First, published in 1978, Tulle Olsen's 'Silences' revolutionised literary studies and inspired an explosion of new creative voices. By exploring the social and economic conditions that make creativity possible, Olsen sheds new light into the gaps in the literary landscape and the canon. She reveals that working-class people, people of colour, and all women have in fact always written -- though their work has been officially ignored -- and she examines the forces they struggled against in order to create, forces that led in many cases to premature silence. With fascinating testimony from authors' diaries and letters, Olsen takes us inside the artistic process, examining the effects of poverty, family duties (especially motherhood), political and religious censorship, and rigid literary norms on writers ranging from Thomas Hardy and Herman Melville to Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. For those disadvantaged by gender, class, or race, these obstacles loom even larger.In particular, Olsen makes the case that women writers have faced crushing odds, their talents underestimated, their achievements ignored, the themes of their writing scorned, their very attempt to write condemned as a breach of family duty -- and of feminine nature. And yet, as she shows, they have written. This special 25th anniversary edition includes an introduction tracing the impact of Silences on women's studies, women's writing, and women's publishing. It also provides a key document of Olsen's work: the famous reading lists that she assembled from her years of research in public libraries.

Stella Adler was one of the most influential acting teachers of all time, a legendary force of nature whose generations of students include Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Anthony Quinn, Diana Ross, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, Annette Benning, and Mark Ruffalo. This long-awaited companion to her book on the master European playwrights brings to life America’s most revered playwrights, whom she knew, loved, and worked with. Brilliantly edited by Barry Paris, Adler’s lectures on the giants of twentieth-century theater feature her indispensable insights into such classic plays as “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” “The Skin of Our Teeth,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Come Back, Little Sheba,” “The Glass Menagerie,” and “Death of a Salesman,” while shedding new light on such lesser known gems as Tennessee Williams’s “The Lady of Larkspur Lotion” and Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall.” Illuminating, revelatory, inspiring—this is Stella Adler at her electrifying best.

Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being--and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience. Wisse broadly traces modern Jewish humor around the world, teasing out its implications as she explores memorable and telling examples from German, Yiddish, English, Russian, and Hebrew

Composer Michael Nyman?'s classic 1974 account of the postwar experimental tradition in music.

Michael Nyman's book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing that developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the postwar modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4' 33'' consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to be performed on any instrument. Such pieces have a conceptual rather than purely musical starting point and radically challenge conventional notions of the musical work. Nyman's book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed toward concepts of time, space, sound, and composer/performer responsibility. It was within the experimental tradition that the seeds of musical minimalism were sown and the book contains reference to the early works of Reich, Riley, Young, and Glass. This second edition contains a new Foreword, an updated discography, and a historical overview by the author.

Captures the opium experience with vivid descriptions.

"Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American public's ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new Jewish war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism"--Page 4 of cover.

Lesbian writers include some of the most innovative and adventurous writers of this century, but only recently have they been given their due attention in terms of critical study. This book is the first anthology to discuss the subject of lesbianism as it relates to the critical interaction among readers, writers, and literary critics. It explores lesbian texts in terms of identification, meaning, and interpretation, and examines the complex entanglements of identity, voice, intersubjectivity, textualities, and sexualities. "A wonderful exploration of the varieties of life choices lesbians can and do make. This book once again proves that telling the truth aboutyourself is a revolutionary act." — Rita Mae Brown "They will probably drum Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow out of the academy for this one...A college text that is witty, literate, interesting, and can be read for fun. What's the world coming to? Lesbian Texts and Contexts : dry title, wonderful book." — Barbara Grier, Editor Naiad Press "To call this collection much-needed or eagerly awaited would be the understatement of the year. It's thrilling ot think of the new readings of classic texts, the new directions for theory, and—maybe best of all—the new range of literary encounters in the classroom, that will be enabled by this radical intervention on the critical scene." — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Duke University "Excellent,...challenging, sexy,...never boring." — Outweek .

