Volume 1 of the Cole Coonce drag strip reader. Churned out between races while sitting in a trackside porta-potty, Coonce's collection of incendiary drag strip journalism was written during his days at Super Stock & Drag Illustrated, Full Throttle News and Nitronic Research, between his stints as a guitar player in Braindead Soundmachine and his return to show business as Angelyne's fluffer in Studio City, California. Its 256 pages of ack-ack includes "Viva La Nitro " and "Who's Afraid of Arley Langlo?"

Sex & Travel & Vestiges of Metallic Fragments is an anthology of essays probing and deconstructing modern and historical concerns, from Katrina to Antietam to Hollywood to Irwindale; be it luscious low-rent lap dancers or land speed record losers; reactionary rock stars or genocidal Confederate Generals; Death Valley meth-heads or Japanese drifters; Teutonic milfs in swimsuits or Ashcroft informants; anarchic adrenaline-addled urban bicyclists or Scientologists; from Mark E. Smith and Merle Haggard to Kathie Lee Gifford, Courtney Love and the chick from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Of the zeitgeist...

A delta blues singer guides a Third Reich officer on a tour of controversial Civil War Battles. En route, they retrace the steps of cagey Confederate hero Nathan Bedford Forrest's greatest triumphs and vicious bloodbaths, while re-evaluating the notions of human bondage, charisma, existentialism and duty before encountering the very violence they themselves might be complicit in.

Meditations on maximum velocity. An introspective history of the land speed record.

With his second collection of musings on all things nitro, drag-strip journalist Cole Coonce pulls no punches in his mind-warping analysis of the greatest sport in the history of western civilization, drag racing.