Movement of the Human Figure; Botany and Landscape; Engineering and Military Engineering; Physical Sciences; Aerodynamics and Flight; Geography - and more.

Leopardi, Giacomo and Jonathan Galassi (2010). Canti: Bilingual Edition. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Leopardi's poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, and he has been less well known to English-language readers than his central significance for his own culture might suggest. Now Jonathan Galassi, whose translations of Eugenio Montale have been widely acclaimed, has produced a strong, fresh, direct version of this great poet that offers English-language readers a new approach to Leopardi. Galassi has contributed an informative introduction and notes that provide a sense of Leopardi's sources and ideas.

Leopardi, Giacomo, Michael Caesar, et al. (2013). Zibaldone. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers from Nietzsche to Beckett as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history. He was also a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy, and a voracious reader in numerous ancient and modern languages. For most of his writing career, he kept an immense notebook, known as the Zibaldone, or "hodge-podge," as Harold Bloom has called it, in which Leopardi put down his original, wide-ranging, radically modern responses to his reading. His comments about religion, philosophy, language, history, anthropology, astronomy, literature, poetry, and love are unprecedented in their brilliance and suggestiveness, and the Zibaldone, which was only published at the turn of the twentieth century, has been recognized as one of the foundational books of modern culture. Its 4,500-plus pages have never been fully translated into English until now, when a team under the auspices of Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino of the Leopardi Centre in Birmingham, England, have spent years producing a lively, accurate version.

Leslie, Esther (2002). Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London; New York, Verso.
With ruminations on drawing, color and caricature, on the political meaning of fairy-tales, talking animals and human beings as machines, Hollywood Flatlands brings to light the links between animation, avant-garde art and modernist criticism. Focusing on the work of aesthetic and political revolutionaries of the inter-war period, Esther Leslie reveals how the animation of commodities can be studied as a journey into modernity in cinema. She looks afresh at the links between the Soviet Constructivists and the Bauhaus, for instance, and those between Walter Benjamin and cinematic abstraction. She also provides new interpretations of the writings of Siegfried Kracauer on animation, shows how Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's film viewing affected their intellectual development, and reconsiders Sergei Eisenstein's famous handshake with Mickey Mouse at Disney's Hyperion Studios in 1930. 10 color and 30 b/w photographs.

Lessig, Lawrence (1999). Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York, Basic Books.
Lessig (law, Harvard) tackles the tricky and troubling question of Internet regulation. Cyberspace has no intrinsic structure to protect its libertarian nature, and we are now well into an era where commerce and its partner in control, government, are working in a manner that could permanently, and perhaps negatively, alter its character. Now is the time for all who stand to benefit from the unique nature of cyberspace to assert their collective values into a framework for regulating it. Apathy or inaction, Lessig argues, would result in a medium shaped by special interests. His book is replete with examples of failed attempts to address cyberspace issues, such as the 1996 Communications Decency Act. A central theme is that the architecture of cyberspace can be coded to address properly salient issues related to free speech, intellectual property, and privacy.

Lessig, Lawrence (2001). The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York, Random House.
The Internet revolution has come. Some say it has gone. What was responsible for its birth? Who is responsible for its demise?

In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the Internet revolution has produced a counterrevolution of devastating power and effect. The explosion of innovation we have seen in the environment of the Internet was not conjured from some new, previously unimagined technological magic; instead, it came from an ideal as old as the nation. Creativity flourished there because the Internet protected an innovation commons. The Internet's very design built a neutral platform upon which the widest range of creators could experiment. The legal architecture surrounding it protected this free space so that culture and information - the ideas of our era - could flow freely and inspire an unprecedented breadth of expression. But this structural design is changing - both legally and technically.

This shift will destroy the opportunities for creativity and innovation that the Internet originally engendered. The cultural dinosaurs of our recent past are moving to quickly remake cyberspace so that they can better protect their interests against the future. Powerful conglomerates are swiftly using both law and technology to "tame" the Internet, transforming it from an open forum for ideas into nothing more than cable television on speed. Innovation, once again, will be directed from the top down, increasingly controlled by owners of the networks, holders of the largest patent portfolios, and, most invidiously, hoarders of copyrights.

The choice Lawrence Lessig presents is not between progress and the status quo. It is between progress and a new Dark Ages, in which our capacity to create is confined by an architecture of control and a society more perfectly monitored and filtered than any before in history. Important avenues of thought and free expression will increasingly be closed off. The door to a future of ideas is being shut just as technology makes an extraordinary future possible.

With an uncanny blend of knowledge, insight, and eloquence, Lawrence Lessig has written a profoundly important guide to the care and feeding of innovation in a connected world. Whether it proves to be a road map or an elegy is up to us.

Leunig, Michael (2012). The Essential Leunig: Cartoons from a Winding Path. Melbourne, Penguin Random House Australia.
Four hundred of Michael Leunig's most brilliant cartoons from the past five decades, including some previously uncollected.

Leunig, Michael (2013). Holy Fool: Artworks. Crows Nest, NSW, Australia, Allen & Unwin.
At the heart of Michael Leunig's work lies the idea of the holy fool—a character who does not conform to social norms of behavior because of mental disability or as a deliberate choice, but is regarded as having a compensating divine blessing or inspiration. The holy fool is the protagonist in most of Michael's paintings and cartoons. He is, in short, that strange person with the big nose, Mr. Curly, and Vasco Pyjama. As wonderful as his cartoons are, this collection offers much more of the artistic expression of Michael Leunig—described by the artist himself as regressive, humorous, messy, mystical, primal, and vaudevillian, producing work that is open to many interpretations.

Leunig, Michael (2016). The Wayward Leunig: Cartoons That Wandered Off. Melbourne, Penguin Random House Australia.
The cartoons in The Wayward Leunig: Cartoons That Wandered Off have been selected from five decades of work, and are wide-ranging, potent, hilarious, insightful, relevant, original and beautiful. A companion to Essential Leunig, this collection is a must-have for Leunig fans.

Lever, Maurice (1994). Sade: A Biography. San Diego, Harcourt Brace & Co.
Lever is the French editor of the Marquis de Sade's correspondence, and thus in a particularly good position to check and curb much of the mythical fervor that surrounds the writer everyone thinks he knows all about and almost no one does. By modern French surrealists and leftists, Sade has been championed as an archangel of revolution, of sexual revolt; by the general public, as evil and cruelty incarnate. The facts support both and neither, though Lever works upon the framework constructed most seminally by Gilbert Lely in the Fifties. Sade's noble Provencal family related to Petrarch; his feverish libertinage and real crimes of perversity; his first imprisonment (during which he wrote the first of his novels, The 120 Days of Sodom); his second imprisonment, during Robespierre's Terror; his authorial ambitions (not especially pure or demonic sometimes: Sade acknowledged the popular taste for "spicy books'' when he was writing Justine); the two remarkable women who put up with him as wife, then companion; his rearrest and reimprisonment during the Napoleonic reaction to Jacobin excesses; the end of his days spent in the mental ''hospital'' at Charenton, where Sade ran the loony bin's semi- psychodrama theatricals. What Lever brings across, in a vigorous, unpedantic, well-translated style, is how much (and also how merely) a writer Sade would become -with the largeness and smallness that goes with it--after his aristocratic sexual frenzies burned themselves out early in life. Nobleman that he was, he knew nothing about people; and Lever is right to mention (though the book is almost devoid of literary analysis) that Sade's greatest distinction as an imaginative writer was to create a self-contained repetitious rhythm--of impossible sexual acts that have no relation to what real people would do (or want to do) -the likes of which have never been repeated in prose. Demythologizing, level, and consistently fascinating.

