Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author Hunter S. Thompson rocked the literary world with his mind-bending style of Gonzo journalism. First published in 1966, Hell’s Angels is Thompson’s up-close and personal look at the infamous motorcycle gang during the time when its moniker was most feared.

In Las Vegas to cover a motorcycle race, Raoul Duke (Thompson) and his attorney Dr. Gonzo (inspired by a friend of Thompson) are quickly diverted to search for the American dream. Their quest is fueled by nearly every drug imaginable and quickly becomes a surreal experience that blurs the line between reality and fantasy. But there is more to this hilarious tale than reckless behavior, for underneath the hallucinogenic facade is a stinging criticism of American greed and consumerism.

No skill is more important in today's world than being able to think about, understand, and act on information in an effective and responsible way. What's more, at no point in human history have we had access to so much information, with such relative ease, as we do in the 21st century. But because misinformation out there has increased as well, critical thinking is more important than ever. These 24 rewarding lectures equip you with the knowledge and techniques you need to become a savvier, sharper critical thinker in your professional and personal life.

Begun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s.

Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, The House on Mango Street tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong, not to her rundown neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza's story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become.

A nameless El Salvadoran man, fleeing torture and imprisonment, arrives in the United States - his only hope for asylum. The American woman who has volunteered to help him is searching for something to add meaning to her life. When these two lonely people meet, their haunting relationship fulfills their hearts' desires, but it also gives life to their darkest dreams.

One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.

Wood delivers another knock-out punch - the story of Los Angeles County District Attorney George Keegan, who is running for reelection…and running from the truth about his wife's recent death in a fiery car accident. Prompted by his anguish, Keegan decides to prosecute an explosive murder case himself. Now his reputation hangs in the balance.

Leslie Marmon Silko's sublime Ceremony is almost universally considered one of the finest novels ever written by an American Indian. It is the poetic, dreamlike tale of Tayo, a mixed-blood Laguna Pueblo and veteran of World War II. Tormented by shell shock and haunted by memories of his cousin who died in the war, Tayo struggles on his impoverished reservation. After turning to alcohol to ease his pain, he strives for a better understanding of who he is.

What is life? What is my place in it? What choices do these questions obligate me to make? More than a half-century after it burst upon the intellectual scene - with roots that extend to the mid-19th century - Existentialism's quest to answer these most fundamental questions of individual responsibility, morality, and personal freedom, life has continued to exert a profound attraction.

With this exciting and historically rich six-lecture course, experience for yourself the drama of this dynamic year in medieval history, centered on the landmark Norman Conquest. Taking you from the shores of Scandinavia and France to the battlefields of the English countryside, these lectures will plunge you into a world of fierce Viking warriors, powerful noble families, politically charged marriages, tense succession crises, epic military invasions, and much more.

Vlad Taltos, a mobster and assassin in the magical metropolis of Adrilankha, is given the largest contract of his career, but the job is even more complicated than he expects.

Grasp the important ideas that have served as the backbone of philosophy across the ages with this extraordinary 60-lecture series. This is your opportunity to explore the enormous range of philosophical perspectives and ponder the most important and enduring of human questions-without spending your life poring over dense philosophical texts.

Clanton, Mississippi. The life of a 10-year-old black girl is shattered by two drunken and remorseless young men. The mostly white town reacts with shock and horror at the inhuman crime. Until her father acquires an assault rifle - and takes justice into his own outraged hands. For 10 days, with burning crosses and the crack of sniper fire spreading through the streets of Clanton, the nation sits spellbound as young defense attorney Jake Brigance struggles to save his client's life...and then his own....

An iconic and controversial figure in American literature, Hunter S. Thompson displayed a brilliance that forever changed journalism. Thompson’s follow-up to The Proud Highway, this second volume of private, never-before-published letters spans the years 1968 through 1976. Addressed to such luminaries as Tom Wolfe, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jimmy Carter, this incisive collection showcases Thompson’s raw and starkly honest thoughts on a pivotal era in U.S. history.

