Toby is a disillusioned director, currently heading commericals, who becomes pulled into a world of fantasy and memory when he's reunited with a Spanish cobbler he cast as Don Quixote in a student film years earlier. The old man now believes himself to be the legendary character, and Toby to be Sancho Panza, who must play along with the delusion as he also attempts to fulfill his professional duties and rescue a young woman who believed his seductive...

Toole's lunatic and sage novel introduces one of the most memorable characters in American literature, Ignatius Reilly, whom Walker Percy dubs "slob extraordinaire, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one." Set in New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces outswifts Swift, one of whose essays gives the book its title. As its characters burst into life, they leave the region and literature forever changed by their...

"Everyone agrees that we should graduate as many students as possible, as prepared for colleges and jobs as possible. We all want improved STEM and computer literacy. We're united in our belief that racial testing gaps need to be closed to create more opportunities for everyone. But there are billions of dollars spent every year to get Americans to give up on these shared goals. Why? Race to the Bottom is the first comprehensive expose of the way...

All Dominguita wants to do is read. Especially the books in Spanish that Abuela gave to her just before she moved away. They were classics that Abuela and Dominguita read together, classics her abuela brought with her all the way from Cuba when she was a young girl. It helps Dominguita feel like Abuela's still there with her. One of her favorites, Don Quixote, tells of a brave knight errant who tries to do good deeds. Dominguita decides that she,...

The nineteenth-century author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow presents a vivid history of the Granada War, which ended Islamic rule in Spain. From 1482 to 1492, Catholic monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon mounted a series of military campaigns against the Nasrid kingdom of Granada. Washington Irving's acclaimed Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada describes the struggles and numerous battles of the ten-year conflict, which culminated...

"We don't understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today's political dramas are unintelligible to us. The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern a figure as the revolutionary, someone shipwrecked inthe rapidly changing present, and suffering from nostalgia for an idealized past and an apocalyptic fear that history is rushing toward catastrophe....

Thirty-five years ago, when "searching for America" was not yet the cliche it has since become, Steinbeck hit the highways with his French poodle, Charley. In a custom-built camper he named Rosinante after Don Quixote's steed, the two traveled the country--10,000 miles and 34 states. Their varied experiences comprise several slices of small-town back-roads Americana. Steinbeck laments the rise of plastic-covered everything, the vacuousness of "sad...