Levertov, Denise (1982). Candles in Babylon. New York, New Directions Pub. Corp.
Candles in Babylon begins from a position of exile and orphanhood which represents alienation from a hostile environment. The opening and title poem of Candles in Babylon presents the public world as antithetical to nourishing reflection.

Through the midnight streets of Babylon
between the steel towers of their arsenals,
between the torture castles with no windows,
we race by barefoot, holding tight
our candles, trying to shield
the shivering flames, crying
"Sleepers Awake!" (ix)

While fragile individual vision survives, armor and aggression thwart imaginative interaction, rendering the public world inhospitable and lonely. Those opposing the rigid institutions that form public space are powerless to create communion. The ideal of community persists only in an art increasingly remote from experience, in their "hoping / the rhyme's promise was true" (ix). By presenting the repressive forces as "sleepers," however, Levertov renders imprisonment a state of mind. Beginning from the individual imagination's exile from the public world, Candles in Babylon seeks handholds by which the imagination may establish its place in history.

As Candles in Babylon progresses, it anchors the imagination in people and things outside the conventional structures of perception which mediate their subjects' relation to the world. "The Art of the Octopus: Variations on a Found Theme" explores selective imaginative reflection as a "solitary dance" through which the self may choose which elements of the world to inhabit.

The final section of Candles in Babylon, "Age of Terror," criticizes the cultural organization of space currently mediating relations between individuals. Echoing the shivering flames of the title poem, "Talk in the Dark" shows isolated voices lamenting their condition as "flies on the hide of Leviathan," wanting to see "where my own road's going" but feeling powerless against an impersonal "history" (100). The threat of nuclear war is overwhelming. "Each day's terror [is] almost / a form of boredom-madmen / at the wheel and / stepping on the gas and / the brakes no good" (78). Because vital contact with such horror is unsustainable, empathy becomes apathy.

Levertov's most developed image of the cultural space that produces this apathy is the movie theater, where the audience loses itself in the superhuman illusions on the screen. "A Speech: For Antidraft Rally, D. C., March 22, 1980" exposes the media's power to isolate individuals from empathetic selection and creation of community and thus render them pawns of ready-made ideology. Listening to students' speculations about what they'll do "'[i]f there's a war," 'the speaker laments their ignorance of history and the real violence of war. Filtered through the dualistic Cold War framework dominant in the news and the unreal violence of cartoons, war seems a clean and noble struggle between abstract good and evil, between "Commies" and "the Free World" (92-93). Violence has become a familiar yet unfelt aspect of everyday life.

Levertov, Denise (1983). Poems 1960-1967. New York, New Directions.
Denise Levertov's Poems 1960-1967 brings together all of the poetry first published in The Jacob's Ladder (1961), O Taste and See (1964), and The Sorrow Dance (1967). This new compilation, beginning where her Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 (New Directions, 1979) left off, shows both a refining of the poet's craft and a widening of her concerns.

Levi, Carlo (2006). Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
It was to Lucania, a desolate land in southern Italy, that Carlo Levi―a doctor, painter, philosopher, and man of letters―was confined as a political prisoner because of his opposition to Italy's Fascist government at the start of the Ethiopian war in 1935. While there, Levi reflected on the harsh landscape and its inhabitants, peasants who lived the same lives their ancestors had, constantly fearing black magic and the near presence of death. In so doing, Levi offered a starkly beautiful and moving account of a place and a people living outside the boundaries of progress and time.

Levin, Harry (1980). Memories of the Moderns. New York, New Directions.
This volume by the respected modernist scholar and Harvard professor of comparative literature collects reviews, essays, lectures, and introductions on figures such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. Included as well are reminiscences of W. H. Auden and Delmore Schwartz.

Levine, Bruce E. (2018). Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person's Guide to Being an Anti-Authoritarian—Strategies, Tools, and Models. Chico, CA, AK Press.
Profiling a diverse group of U.S. anti-authoritarians—including Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, Malcolm X, and Lenny Bruce—in order to glean useful lessons from their lives, Resisting Illegitimate Authority is a self-help manual for anti-authoritarians. Discussing anti-authoritarian approaches to depression, relationships, and parenting, it provides political, spiritual, philosophical, and psychological tools to help those suffering violence and marginalization in a society whose most ardent cheerleaders for “freedom” are often its most obedient and docile citizens. Bound by the shackles of convention, many of us have become fearful of the outsider, the dissident and the anti-authoritarian—anyone who refuses to be ruled and regulated. Levine has written an electric book charting the mechanics—political, economic and psychological—of our self-confinement. Yet, Levine’s writing simmers with a kind of optimistic rage meant to prod and provoke us out of our paralytic compliance with faceless authority.

Levine, Mark (1995). The Jazz Theory Book. Petaluma, CA, Sher Music.
Comprehensive, but easy to understand text covering every aspect of how jazz is constructed -- chord construction, II-V-I progressions, scale theory, chord/scale relationships, the blues, reharmonization, and much more. A required text in universities world-wide, translated into five languages, endorsed by Jamey Aebersold, James Moody, Dave Liebman, and many others.

Levitz, Paul (2010). 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking. Los Angeles, Taschen.
In 1935, DC Comics founder Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson published New Fun No. 1, the first comic book with all-new, original material - at a time when comic books were mere repositories for the castoffs of the newspaper strips. What was initially considered to be disposable media for children was well on its way to becoming the mythology of our time, the 20th century's answer to Atlas or Zorro. More than 40,000 comic books later, in honor of the publisher's 75th anniversary, Taschen has produced the single most comprehensive book on DC Comics, in an XL edition even Superman might have trouble lifting. More than 2,000 images - covers and interiors, original illustrations, photographs, film stills, and collectibles - are reproduced using the latest technology to bring the story lines, the characters, and their creators to vibrant life as they've never been seen before. Telling the tales behind the tomes is 38-year DC veteran Paul Levitz, whose in-depth essays trace the company's history, from its pulp origins through to the future of digital publishing. Year-by-year timelines that fold out to nearly four feet and biographies of the legends who built DC make this an invaluable reference for any comic book fan. Creator tributes are part of the true joys of reading through DC's history and for once a book of this kind goes to great lengths to credit more than the customary top 20 or so names from the company's storied past. Beyond the names most fans of the genre already know (The Bob Kanes, Jack Kirbys and Carmine Infantinoes) we find tributes to writers and artists less well known but just as important to DC Comics and the comic book industry over the decades (Will Eisner, Sheldon Mayer, Jack Cole, Mort Weisinger, Curt Swan, Wally Wood, Gil Kane, Bernie Wrightson, Alex Toth), including many of the modern era's top talents (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Marv Wolfman, George Perez, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Mike Grell, Frank Miller, Bruce Timm, Alex Ross, Darwyn Cooke, Jim Lee, Geoff Johns). The list is long, indeed.

Lewis, C. S. (2002). The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics. San Francisco, Calif., HarperSanFrancisco.
For the first time ever, the essential volumes by one of the most celebrated literary figures of our time are available in one deluxe gift edition. The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics includes: Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, A Grief Observed, plus The Abolition of Man. The collection features a detailed index covering all 7 works, as well as an elegant ribbon marker and beautiful line art in-text and between each volume.

Lewis, John, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell (2013). March: Book One. Marietta, GA, Top Shelf Productions.
Lewis presents March, a graphic novel trilogy, in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and New York Times best-selling artist Nate Powell (winner of the Eisner Award and LA Times Book Prize finalist for Swallow Me Whole).

March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.

Lewis, John, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell (2015). March: Book Two. Marietta, GA, Top Shelf Productions.
After the success of the Nashville sit-in campaign, John Lewis is more committed than ever to changing the world through nonviolence — but as he and his fellow Freedom Riders board a bus into the vicious heart of the deep south, they will be tested like never before. Faced with beatings, police brutality, imprisonment, arson, and even murder, the movement's young activists place their lives on the line while internal conflicts threaten to tear them apart.

