Mark Jacobson

"In American Gangster, Mark Jacobson's captivating account of the life of Frank Lucas (the basis for the forthcoming major motion picture) joins other tales of New York City from the past thirty years." --from publisher description.

In the pages of The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Esquire, New York, Maxim, and GQ, Mark Jacobson has carried on in the tradition of such titans as Joe Mitchell, A.J. Liebling, Jimmy Breslin, and Pete Hamill as one of New York City's finest journalistic provocateurs. Now he collects the best of his years in Teenage Hipster in the Modern World. Jacobson has been witness to a decidedly different sort of history. His "beats" range far and wide, delving into the realms of politics, sports, and celebrity in pieces on such luminaries as Bob Dylan, Julius Erving, Chuck Berry, Pam Grier (in her Scream, Blacula, Scream days), Martin Scorsese, and many others. But for Jacobson, New York City has always been Topic Number One. Jacobson tells the story of the city in his classic essays on the beginnings of punk rock back in the times of "pregentrification" to the heart-wrenching days of 9/11. With a foreword from best-selling author Richard Price, Teenage Hipster in the Modern World is a hilarious and poignant snapshot of a city, a generation, and a man who wonders how he went from hanging out at CBGB to being an AARP card-holding father of three.

Taylor Powell, the hero of Everyone and No One, is, by virtue of his beautiful and irresistible face, the greatest lover in Hollywood history. But self-absorbed as he is, he is sick of being The Face, sick of dispensing his own particular brand of sexual healing. There are so many women to make happy, but he's only one guy, after all, and the pressures are enormous. It would be a relief to be someone else, anyone else. But when he is granted a new countenance that can save the world, he gets far more than he bargained for. After miraculously surviving a plane crash in which he is presumed dead, Taylor engages a strange, enigmatic plastic surgeon to make him unrecognizable. Freed of his fabulous looks, he becomes absolutely ordinary: everyone and no one. However, Taylor soon finds out that while he has been rescued from one kind of fame, his new face is anything but common. His features have been imbued with mysterious powers that have thrust him into the eternal battle between Good and Evil. In fact, when mankind is threatened with destruction, the only hope for its survival is the unremarkable face of Taylor Powell.

Lush meditations by a poet whose previous book, Leaving Saturn, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In Hoops, Major Jackson continues to mine the solemn marvels of ordinary lives: a grandfather gardens in a tenement backyard; a teacher unconsciously renames her black students after French painters. The substance of Jackson's art is the representation of American citizens whose heroic endurance makes them remarkable and transcendent.

At the end of the last millennium, noted journalist Mark Jacobson and his wife, Nancy, decided that their three children, Rae (sixteen), Rosalie (twelve), and Billy (nine), had become prisoners of the idiot culture, which seemed a terrible waste of perfectly fine DNA. There was only one recourse: to declare war. To get away, far away. To go around the world. 12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time is the story of this three-month trip. The concept: to contrast the immortal works of man -- the Angkor Wat, Durbar Square in Katmandu, the ancient Hindu city of Varanasi, Petra in Jordan, the Pyramids at Giza, and the Holy City of Jerusalem -- with the crap on TV. But this is also the story of a wider journey, stretching across generations, an expedition into the minds of five family members as they make their way through a succession of cramped cars, twenty-seven-hour train rides, and hotel rooms with ceiling fans that crash to the ground in the middle of the night. Writing in the entertaining, insightful, occasionally wacked-out prose that has endeared him to both magazine and novel readers, Jacobson invites us to accompany him and his crew on this Odyssean journey through the familial fogbanks onward, to discover that what really endures are the ties between people who love each other. The literary sojourn is spiced by "Talk back/Backtalk" sections written by Mark's oldest daughter, Rae, who winningly delineates the teenage point of view on Hindu death rituals and a lot of really, really strange food. Honest and funny, 12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time is a rollicking journey across the globe and a heartfelt lesson into what it means to be part of a family.

The iconic KGB bar, a seemingly tumbledown dive in the Lower East Side, is home to New York City's most diverse and exciting series of nonfiction literary readings. Susan Orlean, Jimmy Breslin, Budd Schulberg, Jack Newfield, Natalie Angier, Joyce Carol Oates, Luc Sante, and many others have all appeared on its hallowed stage. The KGB Bar Non-Fiction Reader reflects the mix-and-match whiplash mood swing atmosphere of their best evenings. Arranged thematically around such topics as Law and Justice, Faraway Places, Sports, Sex and Science, this diverse collection includes Natalie Angier's writing on AIDS, Luc Sante's musings on New York's former bookstores, Steve Earle's eyewitness account of a Texas execution, Lucius Shepard on hopping freight trains and the murderous FTRA, Mick Taussig's report from dysfunctional Colombia, David Remnick on Ali, Marcelle Clements on the trauma of Big City childrearing, and Jon Langford (of the Mekon's) mutant letters to a rock band. Other contributors include John Berendt, Jack Newfield, Katha Pollit, Marshall Berman, Joyce Carol Oates, Armond White, Richard Ben Cramer, and many others.

"We are living in a time of unprecedented distrust in America: Faith in the government is at an all-time low, and political groups on both sides of the aisle are able to tout preposterous conspiracy theories as gospel, without much opposition. "Fake news" is the order of the day. This book is about a man to whom all of it points, the greatest conspiracist of this generation and a man you may not have heard of. A former U.S. naval intelligence worker, Milton William Cooper published his manifesto Behold a Pale Horse in 1991. Since then it has gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming the number-one bestseller in the American prison system. (Bookscan lists sales at 289,000 since 2005.) According to Behold a Pale Horse, JFK was assassinated--because he was about to reveal that extraterrestrials were about to take over the earth--by his driver, an alien himself; AIDS is a government conspiracy to decrease the population of blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals; and the Illuminati are secretly involved with the U.S. government to manage relationships with extraterrestrials. Cooper died in a shootout with Apache County police in 2001, one month after September 11, in the year in which he had predicted catastrophe"--