America's maestro reporter/novelist gives America an MRI at the dawn of a new age. In "Hooking Up", Wolfe ranges from coast to coast, chronicling everything from the sexual manners and mores of teenagers to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves--thanks to the hot new fields of genetics and neuroscience--to the inner workings of television's magazine-show sting operations.

Sherman McCoy finds himself involved in a freak accident involving two black muggers, his Mercedes and his mistress. As a result McCoy learns that prosecutors, politicians and press are lining up to devour him with shameless self-serving relish.

The setting is Atlanta, Georgia, the protagonist is Charles Croker, once a fabled college football star, now a middle-aged entrepreneur-turned-conglomerate king whose outsize ego has at last hit up against reality.

Tom Wolfe introduces a wide range of journalistic reportage by writers including Truman Capote, Terry Southern, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson.

I looked around and people's faces were distorted...lights were flashing everywhere...the screen at the end of the room had three or four different films on it at once, and the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been...the band was playing but I couldn't hear the music...people were dancing...someone came up to me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected images on the back of my eye-lids...I sought out a person I trusted and he laughed and told me that the Kool-Aid had been spiked and that I was beginning my first LSD experience...

A wildly vivid and entertaining chronicle of America's manned space program, from the author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid TestWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY US ASTRONAUT SCOTT KELLY`What is it' asks Tom Wolfe, `that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman Candle...and wait for someone to light the fuse?' Arrogance?

'Verdict: excellent book by a genius' Kurt VonnegutIn this, his first book and one of the landmarks of the New Journalism, Tom Wolfe managed to look at the American scene of the early 1960s afresh and to zero in on the more exotic forms of status-seeking then in vogue from New York to Los Angeles.

Tom Wolfe's genre-defining ride through the 1960s published in Vintage Classics for the first time to mark its fiftieth anniversaryWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JARVIS COCKERIn the summer of 1964, author Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters set out on a trip like no other.