But their courage will attract the notice of powerful allies, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. And once Lewis is elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, this 23-year-old will be thrust into the national spotlight, becoming one of the 'Big Six' leaders of the civil rights movement and a central figure in the landmark 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Lewis, John, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell (2016). March: Book Three. Marietta, GA, Top Shelf Productions.
The stunning conclusion of the award-winning and best-selling March trilogy. Congressman John Lewis, an American icon and one of the key figures of the civil rights movement, joins co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell to bring lessons of history to vivid life for a new generation, urgently relevant for today's world.

Lewis, Meriwether, William Clark, et al. (1997). The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co.
On January 18, 1803, President Jefferson presented a secret proposal to Congress. In that address, he requested that the legislature approve an expedition to the western reaches of the continent that the United States occupied at that time with French, Spanish, British, and Indian territories. He told Congress that it was a commercial and diplomatic mission, however, Jefferson's ambitions exceeded a desire for friendship with surrounding nations and commercial gains.

The inquisitive President wanted to know about the languages, customs, and technologies of the Indians, the dates on which plants started to wilt, and what new species of animals roamed beyond the frontier. He wanted to establish relations with the Indians, and perhaps bring some to Washington in a learning exchange. He wanted to create maps of the unclaimed territories, based on geographical and astronomical observations. He yearned to enrich the public understanding of science and nature. Congress approved the proposal, granting the Corps of Western Discovery $2,500 (Beckham, 2003 p.68).

President Jefferson entrusted his personal assistant and fellow Virginian, Lieutenant Meriwether Lewis, to lead the venture. Lewis invited a friend from his military service, William Clark, to serve as his co-captain. Together, the two captains recruited 49 other volunteers with military experience to accompany them for the grand adventure; some for just part of the trek, and many for the entire journey.

Jefferson instructed the leaders of the expedition to maintain detailed journals "entered distinctly and intelligibly for others as well as [themselves]," and have some of the lower ranking participants copy the journals to protect them against "the accidental losses to which they will be exposed." (Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis, 1920 June 1803). Upon their return from the wilderness, Jefferson intended to publish their findings.

Lewis, Michael (2010). The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. New York, W.W. Norton.
The real story of the crash began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can't pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren't talking. Few readers will care for the message here (despite laugh-out-loud moments of absurdity), but Lewis is a capable guide into the world of CDOs, subprime mortgages, head-in-the-sand investments, inflated egos--and the big short.

Lewis, Sinclair (1979). Elmer Gantry. Cambridge, Mass., R. Bentley.
Novel by Sinclair Lewis, a satiric indictment of fundamentalist religion that caused an uproar upon its publication in 1927. The title character of Elmer Gantry starts out as a greedy, shallow, philandering Baptist minister, turns to evangelism, and eventually becomes the leader of a large Methodist congregation. Throughout the novel Gantry encounters fellow religious hypocrites, including Mrs. Evans Riddle, Judson Roberts, and Sharon Falconer, with whom he becomes romantically involved. Although he is often exposed as a fraud, Gantry is never fully discredited.

Lewis, Sinclair (1992). Main Street & Babbitt. New York, Library of America.
John Hersey, editor. The famous satirical novels of America's first Nobel Prize winner for literature. Main Street was Lewis' first triumph, a phenomenal event in American publishing and cultural history. In George F. Babbitt, the boisterous, vulgar, worried, gadget-loving real-estate man, he fashioned a new and enduring figure in our literature--the total conformist--and captured the noisy restlessness of American commercial culture. H. L. Mencken wrote: "I know of no American novel that more accurately presents the real America."

Lewis, Sinclair (2002). Arrowsmith; Elmer Gantry; Dodsworth. New York, Library of America: Distributed to the trade in the U.S. by Penguin Putnam.
Written at the height of his powers in the 1920s, the three novels in this volume continue the vigorous unmasking of the pretenses and hypocrisies of American middle-class life begun by Sinclair Lewis in Main Street and Babbitt.

In Arrowsmith (1925) Lewis portrays the medical education and career of Martin Arrowsmith, a physician who finds his commitment to the ideals of his profession tested by the cynicism and opportunism he encounters in private practice, public health work, and scientific research. The novel reaches its climax as its hero faces his greatest medical and moral challenges amid a deadly outbreak of plague on a Caribbean island.

Elmer Gantry (1927) aroused intense controversy with its brutal depiction of a hypocritical preacher in relentless pursuit of worldly pleasure and power. Through his satiric examination of American evangelical religion, Lewis captures the growing cultural and political tension during the 1920s between the forces of secularism and fundamentalism.

Dodsworth (1929) follows Sam Dodsworth, a wealthy, retired Midwestern automobile manufacturer, as he travels through England, France, Germany, and Italy with his increasingly restless wife, Fran. The novel intimately explores the unraveling of their marriage while pitting the proud heritage of European high culture against the rude vigor of ascendant American commercialism.

Lewis, Wyndham and Reed Way Dasenbrock (1989). The Art of Being Ruled. Santa Rosa, Black Sparrow Press.
Lewis examines modern society, in its political and social aspects, from his own "near fascist" point of view. Original and individual, his analysis is illuminated by many unique insights.

Lhamon, W. T. (2002). Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s: With a New Preface. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Examining the art, ideas, movements, technological innovations and cultural forms of the fifties--including rock & roll, bop, the blues and folk revival, Beat counterculture, Abstract Expressionism, the civil rights struggle--Lhamon discovers not a void, but a quiet revolution that anticipated the cultural fireworks of the 1960s. Beginning with the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education' s decision that desegregation be carried out with "deliberate speed," Lhamon argues that the 1950s were alive with strong standards of style that shaped today's culture. Civil rights, electronics, and art forms are discussed in eloquent, thoughtful essays; critical examinations are given of Nabokov's Lolita, Ginsberg's poetry, Wells's The Invisible Man, O'Connor, Kerouac, Chuck Berry, Jackson Pollack, Little Richard, and the film Rebel without a Cause.

Liebling, A. J. and Pete Hamill, editor (2009). The Sweet Science and Other Writings: The Earl of Louisiana / the Jollity Building / between Meals / the Press. New York, Library of America.
One of the most gifted American journalists of the twentieth century, A. J. Liebling learned his craft as a newspaper reporter before joining The New Yorker in 1935. This volume collects five books that demonstrate his extraordinary vitality and versatility as a writer.

Named the best sports book of all time by Sports Illustrated in 2002, The Sweet Science (1956) offers a lively and idiosyncratic portrait of boxing in the early 1950s that encompasses boastful managers, veteran trainers, wily cornermen, and the fighters themselves: Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Archie Moore, "a virtuoso of anachronistic perfection." No one has captured the fierce artistry of the ring like Liebling. "A boxer," he observed, "like a writer, must stand alone." A classic of reporting, The Earl of Louisiana (1961) is a vivid account of Governor Earl Long’s bid for reelection after his release from a mental asylum in 1959—and an insightful look at Southern politics during the civil rights era.

The Jollity Building (1962) collects hilarious stories about Manhattan cigar-store owners, night-club promoters, and the scheming “Telephone Booth Indians” of Broadway, as well as a profile of “The Honest Rainmaker,” the racing columnist and confidence man extraordinaire Colonel John R. Stingo. An unabashed celebration of the pleasures of unrestrained eating, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962) is a richly evocative memoir of Liebling’s lifelong love for Paris and French food and wine. The Press (1964) brings together the best of Liebling’s influential Wayward Press pieces, in which he perceptively examined the flaws of American journalism and presciently warned of the dangers of consolidated media ownership. "Freedom of the press," he wrote, "is guaranteed only to those who own one."

