How can we account for the persistent appeal of glossy commercial pop music? Why do certain performers have such emotional power, even though their music is considered vulgar or second rate? In The Persistence of Sentiment, Mitchell Morris gives a critical account of a group of American popular music performers who have dedicated fan bases and considerable commercial success despite the critical disdain they have endured. Morris examines the specific musical features of some exemp...

This volume, edited by Kim Golombisky, applies an intersectional lens to advertising, focusing on gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, age, class, and nationality. Intersectional feminist perspectives on advertising are rare in the advertising industry, even as it faces pressure to reform. This anthology focuses on advertising messaging to follow up the professional practices covered in Feminists, Feminisms, and Advertising, edited by Kim Golombisky and Peggy Kreshel. In this ne...

For the past several years, the American musical has continued to thrive by reflecting and shaping cultural values and social norms, and even commenting on politics, whether directly and on a national scale (Hamilton) or somewhat more obliquely and on a more intimate scale (Fun Home). New stage musicals, such as Come from Away and The Band's Visit, open on Broadway every season, challenging conventions of form and content, and revivals offer audiences a ...

The American musical is a paradox. On stage or screen, musicals at once hold a dominant and a contested place in the worlds of entertainment, art, and scholarship. Born from a mélange of performance forms that included opera and operetta, vaudeville and burlesque, minstrelsy and jazz, musicals have always sought to amuse more than instruct, and to make money more than make political change. In spite of their unapologetic commercialism, though, musicals have achieved supreme artistry and ha...

The gifted filmmaker, corduroy activist and amateur dentist, Richard Ayoade, first chanced upon a copy of The Two-Hander Trilogy by Harauld Hughes in a second-hand bookshop. At first startled by his uncanny resemblance to the author's photo, he opened the volume and was electrified. Terse, aggressive, and elliptical, what was true of Ayoade was also true of Hughes's writing, which encompassed stage, screen, and some of the shortest poems ever published.**A...

Issues of identity have always been central to the American musical in all its guises. Who appears in musicals, who or what they are meant to represent, and how, over time, those representations have been understood and interpreted, provide the very basis for our engagement with the genre. In this third volume of the reissued Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, chapters focus on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, regional vs. national identity, and the cultural and class...

This autobiographical coming of age classic offers a "visceral, comic and tragic" portrait of rural life in Wales during the Great War ( The Guardian, UK).Named the greatest Welsh novel by the Wales Arts Review, this beautifully rendered novel tells of a boy's hardscrabble life in rural Wales and his challenging—yet at times transcendent—journey into adulthood. In the 1910s, the village of Bethesda is a place of poverty and religion; illn...

In a London funeral parlor, the dead rise and walk again. On a train in the London Underground, a young couple is terrorized by a demon. In a suburb, a poltergeist forces a family to flee their home. Hellboy has his hands full. While the supernatural is on a rampage in London, a series of brutal Torso Murders turns up at various sites around the city. All of the corpses are headless, limbless, and drained of their blood. Called in to investigate the killings, B.P.R.D. agents Abe Sapien and...

*FRANKIE BOYLE'S GRIPPING CRIME NOVEL: AN INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER *'A dark and entertaining tranche of Glasgow noir . . . [A] deft, engaging thriller' Observer'Full of scintillating sentences and perfect lines of dialogue' Sunday Times_______________________________________________________________Glasgow, 2015. When Valium addict Felix McAveety's best friend M...

Feilamort can remember very little of his childhood before he became a choir boy in the home of the Laird and his French wife. Feilamort has one of the finest voices in the land. It is a gift he believes will protect him . . .Deirdre has lived in the castle all her short life. Apprentice to her mother, she embroiders the robes for one of Scotland's finest families. She can capture, with just a few delicate stitches, the ripeness of a bramble or the glint of bronze on a fallen leaf....

A virus that kills pregnant women has been let loose, and women are dying by the millions. Some blame scientists, some see the hand of God and some see human arrogance reaping the punishment it deserves. Jessie Lamb is an ordinary girl living in extraordinary times: as her world collapses, her idealism and courage drive her toward the ultimate act of heroism. If the human race is to survive, it’s up to her.But is Jessie heroic? Or is she, as her father fears, impressionable, innoce...

This "beautifully written," international bestselling novel charts the triumphs and tragedies of an Iranian family on the brink of national revolution ( Daily Mail, UK).Senejan, Iran, 1969. The family of Aqa Jaan has lived for eight centuries in the house of the mosque. Now it is occupied by the families of three cousins: Aqa Jaan, a merchant and head of the city's bazaar; Alsaberi, the imam of the mosque; and Aqa Shoja, the mosque's muezzin. The ...