From jazz fantasy camp to running a movie studio; from a fight between an old guy and a fat guy to a fear of clowns – Carlo Rotella's "Playing in Time" delivers good stories full of vivid characters, all told with the unique voice and humor that have...

Joe Louis defended his heavyweight boxing title an astonishing twenty-five times and reigned as world champion for more than eleven years. He got more column inches of newspaper coverage in the 1930s than FDR did. His racially and politically charged...

June 1978: Frederic Raphael is in a studio for the dubbing of his television play "Something's Wrong", and a routine moment is captured by his wry alertness to vanities and foibles. "Ifs and Buts" continues the sharply stylish extracts from the journ...

"Finding Mars" is an interwoven tale of science, travel, and adventure, as science writer Ned Rozell accompanies permafrost researcher – and inveterate wanderer – Kenji Yoshikawa on a 750-mile trek by snowmobile through the Alaska wilderness. Along t...

Street-smart, wickedly funny, piercingly perceptive, and eloquent enough to win a Pulitzer Prize, Mike Royko continues to have legions of devoted fans who still wonder "what Royko would have said" about some outrageous piece of news. One thing he har...

Zigzag: five sequences marks the welcome return of Anthony Rudolf – publisher, translator, autobiographer, essayist – to his first vocation, poetry. Apart from collaborations with artists, this is his first book containing poems for more than thirty...

Combining the incisive pen of a newspaperman and the compassionate soul of a poet, Mike Royko became a Chicago institution – in Jimmy Breslin's words, "the best journalist of his time".Early Royko: Up Against It in Chicago" will restore to print the...

Established in 1968, John Fuller's Sycamore Press published some of the most influential and critically acclaimed writers of the past half-century. In addition to publishing established authors, such as W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and Peter Porter, t...

The orthodox view of Vyacheslav Molotov is that he was no more than Stalin's faithful servant; a dogmatic conservative communist of little or no imagination. Molotov was, indeed, Stalin's right-hand man while from the 1920s the two men presided over...

The fourth volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, "Ticks and Crosses" covers the years 1976 to 1978 with the sharp wit and provocative intelligence that made the earlier books an acclaimed success. Raphael observes the inner workings of film studios...