Lichtheim, George (1971). From Marx to Hegel, and Other Essays. London, (44 Gray's Inn Rd., W.C.1), Orbach and Chambers Ltd.
George Lichtheim's well-titled From Marx to Hegel (New York: Herder & Herder, 1971), deals directly with the conflict between Hegelian and anti-Hegelian Marxisms, as well as with the development of the former into the Critical or Frankfurt School in the work of Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas. Lichtheim always knew who the players were and situated them deftly. The very breadth of Lichtheim's scholarship, his even-handed treatment of conflicting standpoints, his insistence on clarity even from Germans, and his feeling for the historically concrete--all these are substantial virtues which make this book, with the exception of its last and very dated essay, useful reading for students of Marxism.

Liew, Sonny (2015). The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. New York, Pantheon Books.
Meet Charlie Chan Hock Chye. Now in his early 70s as he looks back on his career, Chan has spent a lifetime making comics in his native Singapore since he was a boy of 16, in 1954. The artist doubles here as both the narrator and the subject matter, as his life story parallels the changes in Singapore over five decades since the war. The evolution of his artwork mirrors the evolution of both his homeland and the comic book medium itself. The myriad art styles employed by Liew go beyond deft sleight-of-hand and actually inform the narrative in a thoroughly ingenious and engaging way. While all the detail about the formation of the Singapore government adheres meticulously to the facts, the reader is ultimately left wondering whether or not Charlie Chan Hock Chye himself is real or a construct. And given the subject at hand, that quandary only adds to the themes raised in this enthralling graphic novel.

Lifton, Robert Jay (2000). The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide: With a New Preface by the Author. New York, Basic Books.
Nazi doctors did more than conduct bizarre experiments on concentration-camp inmates; they supervised the entire process of medical mass murder, from selecting those who were to be exterminated to disposing of corpses. Lifton (The Broken Connection; The Life of the Self) shows that this medically supervised killing was done in the name of "healing," as part of a racist program to cleanse the Aryan body politic. After the German eugenics campaign of the 1920s for forced sterilization of the "unfit, "it was but one step to "euthanasia," which in the Nazi context meant systematic murder of Jews. Building on interviews with former Nazi physicians and their prisoners, Lifton presents a disturbing portrait of careerists who killed to overcome feelings of powerlessness. He includes a chapter on Josef Mengele and one on Eduard Wirths, the "kind," "decent" doctor (as some inmates described him) who set up the Auschwitz death machinery. Lifton also psychoanalyzes the German people, scarred by the devastation of World War I and mystically seeking regeneration. This profound study ranks with the most insightful books on the Holocaust.

Ligachev, Yegor (1993). Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin: The Memoirs of Yegor Ligachev. New York, Pantheon Books.
Sovietologists and general readers should find this book of major interest, not only for its insider's perspective on Gorbachev's Kremlin but also for its insights into the character of Communist leader Ligachev. Ligachev -- who was for 17 years First Secretary of Siberia before he was recalled to Moscow by General Secretary Andropov in 1983, then went on to become Gorbachev's second-in-command until his de facto removal in 1988 and ultimate ouster in 1990 -- was a reformist but a Communist true believer as well. That conflicted view informs his memoirs, which are at once self-serving, instructive and tremendously thought-provoking. Ligachev charges that glasnost and perestroika were abused by high level apparatchiks for personal aggrandizement and careerism, that Gorbachev, drawn to the role of "enlightened monarch," increasingly surrounded himself with "academic thinkers" instead of "practical realists," also that Gorbachev came under the radical influence of Alexander Yakovlev, the ambassador to Canada whom he brought home from exile in 1985. Spearheaded by glasnost and in turn by Yakovlev's strategic editorial appointments, the press, according to Ligachev, engaged in a destabilizing propaganda campaign: "A dictatorship of destructive forces reigned in the mass media. This accelerated economic collapse and intensified ethnic conflicts." While damning his critics for their "unjust calumny" and for their use of "Stalinist methods of the witch hunt in the struggle against Stalinism," Ligachev attempts to distance himself from the news-making anti-reform actions attributed to him. If his denial of culpability for the publication, in 1988, of Nina Andreyeva's article decrying perestroika rings hollow, the evidence he presents to document his claimed noninvolvement in the 1989 Tbilisi tragedy when Army troops attacked nationalist demonstrators gives pause, despite Sovietologist Stephen F. Cohen's disbelief expressed in the introduction. Still, as Cohen notes, Ligachev "challenges us to understand more by judging less."

Lindbergh, Peter and Thierry-Maxime Loriot (2016). Peter Lindbergh: A Different Vision on Fashion Photography. Köln, Taschen.
Coinciding with his major retrospective at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, this book gathers more than 400 images from four decades of Lindbergh’s photography to celebrate his unique and game-changing storytelling and the new romantic and narrative vision it brought to art and fashion.

Whether in striking single portraits or dramatic situations of figure and setting, we trace the photographer’s cinematic inflections and his provocative play with female archetypes as subjects adopt the guise of dancers, actresses, heroines, and femmes fatales. Raw and seductive at once, we see how Lindbergh’s trademark monochrome pictures also redefined standards of beauty by emphasizing spirit and personality as much as looks, celebrating the elegance and sensuality of older women, and privileging natural and authentic beauty in an era of pervasive retouching.

Lindgren, Astrid (1997). The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking. New York, Viking.
An enticing, newly illustrated collection of the enduringly popular Pippi stories. Since Pippi Longstocking was first published in 1950, the escapades of the incomparable Pippi,the girl with upside-down braids and no parents to tell her what to do, have delighted boys and girls alike. Now, for the first time, Pippi Longstocking, Pippi Goes on Board, and Pippi in the South Seas are all together in one bumper volume, with new illustrations in full-color and black-and-white. The collection is an ideal introduction for anyone discovering Pippi for the first time, while confirmed fans will enjoy revisiting their favorite episodes and recalling some they've forgotten. Her admirers will also find fascinating new biographical information about author Astrid Lindgren and the origin of the Pippi stories. Astrid Lindgren was awarded the 1958 Hans Christian Andersen Medal for her contribution to international children's literature.

Lindorff, Dave (2003). Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press.
"Dave Lindorff's Killing Time stands alone as a full and fair-minded analysis of the case brought against Mumia Abu-Jamal. As such it throws lurid light on the workings of the institutions that played a role in carrying out and publicizing the case: the Philadelphia police, the judiciary, and the seriously biased media. It also makes a completely compelling case that Mumia Abu-Jamal's trial and treatment by police and courts from his moment of arrest to the present failed to meet minimal standards of justice." - Edward S. Herman

Lindsey, Sandy (1999). Boating Magazine's Quick & Easy Boat Maintenance: 1001 Time-Saving Tips. Camden, ME, International Marine.
Sandy Lindsey has compiled 1,001 tips to help you keep your boat running--and looking--its best in Boating Magazine's Quick & Easy Boat Maintenance. From deck to hull, from paint to the electrical systems, and from winterizing to preparing for opening day, Lindsey offers up advice to help you maintain your boat in less time and with less expense. Many of these tips are also happily environmentally friendly--for example, replacing expensive boat cleaners with cheaper and less caustic substitutes.

Linebaugh, Peter (2016). The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day. Oakland, Calif., PM Press.
May 1st is a day that once made the rich and powerful cower in fear and caused Parliament to ban the Maypole - a magnificent and riotous day of rebirth, renewal, and refusal. This book's reflections on the Red and the Green - out of which arguably the only hope for the future lies - are populated by the likes of Native American anarchocommunist Lucy Parsons, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Karl Marx, José Martí, W.E.B. Du Bois, Rosa Luxemburg, SNCC, and countless others, both sentient and verdant. The book is a forceful reminder of the potentialities of the future, for the coming of a time when the powerful will fall, the commons restored, and a better world born anew.

Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker (2000). The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, Beacon Press.
Globalism is nothing new, argue leftist historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Centuries ago, European trade concerns, such as the Dutch East Indies Company and the Virginia Company, sought to create an overseas empire owned by corporations, not governments. Backed by governments all the same, these companies found themselves opposed only by a congeries of revolutionary sailors, artisans, farmers, and smallholders, who formed a "many-headed hydra" of resistance.

Arguing that this history of resistance to globalism has been unjustly overlooked, Linebaugh and Rediker delineate key episodes. When, for instance, a group of English sailors and common laborers were shipwrecked on the island of Bermuda en route to America, they created their own communal government, which was so pleasant to them that they refused to be "rescued" and had to be removed to the colonies by force. Their ideological descendants later banded with runaway slaves and other discontents to form multi-ethnic, multilingual pirate navies that hindered the transatlantic traffic in metals, jewels, and captive humans. Some of the men and women involved in these pirate bands, this "Atlantic proletariat," put their skills at the service of the American Revolution, which, in the author's view, "ended in reaction as the Founding Fathers used race, nation, and citizenship to discipline, divide, and exclude the very sailors and slaves who had initiated and propelled the revolutionary movement." The fire of rebellion soon spread all the same, they note, to such places as Haiti, Ireland, France, even England, helped along by these peripatetic and unsung rebels.

Linebaugh, Peter (2012). Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811-12. Oakland, Calif., PM Press.
Peter Linebaugh, in an extraordinary historical and literary tour de force, enlists the anonymous and scorned 19th century loom-breakers of the English midlands into the front ranks of an international, polyglot, many-colored crew of commoners resisting dispossession in the dawn of capitalist modernity.

Ling, Trevor Oswald (1972). A Dictionary of Buddhism. New York, Scribner.
Provides a comprehensive but brief introduction to Buddhist history and culture. A list of abbreviations and bibliographic notes precede the introduction.

Lingeman, Richard R. (1974). Drugs from A to Z: A Dictionary. New York, McGraw-Hill.

Linker, Kate, Howard Singerman, et al. (1986). Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-1986. Los Angeles; New York, Museum of Contemporary Art; Abbeville Press.
Contemporary art history.

Linteau, Paul-André (2013). The History of Montréal: The Story of a Great North American City. Montréal, Baraka Books.
Tells the story of Montreal, Canada, from prehistoric time through the 21st century. From the Iroquoian community of Hochelaga to the economic metropolis Montreal has become, it describes the social, economic, political, and cultural forces and trends that have driven Montreal's development, shedding light on it's French, British, and American influences. Outlining Montreal's diverse ethnic and cultural origins and its strategic geographical position, this account shows how a small missionary colony founded in 1642 developed into a leading economic city and cultural center, the cosmopolitan hub of French-speaking North America.

Lister, Raymond and William Blake (1986). The Paintings of William Blake. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York, Cambridge University Press.
This is the most accessible introduction available to one of the greatest British artists. The art of William Blake unites visionary simplicity with profound complexity of thought. In this illuminating new study, illustrated throughout in colour, Raymond Lister provides an engaging and lucid approach to Blake's paintings, fully alive to their infinite power of suggestion and refreshingly unfettered by polemic. The biographical introduction, making extensive use of Blake's writings and of contemporary accounts of him, traces the vicissitudes of this absolutely individual artist's life; his very human nature is revealed, no less than his boundless creative energies. The seventy-five colour plates represent the whole span of Blake's working life and all the major areas of his art: his biblical pictures, his allegorical subjects and his illuminated books, which he wrote, engraved and decorated himself. The detailed commentary to each plate explores as much of his symbolism as is readily comprehensible, and explains his often idiosyncratic techniques.

Liu, Marjorie M. and Sana Takeda (2016). Monstress 1, Issues 1-6 [Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition]: Awakening. St. Louis, MO, Turtleback Books.
Set in an alternate matriarchal 1900 's Asia, in a richly imagined world of art deco-inflected steampunk, Monstress tells the story of a teenage girl who is struggling to survive the trauma of war, and who shares a mysterious psychic link with a monster of tremendous power, a connection that will transform them both and make them the target of both human and otherworldly powers.

Liu, Marjorie M. and Sana Takeda (2016). Monstress 2, Issues 7-12 [Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition]: Blood. St. Louis, MO, Turtleback Books.
This series is impossible to classify; genre elements mingle in mythical and gleefully subversive ways. The story's protagonist, Maika Halfwolf, is descended from an ancient immortal called the Queen of Wolves - quite literally an anthropomorphic wolf. Maika has only one arm, though sometimes she wears a magical clockwork prosthetic; hidden in the stump is a squiggly, many-eyed monstrosity that periodically pops out and eats people. Her companions include a talking cat and a child with a fox tail. Yet the obvious parallels with our own world give this wildly imaginative fantasy epic its greatest impact. The central conflict is between "arcanic" people like Maika and humans who have developed a means of extracting magical power from arcanic bodies - brutally, and fatally. This of course evokes the politicized bodies of our own society, more so because so many of the story's characters are visibly people of color. The war's proponents deploy propaganda with all the loathsome rhetoric of the white supremacist alt-right; the war's atrocities are Mengelean in scope and grotesquerie. That the true monsters here include the hatemongers, and not just the tentacled horrors running about, is never in question. Yet between Liu's lyricism and the utter breathtaking beauty of Takeda's art, it's tempting not to care about the story at all. It's a pleasant bonus, then, that Volume 2 provides answers to some of the crucial questions driving this in medias res story, and some welcome character development for both Maika and her resident monster. New mysteries appear as well, so readers can look forward to the continuation of this macabre, masterly series.

Lobel, Jules (2003). Success Without Victory: Lost Legal Battles and the Long Road to Justice in America. New York, New York University Press.
Lobel, an activist lawyer who has worked via the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild to litigate against U.S. military and economic interventions abroad, where defeat was almost ensured, offers a soul-searching challenge to the notion that winning is everything in the practice of law. He offers other alternative values, including his personal preference for the tradition of resistance to unjust laws seen in the struggles for social justice by Jewish and African Americans. He examines the broader values in suits brought by abolitionist lawyers seeking to free fugitive slaves, suffragist Susan B. Anthony's trial for voting illegally, and challenges to segregation laws following the Civil War that resulted in Plessy v. Ferguson. Despite losses along the way in the causes of abolitionists, suffragists, and antisegregationists, the legal challenges they mounted made huge contributions to changing American society. Lobel draws on these past affirmations of higher principles even in defeat to examine how acts of resistance inspire contemporary questioning of the justifications for U.S. military action.

Loisel, David and David Gerstein, tr.) (2022). The Mickey Mouse: Zombie Coffee. Seattle, WA, Fantagraphics.
Award-winning French cartoonist/Disney animator Régis Loisel presents an amazing brand-new Mickey adventure — set in Mickey's classic 1930s golden age. Mickey, Minnie, Donald Duck, Horace Horsecollar, and Clarabelle Cow go camping to forget the Great Depression. But when they return to Mouseton, they find shady real-estate developer Rock Fuller destroying it to build a golf course… with the help of an army of "zombies," transformed from normal citizens with a magic drink! What does Mickey's old enemy Pegleg Pete have to do with this evil scheme… and can Mickey trip it up?.

