As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay — with officer Nestor Camacho on board — Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, an ambitious young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor.

As the police boat speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay, the scene is set for Officer Nestor Camacho's great moment of heroism. Except that in this feverous melting pot of a city, Nestor's one act of heroism can be seen as an utter betrayal of his Cuban roots. As Nestor's world disintegrates — his family disowns him, he can't get a Cuban coffee without ugly stares, and his girlfriend Magdalena leaves him for her sex-addiction psychiatrist boss — his quest to right the wrongs brings him into contact with the full panorama of modern Miami. The Cuban mayor, a Yale-marinated journalist, the black police chief, a Haitian professor whose ambitions to be French are thwarted by his Creole-spouting son, the clueless baying art-buyers and an Anglo billionaire porn addict all come up for scrutiny in Tom Wolfe's high-energy, scrupulous and hilarious reckoning with our times.

'By the year 2000 the term working class had fallen into disuse in the United States, and proletariat was so obsolete it was known only to a few bitter Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of their ears. The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink'... So begins Hooking Up, the first of the brilliant pieces in Tom Wolfe's classic collection. Wolfe ranges from coast to coast chronicling everything from the sexual mores of teenagers to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves, thanks to the hot new fields of genetics and neuroscience. Hooking Up also includes Ambush at Fort Bragg, Wolfe's novella about 'sting TV', and U.R. Here, a story about a New York artist who triumphs precisely because of his total lack of talent. Funny, often savagely so, hard-hitting, wise, Wolfe remains a unique chronicler of America, and its future in a new age.

Another unputdownable novel from the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Man in Full, both huge bestsellers America's 'peerless observer [and] fearless satirist' takes on the university — from jocks to mutants, dormcest to tailgating — plus race, class, sex, and basketball. Dupont University — the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition... Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a freshman from Sparta, North Carolina (pop. 900), who has come here on full scholarship in full flight from her tobacco-chewing, beer-swilling high school classmates. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that Dupont is closer in spirit to Sodom than to Athens, and that sex, crank, and kegs trump academic achievement every time. As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite — her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jayjay Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennium Mutants who run the university's 'independent' newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavour on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus — she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.