If art imitated capitalism, it would look like Borges' Travel, Hemingway's Garage. In this secret guide to culture, Mark Axelrod has scoured Europe and the Americas photographing products and businesses that bear the great names of Western civilization and then has recounted the little-known turns of fate by which our immortals ended up in these mundane straits. For those who lament our culture's prostitution to capital, Borges' Travel, Hemingway's Garage offers definitive proof that art lives on.

Learn the untold history of Rembrandt's Toothpaste, Van Gogh's Potatoes, Lautrec Handbags, and Kipling's Rucksacks. Dine on Fellini's Pollo La Strada in Brussels. Hear the great Czech fabulist kibitzing with his cooks at Kafka's Cafe, and find out about Christ's "hidden years" at the Taverne Chez Jesus.

Mark Axelrod is a professor of English and comparative literature at Chapman University, and the director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing. He is a two-time recipient of a United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowship for Creative Writing, and a three-time recipient of the Alliance Française National Writing Award. He has published four novels, a short story collection and three books of criticism. He is also a screenwriter who has written two film books and over twenty screenplays and teleplays. He has receivde rewards for his work from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Writers Guild of America (East), the Screenwriters Forum (University of Wisconsin), and the Sundance Institute.

Praise for Axelrod's Cardboard Castles:

"Axelrod's novel is a moving and at times hilarious adventure through one writer's life of the imagination, the intellect, and the libido...Cardboard Castles is an important novel and--as it is the first in a trilogy featuring Katz--a promising one as well." -Review of Contemporary Fiction

"This novel is an experiment with style and a comment on the social fabric of the United States. Replete with experiment, it contains advertising blurbs, movie blurbs, and typographic dalliances. It is also a satire on Hollywood film; American television, folklore, advertising, and education; the U.S. presidency; Ronald Reagan; and publishing prejudices and "literary" agent incompetence. Moreover, it contains a panoply of gibes, jabs, and gestures at American culture in general. The author is attempting to prove that the novel is not dead, only that those people who want to write novels in the style of Balzac are dead."