Lomax, Alan (2002). The Land Where the Blues Began. New York, New Press.
Working for the Library of Congress and other cultural institutions, legendary roots-music connoisseur Lomax visited the Mississippi Delta with his father, folklorist John Lomax, and black folklorist Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s; with African American sociologists from Fiske University in the 1940s; and with a PBS film crew in the 1980s, researching the history of the blues in America. Addressing this wonderfully rich vein of scarcely acknowledged Americana, Lomax has written a marvelous appreciation of a region, its people and their music. Burdened early with now long-forgotten technology (500-pound recording machines, etc.) and encountering pronounced racial biases and cultural suspicions about black and white people mixing socially and otherwise, Lomax sought out those in the Delta who knew Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton and others acquainted with musicians once less well known, such as Doc Reese, young McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters), Dave Edwards, Eugene Powell and Sam Chatmon. Traveling across the South "from the Brazos bottoms of Texas to the tidewater country of Virginia," Lomax discovers the plantations, levee camps, prisons and railroad yards where the men and women of the blues came from and the music was born. In a memoir that will take its place as an American classic, Lomax records not just his recollections but the voices of hard-working, frequently hard-drinking, spiritual people that otherwise might have been lost to readers.

Lomax, John A. and Alan Lomax (1994). American Ballads and Folk Songs. New York, Dover.
Music and lyrics for over 200 songs: John Henry, Goin' Home, Little Brown Jug, Alabama-Bound, Ten Thousand Miles from Home, Shack Bully Holler, Black Betty, The Hammer Song, Bad Man Ballad, Jesse James, Down in the Valley, The Bear in the Hill, Shortenin' Bread, The Ballad of Davy Crockett, and many more. Reprint of The Macmillan Company, New York, 1934 edition.

Lomax, John A. and Alan Lomax (2000). Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads. Mineola, N.Y., Dover.
This sequel to the Lomaxes' widely acclaimed American Ballads and Folk Songs includes melodies and words for tunes from all parts of the country. Songs include spirituals, hollers, game songs, lullabies, courting songs, chain-gang work songs, Cajun airs, breakdowns, and many more. Judith Tick, a scholar and award-winning author, provides a new fact-filled Introduction; notes on tune origins, two indexes, and an extensive bibliography round out this archive of some 200 authentic folk songs and ballads. Reprint of The Macmillan Company, New York, 1941 edition.

London, Jack. Matthew Asprey, ed. (2014). Jack London: San Francisco Stories. Sydney, AU, Sydney Samizdat Press.
From one of America's great writers, this delightful collection - the first of its kind - contains twenty-three adventurous tales set in the San Francisco Bay Area. If San Francisco has captured the world's imagination through the hardboiled stories of Dashiell Hammett, the prose and poetry of Jack Kerouac and his fellow Beats, through Orson Welles' Lady From Shanghai and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, it is as a romantic city of vast suspension bridges and foggy back alleys, not as the wild west of Jack London's day. Pre-quake San Francisco was a tough town, and Jack London - hobo, sailor, oyster pirate, hard drinker - was pretty tough, too. Although famous for his stories of the Klondike and the Pacific, London wrote extensively about his home base. This collection contains such classic stories as The Apostate and South of the Slot as well as extracts from John Barleycorn and The Sea-Wolf. The overlooked 1905 story cycle Tales of the Fish Patrol is included in its entirety. London's vivid eyewitness report of the Great 1906 Earthquake and Fire - which destroyed forever the old city - stands as a fitting epilogue. Discover a vanished San Francisco in these wonderful stories of Jack London.

London, Jack (1982). Novels & Stories. New York, N.Y., Literary Classics of the United States: Distributed to the trade by Viking Press.
Donald Pizer, editor. London's best-known novels, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea Wolf, are presented together with selections from his Klondike tales and previously uncollected short stories. Set in California, Mexico, Alaska, and the South Seas, these works capture the romance and violence of adventure with vigorous narratives and an intuitive feeling for animal life."He is fascinating to read, about beast or man, in fact or fiction." - Wall Street Journal

London, Jack (1982). Novels and Social Writings. New York, N.Y., Literary Classics of the United States: Distributed to the trade by the Viking Press.
Donald Pizer, editor. The People of the Abyss, The Road, The Iron Heel, Martin Eden, John Barleycorn. This second volume of London presents the works that reflect his ideas about 20th-century societies, the condition of the poor, and socialism. Political ideas are dramatized in incidents of adventure, romance, and brutal violence. "These editions should bring London new generations of admirers." - Los Angeles Times

London, Jack (1982). Novels and Stories. New York, N.Y., Literary Classics of the United States: Distributed to the trade by Viking Press.
Donald Pizer, editor. London's best-known novels, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea Wolf, are presented together with selections from his Klondike tales and previously uncollected short stories. Set in California, Mexico, Alaska, and the South Seas, these works capture the romance and violence of adventure with vigorous narratives and an intuitive feeling for animal life. "He is fascinating to read, about beast or man, in fact or fiction."

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (2000). Poems and Other Writings. New York, Library of America: Distributed to the trade in the USA by Penguin Putnam.
No American writer of the 19th century was more universally enjoyed and admired than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His works were extraordinary bestsellers for their era, achieving fame both here and abroad. Now, for the first time in over 25 years, Poems and Other Writings offers a full-scale literary portrait of America's greatest popular poet.

Here are the poems that created an American mythology: Evangeline in the forest primeval, Hiawatha by the shores of Gitche Gumee, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the wreck of the Hesperus, the village blacksmith under the spreading chestnut tree, the strange courtship of Miles Standish, the maiden Priscilla and the hesitant John Alden; verses, like "A Psalm of Life" and "The Children's Hour," whose phrases and characters have become part of the culture. Here as well, along with the public antislavery poems, are the sparer, darker lyrics - "The Fire of Drift-Wood," "Mezzo Cammin," "Snow-Flakes," and many others - that show a more austere aspect of Longfellow's poetic gift.

Erudite and fluent in many languages, Longfellow was endlessly fascinated with the byways of history and the curiosities of legend. As a verse storyteller he had no peer, whether in the great book-length narratives such as Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha (both included in full) or the stories collected in Tales from a Wayside Inn (reprinted here in a generous selection). His many poems on literary themes, such as his moving homages to Dante and Chaucer, his verse translations from Lope de Vega, Heinrich Heine, and Michelangelo, and his ambitious verse dramas, notably The New England Tragedies (also complete), are remarkable in their range and ambition.

As a special feature, this volume restores to print Longfellow's novel Kavanagh, a study of small-town life and literary ambition that was praised by Emerson as an important contribution to the development of American fiction. A selection of essays rounds out of the volume and provides testimony of Longfellow's concern with creating an American national literature.

J. D. McClatchy, editor, is a distinguished poet and critic, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at Yale, Princeton, and UCLA, and since 1991 been editor of The Yale Review.

Lopate, Phillip and Teachers & Writers Collaborative. (1994). The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. New York, Anchor Books.
Essayist Lopate (Against Joie de Vivre, Poseidon Pr., 1991, among others) has selected and introduced some 75 personal essays, covering over 400 years, from the East as well as the West, in an attempt to show the development of the genre. The result is a fascinating overview that could be useful in teaching situations. Given the personal nature of the pieces, it may also appeal to general readers who enjoy biography and autobiography. Lopate considers the personal essay to be a sort of friendship based on "the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience." He devotes extensive space to Montaigne, "the patron saint of personal essayists," but we also hear from unfamiliar voices, such as a tenth-century Japanese court lady, and from special branches of the essay, such as the American humorists.

Lorca, Federico García (1987). The Gypsy Ballads of Garcia Lorca. Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press.
Romancero Gitano (1928, translated as 'Gypsy Ballads', 1953), is Frederico Garcia Lorca's best known book of poetry.

Lorca, Federico García; Carlos Bauer, et al. (1983). The Public and Play without a Title: Two Posthumous Plays. New York, New Directions.

