This book examines the relationship that exists between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Animation has played a key role in defining our collective expectations and experiences of fantasy cinema, just as fantasy storytelling has often served as inspiration for our most popular animated film and television. Bringing together contributions from world-renowned film and media scholars, Fantasy/Animation considers the various historical, theoretical, and cultural ramifications of the animated fantasy film. This collection provides a range of chapters on subjects including Disney, Pixar, and Studio Ghibli, filmmakers such as Ralph Bakshi and James Cameron, and on film and television franchises such as Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon (2010–) and HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–).
Jake: Katie Higgins was the first girl I ever loved. We spent one summer together at Lake Fisher when we were sixteen and then I never saw her again. My life is shit, my job is gone, and my dad had a stroke, so I find myself back at Lake Fisher once again. And so does Katie. Her last name isn't Higgins anymore, because Katie is married with three kids and one more on the way, but when she shows up at Lake Fisher with her kids, danger trails her all the way there. I could do a lot of things. I could leave and go home. I could stay and deal with it. But what I want most of all is just to take care of Katie. If I concentrate on her, maybe I won't have to face my own problems. Yeah, that's it. Fix Katie. Katie: I haven't seen Jake in eighteen years, but the moment I lay eyes on him, I feel safer than I have in a very long time. Memories swamp me every time I look out over the clear, cool water. A first kiss. A first boyfriend. A first love. That old spark is still there. I just can't act on it, and neither can Jake. Our story started eighteen years ago, and then we both made lives with other people. Jake is willing to tell me about his, but I can't share mine with him. Ever. We can be friends and spend another summer together, right? Sure, we can.
It's not just a weekend for Lux Castelo. She has a plan, of course. Phase One: Escape to the beach for a music festival. Phase Two: Deal with what she can't control. Phase Three: Return to reality whole and ready. Nowhere in that plan is Micah Jacinto, self-proclaimed adventurer and the kind of boy with his head stuck in the clouds and the moon inked on his arm-everything her rational sense tells her to stay away from. And yet Lux finds herself welcoming the distraction. As they spend the entire weekend together, Micah leads her to rediscover the lost pieces of herself amidst the excitement and the confusion of a raving mosh pit. But all weekends come to an end and Lux needs to return to the dreaded reality she's running away from. Does being brave enough to leave summer behind mean being brave enough to ask Micah to stay?
Five-minute girlfriend. This is what Jett signs up for when she meets Adrian and his band Arabella at beach music festival Summer Storm. One kiss and the attraction is too electric to ignore, but Jett has no room for love and Adrian is Mr. Relationship who's getting over his recent breakup. The solution? Keep it simple. Keep it casual. For three months (that's the rule about breakups, right?), Jett helps Adrian move on and Adrian shows up on Jett's bed whenever she wants. Then the three months are up and neither of them are in a hurry to be the first to leave. Does Jett walk away from a potential disaster or does she finally let someone into her closely-guarded heart?
Five characters stumble toward the possibilities of being seen, being heard and being loved one unusually warm January day in Harlem. Devaun and Jeron are two young African-American men who are looking to earn respect in the neighborhood. Nirmala Singh and her brother, Ishan, run a small neighborhood grocery store. Nirmala's husband, Prasad, has been in a coma for three years after a robbery gone wrong. Ishan desperately wants gender reassignment surgery so he can transition to female, change his name to Indira and start a dating service. He wants Nirmala to pull the plug and cash in Prasad's million-dollar life insurance to fund his surgery. Devaun and Jeron's door-to-door poster campaign to make the neighborhood aware of a sex predator brings them into the store and the lives of Nirmala and Indira. Indira's first attempt at matchmaking is with Joe, a lonely neighboor sanitation worker with a crush on Nirmala. Meanwhile, Devoun is smitten with pre-op Indira, who agrees to go out on a date with him.
Algedonic is an aesthetic outlook on pain and pleasure. Complex emotions simplified into poetic interludes as only r.h. Sin can express. With his trademark of giving simplicity to some of the hardest of emotions, Sin reminds us all that there are often two sides to an emotional story and sometimes the pain transforms into something beautiful, something less problematic and maybe something that reignites a feeling of pleasure.
