In Masscult & Midcult, MacDonald turned his formidable critical attention to what he saw as a new, and potentially catastrophic, development in the history of Western civilization: the influence-by turns distorting, destructive, and inadvertently ridiculous-of mass culture on high culture.

James McCourt's entrancing send-up of the world of opera has been a cult classic for more than a quarter-century. This comic tribute to the love of art is a triumph of art and love by a contemporary American master.

L. J. Davis's A Meaningful Life is a blistering black comedy about gentrification and its discontents, a gritty picture of the collapsing New York of the 1970s, a prophetic send-up of middle-class anxieties and ambitions.

A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising is both a work of memory and a work about memory

Memoirs of a Revolutionary describes a thrilling life on the frontlines of history and includes brilliant portraits of politicians from Trotsky and Lenin and Stalin and of major writers like Alexander Blok and Andrey Bely.

Called "a rich, disquietingly good book" by The New York Times, the five interconnected stories in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite provide a panoramic yet intimate view of the deterioration of the European aristocracy in the years preceding World War II and the difficult decades that followed.

The Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte record a fantastic variety of romantic, political, and professional intrigues, and tell of meetings with a host of remarkable men.

1927. Finding college life "depressing...to a point where [he] could not go on" John "Buffy" Glassco decamped for Paris. Forty years later, he reconstructed this memoir à clef of his rollicking youth among the haute bohemians of the day, including Hemingway, Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Kay Boyle.

In 1884, Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God.

Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s--but deemed too subversive even to show to a publisher--the seven tales presented here attest to Krzhizhanovsky's boundless imagination, black humor and breathtaking irony.