Lorca, Federico García; Christopher Maurer, et al. (2002). Collected Poems. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Federico García Lorca is the greatest poet of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world's most influential modernist writers. Christopher Maurer, a leading Lorca scholar and editor, has substantially revised FSG's earlier edition of the collected poems of this charismatic and complicated figure, who--as Maurer says in his illuminating Introduction-- "spoke unforgettably of all that most interests us: the otherness of nature, the demons of personal identity and artistic creation, sex, childhood, and death."

Federico García Lorca was born in 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, a few miles outside Granada in the province of Andalusia, southern Spain. From an early age he was fascinated by Spain's mixed heritage, adapting its ancient folk songs, ballads, lullabies, and flamenco music into poems and plays. By the age of thirty, he had published five books of poems, culminating in 1928 with Gypsy Ballads, which brought him far-reaching fame. In 1929-30 he studied in New York City, where he wrote the poems - among his most socially engaging and compelling - that were to be published posthumously (and famously) as Poet in New York. Upon returning to Spain he devoted much of his attention to theater, "the poetry which rises from the page . . . and becomes human." In 1936, at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, he was shot to death by anti-Republican rebels in Franco's army, and his books were banned and destroyed.

Lorca, Federico García; Greg Simon, et al. (1998). Poet in New York. New York, The Noonday Press.
Lorca's long out-of-print poetic sequence about New York City, newly translated in this bilingual edition, is as contemporary as today's headlines: slums, racism, violence, and cries of loneliness punctuate this verse. Written during the Spanish playwright's nine-month stopover in 1929-30, and steeped in surrealistic technique, [this] unrelentingly negative antihymn reads the urban condition as symbolic of our culture's materialistic corruption of love and its degradation of nature . . . This [edition] is accompanied by Lorca's letters and a lecture he delivered on this lyrical work.

Lorca, Federico García; Greg Simon, et al. (1998). Poet in New York. New York, The Noonday Press.
Lorca's long out-of-print poetic sequence about New York City, newly translated in this bilingual edition, is as contemporary as today's headlines: slums, racism, violence, and cries of loneliness punctuate this verse. Written during the Spanish playwright's nine-month stopover in 1929-30, and steeped in surrealistic technique, [this] unrelentingly negative antihymn reads the urban condition as symbolic of our culture's materialistic corruption of love and its degradation of nature ... This [edition] is accompanied by Lorca's letters and a lecture he delivered on this lyrical work.

Loriot, Thierry-Maxime and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, eds. (2019) Thierry Mugler: Couturissime. Paris, Phaidon.
Thierry Mugler has, since the creation of his label in 1974, continuously revolutionized contemporary fashion with his singular, imaginative vision. Beyond creating his iconic ready-to-wear and haute couture garments, Mugler inhabits multiple worlds as a photographer, director, choreographer, and perfumer.

Oversized and richly illustrated with 450 images, this book is a luxury object fit for the haute couture world of Mugler. Lavishly designed, the book traces Mugler's career and reveals never-before-seen material by photographers such as Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, and David LaChapelle. This book accompanies the first exhibition on Mugler, produced and toured by the Montreal Museum Fine Arts..

Lovejoy, Margot (1997). Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media. Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall.
Written by a well-known multimedia artist, this cross-disciplinary survey examines the impact of today's high-level computer and video technologies upon contemporary art. It draws connections between the production, dissemination, value and creation of art - past and present - serving as a frame-of-reference for the future. The Second Edition reflects the major issues and developments that have taken place in the visual field during the last ten years.

Lowell, Robert (1967). Life Studies, and for the Union Dead. New York, Noonday Press.
"Life Studies gives us the naked psyche of a suffering man in a hostile world, and Lowell's way to manage this material, to keep it, is by his insistent emphasis on form. The natural heir to Eliot and Pound as well as to Crane, he extends their methods." - M. L. Rosenthal, Salmagundi

"No other English or American poet of his generation has, in his handling of language, the sheer brute strength [that Lowell has in For the Union Dead]; no other poet is so deeply moved not only by moral but by physical horror and disgust (which can include self-disgust), and by a kind of blind Samson-like ferocity. And yet, insensibly, in Lowell's hands, the tale of the world's horrors becomes a tale of the world's wonders, the catalogue of obscure absurdities, a song of praise." - G. S. Fraser, The New York Times Book Review

"Lowell is, by something like a critical consensus, the greatest Amnrican poet of the mid-century . . . More than any contemporary writer, poet or novelist, Lowell has created the language, cool and violent all at once, of contemporary introspection. He is our truest historian." - Richard Poirier, Book Week

Lowell, Robert (1978). Day by Day. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The last book published before the poet's death, Day by Day was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award prize for poetry in 1977 and cements Lowell's reputation as one of the great poetic voices of the century.

Lowell, Robert (2006). Selected Poems. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Selected Poems includes over 200 poems, culled from each of Robert Lowell's books of verse--Lord Weary's Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies, For the Union Dead, Near the Ocean, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. This edition, which first appeared in 1977, was revised by the author: there are additions, deletions, and a change in sequence in the Dolphin section; the five poems in the title sequence from Near the Ocean are now uncut; and a new poem is added to the "Nineteen Thirties."

Lowery, Wesley (2016). They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement. New York, Little, Brown and Company.
Lowery examines the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs. He circles slowly and warily around the question of why, during Barack Obama's presidency, so little has improved on the racial front.

Lowell, Robert and Robert Giroux (1990). Collected Prose. New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
This vast collection of Robert Lowell's uniformly vigorous and well-written essays, which first appeared in 1987, was edited and introduced by Robert Giroux, his longtime editor and friend. Ranging chronologically from a student paper on the Iliad that Lowell composed in 1935 to the unfinished essay, "New England and Further," on which he was working when he died in 1977, Collected Prose is a telling and fascinating compendium of the ideas, arguments, and opinions of one of modernity's most important poets. With many critical writings and book reviews concerning all manner of poets old and new (from Vergil and Ovid to Frost and Stevens, from Hopkins and "Epics" to Bishop and Plath) as well as recently discovered autobiograpical writings, two extended interviews, and learned yet approachable musings on everything from the Gettyburg Address to the art and craft of translation, this prose ominbus is must-reading for all students and scholars of twentieth-century American literature.

Lubbers, Eveline (2002). Battling Big Business: Countering Greenwash, Infiltration, and Other Forms of Corporate Bullying. Totnes, Devon, UK, Green Books.
After big business suffered several spectacular media defeats, from the Mclibel suit where McDonalds won the suit but lost the war, to Monsanto's underestimation of resistance to genetically modified organisms, corporations are fighting back. Hard. From surveillance to legal suits, from lobbyists crafting laws to PR groups' green-washing crimes Battling Big Business reveals how corporate giants attempt to control their 'enemies' - and how groups and individuals can fight back. Contributors include Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, Sharon Beder, Andy Rowell and Eveline Lubbers.

Lucie-Smith, Edward (1969). Late Modern: The Visual Arts since 1945. New York, Praeger.
Introduction to 20th century art from Abstract Expressionism to Pop to Conceptual Art.

Ludlow, Peter (2001). Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
In Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, Peter Ludlow extends the approach he used so successfully in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, offering a collection of writings that reflects the eclectic nature of the online world, as well as its tremendous energy and creativity. This time the subject is the emergence of governance structures within online communities and the visions of political sovereignty shaping some of those communities. Ludlow views virtual communities as laboratories for conducting experiments in the construction of new societies and governance structures. While many online experiments will fail, Ludlow argues that given the synergy of the online world, new and superior governance structures may emerge. Indeed, utopian visions are not out of place, provided that we understand the new utopias to be fleeting localized "islands in the Net" and not permanent institutions.

