"Renowned producer, director, and B-movie showman Charles Band takes readers on a wild romp through Hollywood's decidedly un-Oscarworthy underbelly, where mayhem and zombies reign supreme, and cheap thrills and entertainment are king." --

"The words of Jesus can be as mysterious as they are familiar. For those seeking greater understanding of the Gospels through storytelling and poetry comes this book by Andrew Klavan, who chronicles his own inspiring, late-in-life journey to achieve a fresh perspective and deep connection to Jesus's most well-known and complex biblical passages"--

The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition, Second Edition, immerses students in the engaging story of the Western musical tradition. By emphasizing the connections among works, both within each cultural era and across time and place, the text goes beyond a basic retelling of the music's history to build students' ability to listen critically to key works. A full suite of instructor resources, a free open-access student Companion Website, a three-volume score anthology, and streaming audio recordings support the text, making The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition, Second Edition, a complete program for building students' understanding and appreciation of the classical canon. --

"What is Holocaust literature? When does it begin and how is it changing? Is there an essential core of diaries, eyewitness accounts of the concentration camps, tales of individual survival in hiding? Is it the same everywhere: in the West as in the East, in Australia as in the Americas, in poetry as in prose? Is this literature sacred and sui generis, or can it be studied in the light of other literatures? What of the perpetrators and bystanders, the hidden children, the children of Holocaust survivors: Do they speak with the same authority? What works of Holocaust literature will be read a hundred years from now--and why? Here, for the first time and told from beginning to end, is an historical survey of Holocaust literature in all genres, countries, and major languages. Beginning in wartime, it proceeds from the literature of mobilization and mourning in the Free World to the vast and varied literature produced in the Nazi-occupied ghettos, the bunkers and places of hiding, the transit and concentrations camps. Within weeks of the liberation, in displaced persons camps, a new memorial and testamentary literature begins to take shape. Moving from Europe to Israel, the U.S., and beyond, the authors situate the writings by real and proxy witnesses within three distinct postwar periods: a period of "communal memory," still internal and internecine; a period of "provisional memory" in the '60s and '70s that witnesses the birth of a self-conscious Holocaust genre; to the period of "authorized memory" in which we live today, following the collapse of the Soviet Union (1989-91), and the opening of the US Holocaust Museum (1993). Twenty book covers - first editions in their original languages - and an eminently readable guide to the "first hundred books" together show the multilingual scope, historical depth, the moral and artistic range of this extraordinary body of writing."--Publisher's website.

In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka's sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka's: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin's vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem, it hung in the living room of Scholem's home on Abarbanel Streetin Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum. Alter's focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past. --

"NOT FUNNY is a FUNNY, whipsmart essay collection on gender, politics, the entertainment industry, and work. Jena Friedman is an acclaimed writer and performer, with multiple credits to her name in the fields of tv comedy (The Daily Show and The Late Show with David Letterman), film (an Academy Award nomination for writing on Sacha Baron Cohen's 2020 blockbuster Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), humor writing (The New Yorker), and live performance. More recently, her skill for keen social observation is seen in her acclaimed tv series Indefensible-a comedic takedown of the true-crime tv craze. With incisive cultural criticism, acerbic wit, and an interdisciplinary mind, Jena sheds light on her life as a millennial woman, treated as too smart, brash, and fearless for her own good through this collection of essays. We see her at her highest highs and lowest lows. We see her struggle to accept mistreatment in exchange for career advancement. We see her cope with "cancel culture" first-hand, as mentors she trusts are called to account for misdeeds she herself did not witness. We watch her unpack the roots of humor, and her lifelong goal to change minds through political incitement. And we see a bright-lights big-city version of a classic young women's career struggle; an immensely talented creative who refuses to soften herself for others. In her debut essay collection NOT FUNNY, Friedman fearlessly jousts with a label so often placed on women like her-perceptive, opinionated, ready to call out hypocrisy wherever she finds it, and... funny! Friedman pushes just past the edge of comfort on matters of gender, politics, decency, and class: Why do we look to celebrities to decide whether other celebrities deserve forgiveness? Why don't we ask men whether their careers might get in the way of starting a family? What does it mean to still hold admiration for a mentor you learn in hindsight to have been a predator? And what's so wrong with telling a dead baby joke? As she notes, one of the first jokes in recorded history was just that. Friedman challenges us to reconsider why we do and do not laugh, with whom we choose to empathize, and when we decide to grant attention in a world that demands we laugh to keep from crying. At once brainy, insightful, and absurd, NOT FUNNY reclaims power using the sharpest tool in bold satirist's arsenal: humor"--