"The mid-1970s was England's darkest, dreariest hour. The UK was sliding deeper into unemployment, reeling from strike after strike, power cuts, the three-day work week, and IRA bombs. It was time for a new order and in London's restless streets a handful of snotty young men, feisty females, and first generation Jamaican musicians created the UK's punky revolution. They made it up as they went along and it touched every corner of the Disunited Kingdom. For a few glorious years the UK was the center of the cultural universe." --Vivien Goldman When punk first rocked, the rough and rugged style on the streets was a world away from the super-slick music videos and corporate stylists that were to follow. And photographer Janette Beckman was on the front line of that hyper-energized time, capturing "the look" of the musicians and kids who were loudly defining an era. Collected for the first time in Made in the UK , Beckman's powerful portraits celebrate the music and the attitude of Punk, Mod, Skinhead, 2 Tone, and Rockabilly culture in the UK. Made in the UK: The Music of Attitude, 1977-1983 documents a time when British music pushed every boundary. Beckman began her career working for Melody Maker , one of London's premier weekly music papers. She soon had extraordinary access to the musicians topping the UK charts--icons of an era when music had an agenda--including The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Jam, The Undertones, The Specials, The Beat, The Police, The Ramones, The Rockats, The Raincoats (Kurt Cobain's inspiration), Billy Idol, and Echo and the Bunnymen. Among these groups, this generation still had the radical idea that each and every punk, skin, mod, rude boy, and ted was just as important as the bands. Janette Beckman's gritty aesthetic placed her on good footing among the kids on the street--and the portraits she made prove that attitude never dies.

"From the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of how jazz arrived at the pinnacle of American culture in 1959, told through the journey of three towering artists-Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans-who came together to create the most famous and bestselling jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue The myth of the 60s depends on the 1950s being the before times of conformity, segregation, straightness-The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man. This all carries some truth, but it does nothing to explain how, in 1959, the great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity, led there by a number of Black geniuses so iconic they go by one name-Monk, Mingus, Rollins, Coltrane, and above all, Miles. 1959 saw Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the other members of Miles's sextet come together to record what is widely considered the greatest jazz album of all time, and certainly the best-selling: Kind of Blue. 3 Shades of Blue is James Kaplan's magnificent account of the paths of the three giants Miles, Coltrane and Evans to the mountaintop of 1959 and their path on from there. It's a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the towns that gave jazz its home, from New York and LA to Philadelphia, Chicago and Kansas City. It's an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange hothouses that can produce its full flowering. It's a book about the great forebears of this golden age, particularly Charlie Parker, and the people, like Ornette Coleman, who would take the music down strange new paths. And it's about why this period has never been replicated, why the world of jazz most people visit is a museum to it. But above all this is a book about three very different men-their struggles, their choices, their tragedies, their greatness. Bill Evans had a gruesome downward spiral, John Coltrane took the mystic's path into a space far away from mainstream concerns. Miles had three or four sea changes in him before the end. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplan's hands, an American Odyssey, with no direction home. It is also a masterpiece, a book about jazz that is as big as America"--

Best Music Writing has faithfully collected the year's most compelling writing on music for a decade now, so it's appropriate this special edition be guest-edited by one of the best-known writers on music and popular culture, Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces , Mystery Train , Like a Rolling Stone , and other groundbreaking excursions into the very fabric of music, America, and beyond. As always, Series Editor Daphne Carr has culled an impressively wide range of essays, profiles, news articles, interviews, creative non-fiction, fiction, book reviews, long-format reviews, blog posts, and journal articles on music and music culture, from rock and hip-hop to R&B and jazz to pop, blues, and more. Writers who have been published in Best Music Writing include Alex Ross, Jonathan Lethem, Ann Powers, Dave Eggers, Susan Orlean, and more.

“ The Ellington Century is a wonderful journey through the world of music and art. If you are already an aficionado of Ellington's music, you will enjoy the author's informative and detailed analysis of the composer's work and musical influences. If you are less familiar, this book puts Ellington's music in perspective with the great ‘classical’ composers of the twentieth century. David Schiff's remarkable insight into the historical and musical parallels between these composers is a delight to read and his references are vast, from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s Agon to television’s Sesame Street . Schiff writes with a sense of humor and an enthusiasm for Ellington's music that comes out on every page.”—George Manahan, Music Director, American Composers Orchestra “David Schiff points us forward, observing that ‘Ellington’s music asks us to see with our ears and hear with our eyes.’ Writing as a composer and scholar, he has a gift for making complex ideas strikingly clear. His insights move across a huge terrain of twentieth-century culture, as he builds bridges in his musical and cultural analysis where many have not seen a connection. Yet each musical work, each artist, is given his or her equal due. In this sense, he has met the spiritual and cultural challenge of Ellington’s life work.”—Marty Ehrlich, Composer/Instrumentalist, Associate Professor of Improvisation and Contemporary Music, Hampshire College

Debates on the authenticity of the Star Wars franchise and the hero-or-villain status of George Lucas are at the heart of these essays by bestselling science-fiction authors. The incredible popularity of the movies has led to the formation of strong emotions within the science fiction community on the strengths and flaws of the films, exemplified here by David Brin's attacks and Matthew Woodring Stover's defense of the movies. This intense examination of the epic works addresses a broad range of issues—from politics, religion, and the saga's overall logic to the impact of the series on bookshelf space as well as science-fiction film. The question Is George Lucas a hero for bringing science fiction to a mass audience or a villain who doesn't understand the genre he's working for? is discussed before a final "Judge's Verdict" on the greatness—or weakness—of the franchise is reached.

