It's been a while since I recommended a book, so here's one that I think is pretty awesome:
Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person From Harper's Magazine.
You get Jeff Sharlet on
secret theocrats, Charles Bowden writing on a longtime DEA informant's funeral, Ken Silverstein on lobbyists for third-world regimes, William Vollmann on tunnels under the Mexican border, Barbara Ehrenreich on
breast-cancer kitsch (her word, not mine), Jake Silverstein on poetry-contest scams and quite a few other excellent pieces. I caught some of this stuff the first time around, and anthologies are by their nature hit-or-miss, but this one mostly hits.
Ooh, and here's an .mp3. From the 10th-anniversary
Oxford American music issue (it also appears on the
Complete Stax-Volt Singles box, and probably on a few breaks compilations), Wendy Rene's '
After Laughter.' Among other things, you might recognize it from the sample on the Wu-Tang Clan's '
Tearz.' A few years ago, I was at a hip-hop show at
Vino's, and
Red Eye Jedi (
Memphix) dropped this, and the crowd pretty much shit its collective pants.