In the decades following the Revolutionary War, Americans had an opportunity––at once exhilarating and terrifying—to shape not just the politics of their new nation but also its culture. British political models abounded, of course: Thoughtful citizens could argue for William Godwin’s radical aesthetics, adopt a Shaftesburian “moral sense,” or compare Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution with that of Thomas Paine. The cultural apparatus of America was likewise an import. But for all its access to the most exalted offerings of Europe, the young United States should not be idealized as the genteel, genius offspring of cultivated parents: It

The American West is a region of subtle, folksy flavors, each state characterized by an externally reinforced image: Colorado radiates an aura of upscale hippie crunch, Texas struts strike-it-big bling, Utah dazzles under the long shadow of Mormonism (and Sundance), and New Mexico pipes out a pleasing desert spirituality.

This is a book about a contemporary phenomenon that is crucially important, utterly terrifying, and largely ignored. In AK-47: The Story of a Gun, Michael Hodges, a British journalist, charts the spread of the titular weapon—especially in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia—and the ways in which the gun virtually guarantees the continued implosion of failed states and the intensification of terrorist violence. For thousands, perhaps millions, of people, the AK has developed “a cultural velocity” that has proved to be “both irresistible and catastrophic,” Hodges writes. It is not just a weapon but an unmaker of whole societies,

The sly comedian of the New York School, artist and author Joe Brainard managed in his trademark “I Remember” poems to transform autobiography’s obscure intimacies into near-epic epiphanies—“I remember the only time I saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.” The legerdemain was accomplished through deftly discordant juxtaposition, and the same handiwork is […]

It’s hard not to wonder whether anyone back in the mid-1980s—when Don DeLillo was busy crafting White Noise’s Jack Gladney, the wily chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill—could have anticipated that an entire book on the subject of the Hitler salute would someday be published. And yet even a casual visit to the book exhibition at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association, where a small army of swastikas can be found goose-stepping across dust jackets as if choreographed for Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler,” would have suggested that it was far from unimaginable. Indeed, the natural counterpart

Thirty-five years ago, Stephen Shore set out from Manhattan on a road trip to photograph America. In addition to taking photos that would begin to form his series Uncommon Places, he recorded the details of what would become a near-legendary journey. On the anniversary this summer of the six-week expedition, Phaidon is publishing A Road Trip Journal ($250), a limited-edition facsimile of Shore’s documentation, photographic and otherwise. (The press has also just released an engaging and thorough survey book on the photographer as part of its Contemporary Artists monograph series.) The work featured in this new volume was made with

In form, Human Smoke is unique. Nicholson Baker seeks to tell the story of the origins of World War II through a chronological sequence of several hundred vignettes, as if one were to screen Gone with the Wind through a series of uncaptioned snapshots. Yet however impressionistic Baker’s technique may seem, he is pursuing an ambitious and sweeping reinterpretation of his subject: He evidently regards the “good war” as bad, a colossal mistake. In other words, Baker is tilting against the most deeply settled and ardently embraced piece of conventional wisdom in the current armory of American myth. His prime