Popular motivational speaker and entertainer David Roche’s latest essay collection explores the beauty found in unusual places with elegant humour and compassion.David Roche was born with vascular malformation of the face, which he sees as an “incredible gift” that has forced him to look inside for beauty and self-worth. It has also helped him to see the beauty in others, despite their flaws, allowing him to live in a world of beautiful people. With a refreshingly ...

Is your daily run starting to drag you down? Has running become a chore rather than the delight it once was? Then The Happy Runner is the answer for you.Authors David and Megan Roche believe that you can’t reach your running potential without consistency and joyful daily adventures that lead to long-term health and happiness. Guided by their personal experiences and coaching expertise, they point out the mental and emotional factors that will help you learn exactly how to ...

Contributions by Julien Achemchame, Julie Assouly, David Church, Suzanne Desrocher-Romero, Hélène Frazik, Pierre Jailloux, Nicolas Labarre, Sophie Lécole-Solnychkine, Janice Loreck, Stella Louis, Kingsley Marshall, Krista Mitchell, Karen D. Thornton, and Arnaud WidendaëleBest known for Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequels, George A. Romero (1940–2017) was a writer, editor, director, producer, and influential pioneer of the horror film genre. Beyond Zombie Po...

An engrossing and practical discussion of how to deal with contemporary challenges to democracy and civilization.In Consequences: The Rise of a Fractured World Order, William Priest, David Roche, and Alex Michailoff deliver an engaging, timely, and insightful analysis of identifying the sources and challenges facing liberal democracies and their ability to confront autocracies and autocratic behavior. The authors identify and address structural flaws prese...

A study of Denis Villeneuve’s genre-transcendent film.In Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), scientists must decipher the language of and peacefully communicate with aliens who have landed on Earth before the world’s military attacks. In this first book-length study of the film, scholar David Roche argues that it is one of the most important films of this century, and the most brilliant science fiction film since Blade Runner. Roche posits Arri...

Steven Spielberg: Hollywood Wunderkind and Humanist focuses on the most commercialy successful American director of his generation, from his early career at Universal Television to the Oscar-winning Lincoln (2013). The fourteen chapters deal as much with his major hits as with films that have received little critical attention like The Sugarland Express (1974), 1941 (1979) and The Terminal (2004). They address questions of ethics, ideology and identity politics recognized as central to the...

While Western films can be seen as a mode of American exceptionalism, they have also become a global genre. Around the world, Westerns exemplify colonial cinema, driven by the exploration of racial and gender hierarchies and the progress and violence shaped by imperialism.Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film traces the Western from the silent era to present day as the genre has circulated the world. Contributors examine th...

Women Who Kill explores several lines of inquiry: the female murderer as a figure that destabilizes order; the tension between criminal and victim; the relationship between crime and expression (or the lack thereof); and the paradox whereby a crime can be both an act of destruction and a creative assertion of agency. In doing so, the contributors assess the influence of feminist, queer and gender studies on mainstream television and cinema, notably in the genres (film noir, horror...

Though intimacy has been a wide concern in the humanities, it has received little critical attention in film studies. This collection of new essays investigates both the potential intimacy of cinema as a medium and the possibility of a cinema of intimacy where it is least expected.As a notion defined by binaries--inside and outside, surface and depth, public and private, self and other--intimacy, because it implies sharing, calls into question the boundaries between these extremes,...

Contributions by Jan Baetens, Alain Boillat, Philippe Bourdier, Laura Cecilia Caraballo, Thomas Faye, Pierre Floquet, Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Christophe Gelly, Nicolas Labarre, Benoît Mitaine, David Roche, Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, Dick Tomasovic, and Shannon Wells-LassagneBoth comics studies and adaptation studies have grown separately over the past twenty years. Yet there are few in-depth studies of comic books and adaptations together. Available for the first time in English, this c...

Quentin Tarantino’s films beg to be considered metafiction: metacommentaries that engage with the history of cultural representations and exalt the aesthetic, ethical, and political potential of creation as re-re-creation and resignification.Covering all eight of Quentin Tarantino’s films according to certain themes, David Roche combines cultural studies and neoformalist approaches to highlight how closely the films’ poetics and politics are intertwined. Each in-depth chapter focus...

In Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s author David Roche takes up the assumption shared by many fans and scholars that original horror movies are more “disturbing,” and thus better than the remakes. He assesses the qualities of movies, old and recast, according to criteria that include subtext, originality, and cohesion. With a methodology that combines a formalist and cultural studies approach, Roche sifts aspects of the American horror movie that have been widely ...