About the BookBefore Christopher Columbus's arrival, the New World was populated by people who likely originated in Asia. Each physiographic area's predominant culture was defined by the foods and other resources available in that region. Fish and sea mammals provided the majority of food for coastal peoples; the acorn was a staple for California Indians. Plant life and wild game (especially the American bison, or buffalo) were sources for Plains Indians.Click the Buy butto...

Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town is the first book devoted to the career of one of the director/producers who in the early years of sound cinema was instrumental in establishing the Hollywood model of production that would endure for more than half a century. As a director and producer, LeRoy was responsible for turning out more than sixty feature films in a career that spanned five decades; as a studio executive, he contributed substantially to the success of the industry during the ch...

This book is the first major study of Canadian women filmmakers since the groundbreaking Gendering the Nation (1999). The Gendered Screen updates the subject with discussions of important filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta, Anne Wheeler, Mina Shum, Lynne Stopkewich, Léa Pool, and Patricia Rozema, whose careers have produced major bodies of work. It also introduces critical studies of newer filmmakers such as Andrea Dorfman and Sylvia Hamilton and new media video artists....

Stellar Transformations: Movie Stars of the 2010s circles around questions of stardom, performance, and their cultural contexts in ways that remind us of the alluring magic of stars while also bringing to the fore the changing ways in which viewers engaged with them during the last decade. A salient idea that guides much of the collection is the one of transformation, expressed in these pages as the way in which post-millennial movie stars are in one way or another reshaping ideas...

"There is little credibility in healing a privileged world. If the Church is failing the powerless of this world, it is failing the Gospel totally."In 1971, two priests from a Catholic order left their monastery in order to reinvent the contemplative life amid a Liverpool community oppressed by poverty and systemic racism. Foreshadowing the 'new monastic' movement, the members of a 300-year-old religious order began to translate the radical, self-sacrificial values...

Today, two cultural forces are converging to make America's youth easy targets for sex traffickers. Younger and younger girls are engaging in adult sexual attitudes and practices, and the pressure to conform means thousands have little self-worth and are vulnerable to exploitation. At the same time, thanks to social media, texting, and chatting services, predators are able to ferret out their victims more easily than ever before. In Walking Prey, advocate and former victim Holly A...

The Winter 2015-16 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited.The stories, poems, and essays that comprise this staff-edited issue of Ploughshares are diverse and timely. Visit a South African laundromat in Laurie Baker’s short story, Here I Am, Laughing with Boers;...

Jace had the prince in his hand and was seconds away from slaughtering the last member of the royal bloodline who had for so long oppressed or killed people like Jace. Now he had the power to stop it. Jace wanted to see the eyes of the prince as his soul was drained, but thats when he saw somethingsomething different. In this boys eyes he saw something that he used to see in himself. Jace dropped the prince, turned on his heel, and started to walk away. As he walked, the remaining blood of...

The "memorable" (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and "impressive" (Chicago Tribune) debut from a remarkable new voice in poetryAlmanac is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest, particularly with the people and land of the northwestern Illinois dairy farm where Austin Smith was born and ra...

A new collection about violence and the rural Midwest from a poet whose first book was hailed as “memorable” (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and “impressive” (Chicago Tribune)Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores th...

The essence of an addict is as unique and personal as one’s fingerprints. After years of hopping on and off the train of destruction, Luke’s life comes to a screeching halt. Thrust into sobriety by a ten-year jail sentence for running guns across a state line, reality and illusionary realms become blurred. Luke, once known as the boy who shot his brother, delves into his past through a series of dreams. Travel the twisted road of addiction as Luke navigates his way through fixatio...

Twenty of the best American short stories of 2011, chosen by the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Chord.The twenty tightly crafted stories collected here by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks are full of deftly drawn characters, universal truths, and often surprising humor. Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall" is a comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life. In the satirical "The Sleep," Caitlin...