The book is organized in five sections. The first section considers the sovereignty of the Internet. The second section asks how widespread access to resources such as Pretty Good Privacy and anonymous remailers allows the possibility of "Crypto Anarchy"--essentially carving out space for activities that lie outside the purview of nation states and other traditional powers. The third section shows how the growth of e-commerce is raising questions of legal jurisdiction and taxation for which the geographic boundaries of nation-states are obsolete. The fourth section looks at specific experimental governance structures evolved by online communities. The fifth section considers utopian and anti-utopian visions for cyberspace.

Lumpe, Lora (2000). Running Guns: The Global Black Market in Small Arms. London; New York, Zed Books.
Whether it is Africa, Sri Lanka, or even Chechnya and Afghanistan, it is not heavy weaponry or hi-tech devices that kill the most people, but the flood of cheap, easy to get, small arms that has swept over so many countries in the 80s and 90s. Yet a lot of this cross-border arms trade is illegal. This important and readable new book seeks to advance our understanding of the illegal arms traffic. What precisely is involved? How is it conducted? Who are the players? What are the impacts? What needs to be done?

Lutes, Jason (2018). Berlin. Montreal, Drawn & Quarterly.
A watershed achievement―Berlin charted new territory for the graphic novel and comics at the same time, at once a story about artists trying to make art during the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and a bildungsroman of the first order. This landmark collection returns this story to us now when we need examples of how to stay human to each other in the face of a politics that turns friends into enemies.

Lynd, Staughton (2009). Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Now an established classic, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism was the first book to explore this alternative current of American political thought. Stemming back to the seventeenth-century English Revolution, many questioned private property, the sovereignty of the nation-state, and slavery, and affirmed the common man's ability to govern. By the time of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine was the great exemplar of the alternative intellectual tradition. In the nineteenth century, the antislavery movement took hold of Thomas Paine's ideas and fashioned them into an ideology that ultimately justified civil war. This updated edition contains a new preface by the author, which describes the inquiries that he undertook in his books of the 1960s and their conclusions. David Waldstreicher has contributed a new historiographical essay that discusses the book's lasting importance and contrasts its ideas with the work of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood.

Lunde, Paul (2004). Organized Crime: An Inside Guide to the World's Most Successful Industry. London; New York, DK.
From the obscure origin of the term "Mafia" to the hit TV series The Sopranos, Lunde, who, according to his bio, "has long been interested in the structure and spread of organized crime," surveys a subculture that most law-abiding readers will hope they never directly encounter. In the first section, "What Is Organized Crime?," the author gives a succinct overview, then in part two identifies four major areas of criminal activity: "Exploiting the Human Condition," "Supplying the Illicit," "Extortion and Protection" and "Manipulating Money." The bulk of the book focuses on crime groups by geographic or cultural origin, starting with the Sicilian Mafia and including those that operate in Britain, Russia, Japan, China, the U.S., Mexico and South America. Color and sepia-toned illustrations, ranging from photos of such recent white-collar felons as Nick Leeson and Michael Milken to mug shots of such legendary mobsters as Al Capone and grimly similar pictures of bloody victims of gangland hits, perfectly complement the incisive text.

Lyle, Erick (2008). On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City. Berkeley, Soft Skull Press.
On the Lower Frequencies is at once a manual, memoir, and history of creative resistance in a world awash with war and poverty. An icon on the 1990s zine scene, Iggy Scam traces not only the evolution of cities, but of his own thinking, from his early focus on more outré forms of resistance through more contemplative times as he becomes preoccupied with the need for a more affirmative vision of the future. In one of the book's key pieces, Scam celebrates the history and passing of Hunt's Donuts in San Francisco's Mission District. On one level an epitaph for a beloved hangout and on another a metaphor for the effects of gentrification, it's the untold history of an entire neighborhood in a single retail establishment. Whether handing out fake Starbucks coupons or dreaming of a future with more public art and punk holidays, Scam gives the reader inspiration for living defiantly.

Lyle, Erick, Greta Snyder, et al. (2010). Scam: The First Four Issues. Portland, OR, Microcosm Publishing.
Scam was equal parts an introductory guide on how to get things for free and punk memoir. Youths experienced trainhopping, house shows, and cross country tours that sought out swimming holes. Community was sought and celebrated through generator punk shows on Mission Street, hunting for cans of beer on Easter, and Food Not Bombs. Angst was manifested while stealing electricity from lampposts, squatting in Miami, selling plasma, tagging freight trains, wheatpasting, spraying salt water into vending machines, returning stolen merchandise, and dumpstering as seen through the lens of a young punk. Scam has gone on to inspire a generation of imitators, the highest form of flattery.

Lyle, Erick - editor (2015). Streetopia. NYC, Booklyn.
In recent years, public spaces available for artistic and political expression have been disappearing in San Francisco, a situation addressed by the 2012 guerrilla art festival called Streetopia. For five weeks, Erick Lyle (the man behind the zine Scam and author of the compulsively readable political memoir On the Lower Frequencies) and a crew of collaborators presented a series of art installations, musical performances, and other creative offerings which aimed to revitalize what is left of the city's progressive culture. Now Streetopia has been documented in a book of the same name. It's an affordable, handsome volume published by the small press Booklyn, which brings together articles, photographs, artwork of all varieties, polemics, poetry, and more.

Lynch, Jay and Ed Piskor, Patrick Rosenkranz (2019). Ink and Anguish: A Jay Lynch Anthology. Seattle, Fantagraphics.
The first retrospective of one of the underground comix scene's most beloved figures, which includes an early, uncompleted collaboration with Ed Piskor (X-Men: Grand Design, Hip Hop Family Tree). Jay Lynch was a counterculture artist whose career as cartoonist, satirist, and archivist spanned over six decades. Ink & Anguish is the definitive anthology of Lynch's life as he contributed to the earliest underground comix, designed timeless novelties, and took up painting. This book collects all his signature Nard n' Pat stories; selections from comics like Bijou Funnies and Mineshaft; a sampling of his art for Bazooka Joe, Wacky Packages, and Garbage Pail Kids; and collaborations with Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, and Ed Piskor. Featuring narration by comics historian Patrick Rosenkranz, Ink & Anguish is a loving retrospective of an American original.

Lynch, Peter and John Rothchild (2000). One up on Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market. New York, Simon & Schuster.
Investment opportunities abound for the layperson, Lynch says. By simply observing business developments and taking notice of your immediate world -- from the mall to the workplace -- you can discover potentially successful companies before professional analysts do. This jump on the experts is what produces "tenbaggers," the stocks that appreciate tenfold or more and turn an average stock portfolio into a star performer.

The former star manager of Fidelity's multibillion-dollar Magellan Fund, Lynch reveals how he achieved his spectacular record. Writing with John Rothchild, Lynch offers easy-to-follow directions for sorting out the long shots from the no shots by reviewing a company's financial statements and by identifying which numbers really count. He explains how to stalk tenbaggers and lays out the guidelines for investing in cyclical, turnaround, and fast-growing companies.

Lynch promises that if you ignore the ups and downs of the market and the endless speculation about interest rates, in the long term (anywhere from five to fifteen years) your portfolio will reward you. This advice has proved to be timeless and has made One Up on Wall Street a number-one bestseller. And now this classic is as valuable in the new millennium as ever.

Lyon, James K. (1980). Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.
An impressively researched, cleanly written discourse on six important years in Brecht's life - his friends, his colleagues, his travels, his efforts to make a living in Hollywood, his failures on Broadway, and finally, his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the day before his permanent departure for East Germany.

Lyons, Charles R. (1983). Samuel Beckett. London, Macmillan Press.
Critical guide to Samuel Beckett. Macmillan Modern Dramatists series. Charles R. Lyons, who passed away in 1999, was the Margery Bailey Professor of English and Dramatic Literature at Stanford University. In the spring of 1976 he organized a Samuel Beckett festival that included virtually the whole theatrical oeuvre of this major contemporary playwright.

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