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George Orwell’s 1984 has longe been interpreted as an anti-communist tract. But that’s not entirely accurate, argues Thomas Pynchon. “Though 1984 has brought aid and comfort to generations of anticommunist ideologues with Pavlovian-response issues of their own, Orwell’s politics were not only of the left, but to the left of left.”

During 2002, Eric Schlosser’s history-cum-polemic Fast Food Nation sold almost 200,000 copies in its UK paperback alone. His next target? America’s underground vices: “Today, revenues from porn match Hollywood receipts and exceed sales of rock. Some 20 years after Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs’ began, marijuana cultivation has probably overtaken corn ? worth $19 billion annually ? as the nation’s most lucrative cash crop. In Los Angeles County, 28 per cent of all workers are paid in untraceable cash: ‘a triumph of underground practices and values’. Everywhere you look, the underground has flooded the mainstream. Together, these essays build into a secret history of America’s favourite vices.”

“The Hmong had a purely oral culture, with no form of writing until the 1950s, when Christian missionaries developed one using the Roman alphabet.” But for Mai Neng Moua, “raised and educated in the United States, it is the permanence and durability of words fastened into sentences and placed on a page that make sense of her life, her family’s history and a culture at a crossroads. Mai is among the first generation of Hmong to write about the history and give voice to contemporary Hmong experiences.” And she’s collected Hmong stories for a book, the first-ever anthology of Hmong-American writing.”