Wounded Galaxies 1968 examines the relationship between radical politics, radical aesthetics, radical culture, and the legacy of a watershed year for the world. Like the Surrealists before them, 1968's counterculture believed that changing the world (politics) and changing art (life, culture) were part of the same project.This year saw violent protests and uprisings, including those at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago; the Prague Spring and subsequent Warsaw P...

The definitive look at one of the most important Black art films and original filmmakers of the 1970s.Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess (1973) has across the decades attained a sizable cult following among African American cinema devotees, art house aficionados, and horror fans, thanks to its formal complexity and rich allegory. Pleading the Blood is the first full-length study of this cult classic.Ganja & Hess was withdrawn almost immedia...

Elia Kazan was the twentieth century’s most celebrated director of both stage and screen, and this monumental, revelatory book shows us the master at work. Kazan’s list of Broadway and Hollywood successes—A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, On the Waterfront, to name a few—is a testament to his profound impact on the art of directing. This remarkable book, drawn from his notebooks, letters, interviews, and autobiography, reveals Kazan’s method: how he uncovered the “spi...

The third edition of Bill Nichols's best-selling text provides an up-to-date introduction to the most important issues in documentary history and criticism. A new chapter, "I Want to Make a Documentary: Where Do I Start?" guides readers through the steps of planning and preproduction and includes an example of a project proposal for a film that went on to win awards at major festivals. Designed for students in any field that makes use of visual evidence and persuasive strategies, Introduct...

"An exhaustive biography. . . . Required reading for anyone interested in this enigmatic literary figure; indeed in Southern literature." — Washington TimesThe saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. After writing A Confederacy of Dunces, Toole corresponded with Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster for two years. Exhausted from Gottlieb's suggested revisions, Toole declared the public...

The one guide every creative nonfiction writer needs to turn to when being "creative."Writers of memoir and narrative nonfiction are experiencing difficult days with the discovery that some well-known works in the genre contain exaggerations--or are partially fabricated. But what are the parameters of creative nonfiction? Keep It Real begins by defining creative nonfiction. Then it explores the flexibility of the form--the liberties and the boundaries that allow writers to...

The sweeping story of cartoons, comic strips, and graphic novels and their hold on the American imagination.Comics have conquered America. From our multiplexes, where Marvel and DC movies reign supreme, to our television screens, where comics-based shows like The Walking Dead have become among the most popular in cable history, to convention halls, best-seller lists, Pulitzer Prize–winning titles, and MacArthur Fellowship recipients, comics shape American ...

"No mere page-turner, this is a page-devourer, generating the kind of suspense that is usually the province of the playwright or novelist." — The New York Times Book ReviewFew figures in film and theater history tower like Elia Kazan. Born in 1909 to Greek parents in Istanbul, Turkey, he arrived in America with incomparable vision and drive, and by the 1950s he was the most important and influential director in the nation, simultaneously dominating both the...

Updated and expanded for a new edition, this is the perfect starter text for students of film studies. Packed full of visual examples from all periods of film history up to the present, Film:A Critical Introduction illustrates film concepts in context and in depth, addressing techniques and terminology used in film production and criticism, and emphasising thinking and writing critically and effectively.With reference to 450 new and existing images, the authors discuss con...

New York Times Notable Book: An "engaging" illustrated book full of "valuable insights into the contemporary world of graphic storytelling" ( Los Angeles Review of Books).Over the past century, fans have elevated comics from the back pages of newspapers into one of our most celebrated forms of culture, from Fun Home, the Tony Award–winning musical based on Alison Bechdel's groundbreaking graphic memoir to the dozens of superhero films that...

The most celebrated American novelist of the past half-century, an indispensable figure of postmodernism worldwide, Thomas Pynchon notoriously challenges his readers. This Companion provides tools for meeting that challenge. Comprehensive, accessible, lively, up-to-date and reliable, it approaches Pynchon's fiction from various angles, calling on the expertise of an international roster of scholars at the cutting edge of Pynchon studies. Part I covers Pynchon's fiction novel-by-novel from ...

When Art Spiegelman's Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, it marked a new era for comics. Comics are now taken seriously by the same academic and cultural institutions that long dismissed the form. And the visibility of comics continues to increase, with alternative cartoonists now published by major presses and more comics-based films arriving on the screen each year.Projections argues that the seemingly sudden visibility of comics is no accident. Beginning with...