Tom Wolfe's best-selling modern classic tells the story of Sherman McCoy, an elite Wall Street bond trader who has it all: wealth, power, prestige, a Park Avenue apartment, a beautiful wife, and an even more beautiful mistress - until one wrong turn sends Sherman spiraling downward into a humiliating fall from grace. A car accident in the Bronx involving Sherman, his girlfriend, and two young lower-class Black men sets a match to the incendiary racial and social tensions of 1980s New York City.

Defending a surgeon in a malpractice case, Jake Lassiter begins to suspect that his client is innocent of negligence...but guilty of murder. Add a sexy widow, a deadly drug, and a grave robbery to the stew, and you have Miami's trial of the century.

Hollywood. Saturday night. A broken taillight leads to a routine traffic stop. It shouldn’t have changed the lives of the four men involved, but it did. The Onion Field is the frighteningly true story of a fatal collision of destinies that would lead two young cops and two young robbers to a deserted field on the outskirts of Los Angeles, towards a bizarre execution and its terrible aftermath.

Mary DiNunzio has been slaving away for the past eight years trying to make partner in her cutthroat Philadelphia law firm. She's too busy to worry about the crank phone calls she's been getting - until they fall into a sinister pattern. The phone rings as soon as she gets to work, then as soon as she gets home. Mary can't shake the sensation that someone is watching her, following her every move. The shadowboxing turns deadly when her worst fears are realized, and she has to fight for something a lot more important than partnership: her life.

Lone Wolf, Roach, Goose, and Dutchboy - four wild ones who have lived their lives on the wrong side of the law. They are members of the outlaw motorcycle gang, the Scorpions - men with their own brand of justice. Now they stand accused of the gang-rape of a motel maid of dubious reputation and the brutal murder of a friend of hers in the mountains outside Santa Fe. But they claim they are innocent.

90 Church is both the unbelievable memoir of one man's confrontation with the dark corners of the human experience and a fascinating window into a little-known time in American history. Learn the story of the agents who make the DEA look like choirboys.

Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. She was able to escape and eventually identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken - but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After 11 years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed.

In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation that only a native son can possess, journalist Charlie LeDuff sets out to uncover what has brought low this once-vibrant city, his city.

In a remote northern California town, a huge task force from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration conducts a raid on the stronghold of one of the biggest drug-dealing rings in the country. During the raid, the infamous, reclusive leader of the ring, Reynaldo Juarez, is shot and killed - despite direct orders from the Attorney General that he is to be taken alive at any cost because of his immense value to the government as a witness in other drug cases.

Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Roger "Butch" Karp has been around New York long enough to realize that the judicial system can be dirty and cynical. But he still believes in justice. So when a vicious sociopath tries to dodge a brutal murder charge by convincing the court he is incompetent to stand trial, Karp teams up with firecracker Assistant DA Marlene Ciampi to unleash the full force of their relentless energy, hardboiled wit, and passion for the truth to put the killer away for good. They will accept no lesser plea.

Every week a hundred million dollars in cash arrives at Miami International Airport, shipped by German banks to the Federal Reserve. A select group of trusted workers moves the bags through customs and loads them into armored trucks.

Phillip Margolin, best selling author of The Undertaker's Widow, introduces the world to the first genuinely monstrous psychopath of the new century. Also available abridged.

This number-one New York Times best seller is an unflinching look at what the television cameras could not show: behind-the-scenes meetings, the deteriorating relationships between the defense and prosecution teams, the taunting, baiting, and pushing matches between Darden and Simpson, the intimate relationship between Darden and Marcia Clark, and the candid factors behind Darden's controversial decision for Simpson to try on the infamous glove, and much more.

By age 12, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East L.A. gang warfare. Lured by a seemingly invincible gang culture, he witnessed countless shootings, beatings, and arrests, then watched with increasing fear as that culture claimed friends and family members. Before long, Rodriguez saw a way out of the barrio through education and successfully broke free from years of violence and desperation.

