Literary journalism for the fast, the inquisitive and the appalled, probing everything from Katrina to Irwindale, via luscious low-rent lap dancers, speed racing losers, reactionary rock stars, genocidal Confederate Generals, Death Valley meth-heads, Japanese drifters, Teutonic milfs in swimsuits, anarchic adrenaline-addled urban cyclists and Scientologists; from Mark E. Smith and Merle Haggard to Kathie Lee Gifford, Courtney Love and the chick in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Sex, drugs, drum machines and riots during the dawn of Los Angeles' Infotainment Age. With this update of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, Coonce pulls it out of the bag and drops a load of intrigue and twisted mundanity with brilliant style. Culminating in the illusion of nothing happening--but you know something big went down. This is certainly a book to curl up on someone's sofa with a warm crack pipe and enjoy.

A delta blues singer guides a Third Reich officer on a tour of controversial Civil War Battles. En route, they retrace the steps of cagey Confederate hero Nathan Bedford Forrest's greatest triumphs and vicious bloodbaths, while re-evaluating the notions of human bondage, charisma, existentialism and duty before encountering the very violence they themselves might be complicit in.

Volume 1 of the Cole Coonce drag strip reader. Churned out between races while sitting in a trackside porta-potty, Coonce's collection of incendiary, nitromanical journalism was written during his days at Super Stock & Drag Illustrated, Full Throttle News and Nitronic Research, between his stints as in show business as Angelyne's fluffer in Studio City, California. Its 256 pages of ack-ack includes "Viva La Nitro!" and "Who's Afraid of Arley Langlo?"

Meditations on Maximum Velocity, indeed... This is a blistering dissection of the 20th century in the guise of a free-from History of the Land Speed Record. Speed, chrome, free will, hot rodding and the zeitgeist are over. Consider this a requiem then.