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the world's oldest known epics-it predates Homer by several centuries and is recognized as seminal to the cultural history of the Ancient Near East. Interpretation and decipherment of the story of Gilgamesh--fragmentary and contradictory as its several variants are--has been a monumental scholarly task, spanning more than a century...until Jeffrey Tigay teased out the epic's evolution. In this volume, Tigay traces the development of the composition of The Gilgamesh Epic over nearly two millennia and through the several languages in which it has been transmitted. The result is a study both comprehensive in breadth and impressive in methodology. The author breaks from his scholarly predecessors in relying on documented textual evidence rather than on critical analysis and hypotheses.The immense contribution represented by this study has been acknowledged since its first publication in 1982. This reprint edition once again makes Tigay's groundbreaking work readily available to humanists, historians of literature and religion, biblical and classical scholars, anthropologists, and folklorists.

The gripping and elegiac stories of eight lost books, and the mysterious circumstances behind their disappearances. They exist as a rumour or a fading memory. They vanished from history leaving scarcely a trace, lost to fire, censorship, theft, war or deliberate destruction, yet those who seek them are convinced they will find them. This is the story of one man's quest for eight mysterious lost books. Taking us from Florence to Regency London, the Russian Steppe to British Columbia, Giorgio van Straten unearths stories of infamy and tragedy, glimmers of hope and bitter twists of fate. There are, among others, the rediscovered masterpiece that he read but failed to save from destruction; the Hemingway novel that vanished in a suitcase at the Gare du Lyon; the memoirs of Lord Byron, burnt to avoid a scandal; the Magnum Opus of Bruno Schulz, disappeared along with its author in wartime Poland; the mythical Sylvia Plath novel that may one day become reality. As gripping as a detective novel, as moving as an elegy, this is the tale of a love affair with the impossible, of the things that slip away from us but which, sometimes, live again in the stories we tell.

Transformer, Lou Reed's most enduringly popular album, is described with varying labels: it's often called a glam rock album, a proto-punk album, a commercial breakthrough for Lou Reed, and an album about being gay. And yet, it doesn't neatly fit into any of these descriptors. Buried underneath the radio-friendly exterior lie coded confessions of the subversive, wounded intelligence that gives this album its staying power as a work of art. Here Lou Reed managed to make a fun, accessible rock'n'roll record that is also a troubled meditation on the ambiguities-sexual, musical and otherwise-that defined his public persona and helped make him one of the most fascinating and influential figures in rock history. Through close listening and personal reflections, songwriter Ezra Furman explores Reed's and Transformer 's unstable identities, and the secrets the songs challenge us to uncover.

"In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about 'poetry, ' whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike"--

From one of our premier literary scholars, here is a learned and witty introduction to the "sheer vitality of literature and the satisfactions of a close, informed engagement with it" (New York Times). Robert Alter's illumination of the unique power of reading literature is especially valuable at a time when we are surrounded by electronic texts that distract more than engage and when the special claims of literature are disparaged by the high priests of literary theory. Alter explores the strategies that distinguish literature--the resources of style, the dynamics of allusion, the formal design of structure, the play of perspective in narrative. He draws on copious examples from the great works of literary art--from the Book of Genesis to Shakespeare, Conrad, and Nabokov--to illustrate his analysis of what makes reading a source of complex pleasure and insight.