Rock & Roll is here to stay--so get back to the roots of this exciting, explosive music with the man who saw it all happen: legendary radio personality Cousin Brucie! The artists presented here played vital roles in the earth-shattering changes that unfolded over the decades, from the time rock started to roll in the 50s. Elvis swiveled his hips to the screams of teens--and the horror of their parents. Then came the attack of the Union Jack, with the madness of Beatlemania quickly followed by The Dave Clark Five, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and countless others. Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield belted it out with newly emerging girl power. Teens across America went "Surfing USA" to the sounds of The Beach Boys, while Detroit Soul had kids dancing in the streets. Hippies flew high on Jefferson Airplane--and Woodstock galvanized a nation. Records like Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds changed the way music was produced forever. Cousin Brucie puts the music in its historical context. The songs unfold against a backdrop of social upheaval, from JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights, and anti-war movements to the first Earth Day, Batman, Women's Lib, and Watergate. The book teems with archival photographs, posters, album covers, record labels, newspaper articles, magazine covers, poems, quotes, and more. From the Trade Paperback edition.

"One of the most promising young poet-critics in America" ( Los Angeles Times ) examines a revolutionary generation of poets. Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz formed one of the great constellations of talent in American literature. In the decades after World War II, they changed American poetry forever by putting themselves at risk in their poems in a new and provocative way. Their daring work helped to inspire the popular style of poetry now known as "confessional." But partly as a result of their openness, they have become better known for their tumultuous lives—afflicted by mental illness, alcoholism, and suicide—than for their work. This book reclaims their achievement by offering critical "biographies of the poetry"—tracing the development of each poet's work, exploring their major themes and techniques, and examining how they transformed life into art. An ideal introduction for readers coming to these major American poets for the first time, it will also help veteran readers to appreciate their work in a new light.

Why aren't Jewish women circumcised? This improbable question, first advanced by anti-Jewish Christian polemicists, is the point of departure for this wide-ranging exploration of gender and Jewishness in Jewish thought. With a lively command of a wide range of Jewish sources—from the Bible and the Talmud to the legal and philosophical writings of the Middle Ages to Enlightenment thinkers and modern scholars—Shaye J. D. Cohen considers the varied responses to this provocative question and in the process provides the fullest cultural history of Jewish circumcision available.

In Stagestruck noted novelist and outspoken critic Sarah Schulman offers an account of her growing awareness of the startling similarities between her novel People in Trouble and the smash Broadway hit Rent . Written with a powerful and personal voice, Schulman's book is part gossipy narrative, part behind-the-scenes glimpse into the New York theater culture, and part polemic on how mainstream artists co-opt the work of "marginal" artists to give an air of diversity and authenticity to their own work. Rising above the details of her own case, Schulman boldly uses her suspicions of copyright infringement as an opportunity to initiate a larger conversation on how AIDS and gay experience are being represented in American art and commerce. Closely recounting her discovery of the ways in which Rent took materials from her own novel, Schulman takes us on her riveting and infuriating journey through the power structures of New York theater and media, a journey she pursued to seek legal restitution and make her voice heard. Then, to provide a cultural context for the emergence of Rent-- which Schulman experienced first-hand as a weekly theater critic for the New York Press at the time of Rent 's premiere--she reveals in rich detail the off- and off-off-Broadway theater scene of the time. She argues that these often neglected works and performances provide more nuanced and accurate depictions of the lives of gay men, Latinos, blacks, lesbians and people with AIDS than popular works seen in full houses on Broadway stages. Schulman brings her discussion full circle with an incisive look at how gay and lesbian culture has become rapidly commodified, not only by mainstream theater productions such as Rent but also by its reduction into a mere demographic made palatable for niche marketing. Ultimately, Schulman argues, American art and culture has made acceptable a representation of "the homosexual" that undermines, if not completely erases, the actual experiences of people who continue to suffer from discrimination or disease. Stagestruck 's message is sure to incite discussion and raise the level of debate about cultural politics in America today.