The Queen of Mystery takes readers deep into San Francisco’s Castro District during the mid-1980s, a time of glittering nightlife shadowed by danger and loss.UltraSheen, the radiant drag performer and beloved community icon, finds herself at the center of a storm when a series of shocking murders shakes the queer community. As Casey Johnson, the cab driver turned reluctant investigator, navigates a world of smoky clubs, back-alley secrets, and underground drag shows, he uncovers th...

Queen of the Mission transports readers to San Francisco’s Mission District in 1984, where a community of drag performers, cab drivers, and lovers fight to keep their dreams alive against a backdrop of prejudice, murder, and the looming AIDS crisis.At the heart of the story is UltraSheen—the dazzling star of a new drag revue—whose rise to fame collides with the twisted schemes of Dr. Lindstrom, a deranged academic obsessed with punishing queer culture. As Casey Johnson, th...

Isis Sadler is a women who has faced many obstacles in life, the death of her parents at an early age, her mean spirited grand parents. Numerous chances for romance had somehow slipped between her fingers....life at this point seemed rather bleak.So when the chance to go to mars arrived, Isis saw this as an opportunity for change, a chance for a new life....Even if it was 55 million kilometres away from earth...the farther away, the better.But the red planet could be ...

The Last Days of the Barbary Coast plunges readers into the gritty, intoxicating world of San Francisco in the early 1980s—a city teetering between freedom and destruction. Through the eyes of Casey Johnson, a cab driver turned reluctant chronicler, we witness a community alive with drag shows, drugs, danger, and desire.From the glitz of UltraSheen, the city’s dazzling drag queen star, to the sinister presence of the RedHair Killer, the novel explores the undercurrents of a culture...

Childlike in nature, Kero Mayes is an antisocial teenage man/child with savant-like tendencies, and he is about to be uprooted from his comfort zone and forced out into the world. During a string of unfortunate events, Kero abruptly meets a mysterious young girl named Xuoy and her not-so-little dog, Kibbble, and they bring with them a strange new power for Kero to wrap his mind around. With his newly granted abilities and a pinch of his own intuition, Kero makes new ends and frienemies whi...

Warning: this book may cause you to rethink your default typeface settings.Back to Font uncovers the secrets and lives behind 16 of the most famous typefaces. It answers all sorts of questions you might never have thought to ask before. Like: who were their 'parents' and where were they 'born'? What's pretty and interesting about them, and what isn't? How are the typefaces used (and abused), and where can you find them 'in the wild'? Most importantly, these...

This volume considers the different implications of the rise of streaming services and their particular acceleration during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploring the significant disruption caused to the entertainment industries by the rise of these streaming services, a team of international scholars examine changes to labor issues and compensation, which were central to the conflict between the Writers Guild of America members and their agents, the broadening divide between networks and affili...

Reasserting the Disney Brand in the Streaming Era investigates the evolution of the Disney brand at a pivotal moment – the move from content creation to acquisition and streaming – and how the company reasserted its brand in a changing marketplace.Exploring how Disney’s acquisition of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Fox positioned the company to launch the Disney+ streaming service, the chapters look at the history of those acquisitions, and the deployment of the content, bra...

In this innovative collection, Jason Phillips and ten other historians and literary scholars explore the enduring dynamic between history, literature, and power in the American South. Blending analysis with storytelling, and professional insights with personal experiences, they "deconstruct Dixie," insisting that writing the South's history means harnessing, not criticizing, the inherent power of narrative.Contributors examine white southern texts from multiple, fresh perspectives a...

Martial Culture, Silver Screen analyzes war movies, one of the most popular genres in American cinema, for what they reveal about the narratives and ideologies that shape U.S. national identity. Edited by Matthew Christopher Hulbert and Matthew E. Stanley, this volume explores the extent to which the motion picture industry, particularly Hollywood, has played an outsized role in the construction and evolution of American self-definition.Moving chronologically, eleven essay...

In the Civil War era, Americans nearly unanimously accepted that humans battled in a cosmic contest between good and evil and that God was directing history toward its end. The concept of God's Providence and of millennialism -- Christian anticipations of the end of the world -- dominated religious thought in the nineteenth century. During the tumultuous years immediately prior to, during, and after the war, these ideas took on a greater importance as Americans struggled with the unprecede...

How did Americans imagine the Civil War before it happened? The most anticipated event of the nineteenth century appeared in novels, prophecies, dreams, diaries, speeches, and newspapers decades before the first shots at Fort Sumter. People forecasted a frontier filibuster, an economic clash between free and slave labor, a race war, a revolution, a war for liberation, and Armageddon. Reading their premonitions reveals how several factors, including race, religion, age, gender, region, and ...