A literary investigation of how the modern metropolis--intoxicating, disturbing, powerful--changed perceptions and irrevocably altered the Western imagination. Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centers from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent--a metropolis defying traditional representation and definition, a vast jumble of shifting fragments and glimpses--and writers were compelled to create new methods for conveying the experience of the city. In interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination.--From publisher description.

"Why Mahler? Why does his music affect us in the way it does? Norman Lebrecht, one of the world's most widely read cultural commentators, has been wrestling obsessively with Mahler for half his life. Pacing out his every footstep from birthplace to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts, talking to those who knew him, Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived determinedly outside his own times. Mahler was - along with Picasso, Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Joyce - a maker of our modern world."--Book jacket.

"This is the fifth edition of 'Music Since 1900', first published in 1937 and most recently updated in 1971. In the introduction to the first edition, Nicolas Slonimsky stated that the book, "is intended to be a sort of newsreel reflecting the 'inner headlines' of musical events" containing "elements of evolutionary power that subtly but surely influence the entire future of music." 'Music Since 1900' is just such a newsreel, following both stylistic trends in music and bringing to life the human element missing in so many biographical references. The book is divided into three parts. the Descriptive Chronology, 1900-1991, lists the dates, names, and places of the important musical events of the century. This section covers a great variety of subjects: exact dates of world premières of hundreds of operas, discussions on developments in popular music, entries that reveal the "passing sights and sounds of the general musicorama of the period." The second section, Letters and Documents, contains fascinating new material first published in a supplement to the book in 1986. Slonimsky searched for evidence connecting musical practices with political events. For example, he found a document previously classified by the Department of the Army that discusses the methods used to influence the policies of the Soviet Union by broadcasting Western music. This section also includes a reply to a query addressed to George Bernard Shaw, a radio broadcast by Alban Berg, manifestos of the Italian futurists issued early in the century, and a remarkable collection of letters from Charles Ives. The third section, a Dictionary of Terms, has been enlarged to include a detailed analysis of modern musical techniques. Written by one of the foremost musical authorities of our time, 'Music Since 1900' is a unique compilation that not only gives readers the facts, but also illustrates the styles, tastes, and epoch-making ideas that have marked this century's musical departure from the past."--

In over 1,000 entries, this acclaimed Companion covers all aspects of the Western fairy tale tradition, from medieval to modern, under the guidance of Professor Jack Zipes. It provides an authoritative reference source for this complex and captivating genre, exploring the tales themselves, the writers who wrote and reworked them, and the artists who illustrated them. It also covers numerous related topics such as the fairy tale and film, television, art, opera, ballet, the oral tradition, music, advertising, cartoons, fantasy literature, feminism, and stamps. First published in 2000, 130 new entries have been added to account for recent developments in the field, including J. K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins, and new articles on topics such as cognitive criticism and fairy tales, digital fairy tales, fairy tale blogs and websites, and pornography and fairy tales. The remaining entries have been revised and updated in consultation with expert contributors. This second edition contains beautifully designed feature articles highlighting countries with a strong fairy tale tradition, covering: Britain and Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, North America and Canada, Portugal, Scandinavian countries, Slavic and Baltic countries, and Spain. It also includes an informative and engaging introduction by the editor, which sets the subject in its historical and literary context. A detailed and updated bibliography provides information about background literature and further reading material. In addition, the A to Z entries are accompanied by over 60 beautiful and carefully selected black and white illustrations. Already renowned in its field, the second edition of this unique work is an essential companion for anyone interested in fairy tales in literature, film, and art; and for anyone who values the tradition of storytelling.

"A collection of interviews with one of America's most influential authors, music journalists, and cultural critics. In this book, the author has explored the connections among figures, sounds, and events in culture, relating unrelated points of departure, mapping alternate histories and surprising correspondences." -- Blackwells