Lee Mandelo's debut Summer Sons is a sweltering, queer Southern Gothic that crosses Appalachian street racing with academic intrigue, all haunted by a hungry ghost. Andrew and Eddie did everything together, best friends bonded more deeply than brothers, until Eddie left Andrew behind to start his graduate program at Vanderbilt. Six months later, only days before Andrew was to join him in Nashville, Eddie dies of an apparent suicide. He leaves Andrew a horrible inheritance: a roommate he doesn’t know, friends he never asked for, and a gruesome phantom that hungers for him. As Andrew searches for the truth of Eddie’s death, he uncovers the lies and secrets left behind by the person he trusted most, discovering a family history soaked in blood and death. Whirling between the backstabbing academic world where Eddie spent his days and the circle of hot boys, fast cars, and hard drugs that ruled Eddie’s nights, the walls Andrew has built against the world begin to crumble. And there is something awful lurking, waiting for those walls to fall. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Taking place over a single summer at an abandoned Massachusetts summer camp, this “sun–saturated tale of love and longing” explores the sting of seduction and how desire and ambition can shift through time and experience (Chicago Tribune). After Emily inherits an abandoned summer camp in Massachusetts just before her fortieth birthday, she and her husband David move onto the property with grand plans to fix it up. Instead, Emily finds herself drifting, grieving her recent miscarriage and her own perceived lack of ambition, while David works in the city. Until the day Emily discovers that their new property includes an unexpected guest. Living undetected in one of the cabins is a magnetic twenty–two–year–old named Stella. Their immediate and intense connection expands and contracts over the course of an single summer, calling all of Emily’s relationships, including her marriage, into closer scrutiny. As the two women begin spending time together―talking and drinking, swimming in the lake, watching seductive French films through long afternoons―Emily finds herself playing at performing various roles relative to Stella: friend, mother, lover. Each encounter they share promises to bring Emily a little closer to an understanding of her own identity, but it also puts her marriage and future at risk. How much does she really know about Stella? Why is Stella here, and what does she want, and what might she take with her, if and when she leaves? Named one of the best books of the summer by O, The Oprah Magazine, this “sun–saturated tale of love and longing” is a “smart, funny, nuanced and seductive” read (Chicago Tribune). Startling yet dreamlike, The Summer Demands marks Deborah Shapiro as a master at capturing complex relationships and the electricity of what passes unsaid between people.
THE INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER A Spring 2020 Okra Pick Parade’s 20 Most Anticipated Books of Early 2020 Goodreads’ It Book of Summer Top Reviewers Pick SheKnows’ 10 of the Most Anticipated Books Coming in 2020 Mary Kay Andrews’ Reading Challenge Women’s Fiction Pick Travel + Leisure’s 20 Books to Gift This Mother’s Day Working Mother’s 20 Most Anticipated Books of 2020 for Working Moms Brit + Co 12 Books That Will Take You on a Literary Vacation From “the next major voice in Southern fiction” (Elin Hilderbrand) and the bestselling author of the Peachtree Bluff series comes an odd-couple tale of friendship that asks just how much our past choices define our happiness. It’s summertime on the North Carolina coast and the livin’ is easy. Unless, that is, you’ve just lost your mother to cancer, your sister to her extremist husband, and your husband to his executive assistant. Meet Gray Howard. Right when Gray could use a serious infusion of good karma in her life, she inadvertently gets a stranger, Diana Harrington, fired from her job at the local pharmacy. Diana Harrington’s summer isn’t off to the greatest start either: Hours before losing her job, she broke up with her boyfriend and moved out of their shared house with only a worn-out Impala for a bed. Lucky for her, Gray has an empty guest house and a very guilty conscience. With Gray’s kindness, Diana’s tide begins to turn. But when her first love returns, every secret from her past seems to resurface all at once. And, as Gray begins to blaze a new trail, she discovers, with Diana’s help, that what she envisioned as her perfect life may not be what she wants at all. In her warmest, wisest novel yet, Kristy Woodson Harvey delivers a discerning portrait of modern womanhood through two vastly different lenses. Feels Like Falling is a beach bag essential for Harvey fans—and for a new generation of readers.