In 1919, Delano, Georgia, appoints its first chief of police. Honest and hardworking, the new chief is puzzled when young men start to disappear. But his investigation is ended by the fatal blast from a shotgun. Delano's second chief-of-police is no hero, yet he is also disturbed by what he sees in the missing-persons bulletins. In 1969, when Delano's third chief takes over, the unsolved disappearances still haunt the police files.

Authored with uninhibited candor and manic energy, this audiobook is Acosta's own account of coming of age as a Chicano in the psychedelic '60s, of taking on impossible cases while breaking all tile rules of courtroom conduct, and of scrambling headlong in search of a personal and cultural identity. It is a landmark of contemporary Hispanic American literature, at once ribald, surreal, and unmistakably authentic.

After a fishing accident leaves her husband hospitalized across the border in Canada, Jill is left to look after her teenage boys—"the wolves"—alone. Nothing comes easy in their remote corner of Maine: money is tight; her son Sam is getting into more trouble by the day; her eldest, Charlie, is preoccupied with a new girlfriend; and Jill begins to suspect her marriage isn't as stable as she once believed.

Nessa McCormack's marriage is coming back together again after her husband's affair. She is excited to be in charge of a retrospective art exhibit for one of Ireland's most beloved and enigmatic artists, the late sculptor Robert Locke. But the arrival of two enigmatic outsiders imperils both her personal and professional worlds: A chance encounter with an old friend threatens to expose a betrayal Nessa thought she had long put behind her, and at work, an odd woman comes forward claiming to be the true creator of Robert Locke's most famous work, the Chalk Sculpture.

For the past 20 years, Bronson Powers, former Hollywood stuntman and converted Mormon, has been homesteading deep in the uninhabited desert outside Joshua Tree with his three wives and 10 children. Bronson and his wives, Yalulah, Mary, and Jackie, have been raising their family away from the corruption and evil of the modern world. Their insular existence - controversial, difficult, but Edenic - is upended when the ambitious young developer Maya Abbadessa stumbles upon their land. Hoping to make a profit, she crafts a wager with the family that sets in motion a deadly chain of events.

With three novels and two short story collections published, Kevin Barry has steadily established his stature as one of the finest writers not just in Ireland but in the English language. All of his prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these 11 exquisite stories transport the listener to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction being written today.

Mano Majra is a place, Khushwant Singh tells us at the beginning of this novel, where Sikhs and Muslims have lived together in peace for hundreds of years. Then one day, at the end of the summer, the "ghost train" arrives, a silent funeral train loaded with the bodies of thousands of refuges, bringing the village its first taste of the horrors of the civil war. Train to Pakistan is the story of this isolated village that is plunged into the abyss of religious hate. It is also the story of a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl whose love endures and transcends the ravages of war.

Beekeeper Beckett Walsh is living her dream, working alongside her father in their apiary, until his untimely death sends her world into a tailspin. She suddenly finds she must deal with a new part owner of the family business—one who is looking to sell the property. Beck cannot fathom why her father would put her into the position to lose everything they built together.

B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film by an enigmatic outsider - a film he’s convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made, a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur 90 years to complete, B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed.

For as long as Rae can remember, it's been her and Mum, and their dog, Splinter; a small, deliberately unremarkable family. They have their walks, their cooking routines, their home. Sometimes Mum disappears for a while to clear her head, but Rae is okay with this because Mum always comes back. So, when Rae wakes to Splinter's nose in her face, the back door open, and no Mum, she does as she’s always done and carries on. She tends to the house, goes to school, walks Splinter, and minds her own business - all the while pushing down the truth she isn't ready to face.

Stroke by stroke, color by color, the past comes alive as a young woman in Lombardy, Italy, trains to paint with the masters. Will her ambition be too much for them? Or will she secure her place in the world of Renaissance art, despite them? As Sofonisba struggles to make her name, the Spanish empire invades Italy. With Michelangelo as her mentor and her father as her champion, Sofonisba dreams of painting the Spanish king.