Here's what to see and do, and where to eat, drink, shop, stay, and play in America's glamour queen city-from glitzy Hollywood to posh Beverly Hills, to Santa Monica's surf, Pasadena's parade, and beyond! An amalgam of mini cities connected by a web of freeways and boulevards, the City of Angels boasts more than 80 stage theaters and 300 museums-more than any other U.S. city. With a history intimately associated with the Silver Screen, Los Angeles is at once classic and eccentric. In this indispensable pocket guide, "Top Picks" direct you to not-to-be-missed attractions, and handy "Notes" pages are included to jot down all your favorites. 248 pages, plus 11 fold-out maps.
Reading is a revolutionary act, an act of engagement in a culture that wants us to disengage. In The Lost Art of Reading, David L. Ulin asks a number of timely questions - why is literature important? What does it offer, especially now? Blending commentary with memoir, Ulin addresses the importance of the simple act of reading in an increasingly digital culture. Reading a book, flipping through hard pages, or shuffling them on screen - it doesn't matter. The key is the act of reading, and it's seriousness and depth. Ulin emphasizes the importance of reflection and pause allowed by stopping to read a book, and the accompanying focus required to let the mind run free in a world that is not one's own. Are we willing to risk our collective interest in contemplation, nuanced thinking, and empathy? Far from preaching to the choir, The Lost Art of Reading is a call to arms, or rather, to pages.
This book, edited by Heather Marcovitch and Nancy Batty, offers multiple perspectives on the representation of women and children in the popular AMC series, Mad Men. These essays explore the rich historical and social context portrayed in the series and connect the concerns and tumult of the sixties to the contemporary moment.
The book methodicallly graphs the direction of the English novel from its rise as the chief scholarly class in the mid twentieth century to its mid twenty first century status of unpredictable greatness in new media conditions. Precise parts address 'The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre', 'The Novel in the Economy', 'Genres', 'Gender' (performativity, masculinities, woman's rights, eccentric), and 'The Burden of Representation' (class and ethnicity). Broadened contextualized close readings of more than twenty key writings from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) to Tom McCarthy's Satin Island (2015) supplement the methodical approach and energize future research by giving reviews of gathering and hypothetical points of view. Expanding specialization inside the teach of English and American Studies has moved the concentration of insightful dialog toward hypothetical reflection and social settings. These improvements have profited the train in more courses than one, yet they have likewise brought about a specific disregard of close perusing. Therefore, understudies and scientists inspired by such material are compelled to swing to grant from the 1970s, quite a bit of which depends on dated methodological and ideological presuppositions. The handbook means to fill this hole by giving new readings of writings that figure unmistakably in the writing classroom and in academic level headed discussion aE ' from James' The Ambassadors to McCarthy's The Road.
From beloved CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Mo Rocca, author of New York Times bestseller Mobituaries, comes an inspiring collection of stories that celebrates the triumphs of people who made their biggest marks late in life. Eighty has been the new sixty for about twenty years now. In fact, there have always been late-in-life achievers, those who declined to go into decline just because they were eligible for social security. Journalist, humorist, and history buff Mo Rocca and coauthor Jonathan Greenberg introduce us to the people past and present who peaked when they could have been puttering—breaking out as writers, selling out concert halls, attempting to set land-speed records—and in the case of one ninety-year tortoise, becoming a first-time father. (Take that, Al Pacino!) In the vein of Mobituaries, Roctogenarians is a collection of entertaining and unexpected profiles of these unretired titans—some long gone (a cancer-stricken Henri Matisse, who began work on his celebrated cut-outs when he could no longer paint), some very much still living (Mel Brooks, yukking it up at close to one hundred). The amazing cast of characters also includes Mary Church Terrell, who at eighty-six helped lead sit-ins at segregated Washington, DC, lunch counters in the 1950s, and Carol Channing, who married the love of her life at eighty-two. Then there’s Peter Mark Roget, who began working on his thesaurus in his twenties and completed it at seventy-three (because sometimes finding the right word takes time.) With passion and wonder Rocca and Greenberg recount the stories of yesterday’s and today’s strongest finishers. Because with all due respect to the Golden Girls, some people will never be content sitting out on the lanai. (PS Actress Estelle Getty was sixty-two when she got her big break. And yes, she’s in the book.)
From the 1970s on, Los Angeles was transformed into a center for entertainment, consumption, and commerce for the affluent. Mirroring the urban development trend across the nation, new construction led to the displacement of low-income and working-class racial minorities, as city officials targeted these neighborhoods for demolition in order to spur economic growth and bring in affluent residents. Responding to the displacement, there emerged a coalition of unions, community organizers, and faith-based groups advocating for policy change. In Building Downtown Los Angeles Leland Saito traces these two parallel trends through specific construction projects and the backlash they provoked. He uses these events to theorize the past and present processes of racial formation and the racialization of place, drawing new insights on the relationships between race, place, and policy. Saito brings to bear the importance of historical events on contemporary processes of gentrification and integrates the fluidity of racial categories into his analysis. He explores these forces in action, as buyers and entrepreneurs meet in the real estate marketplace, carrying with them a fraught history of exclusion and vast disparities in wealth among racial groups.
One of the Los Angeles Times Top 10 California Books of 2020. One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Fiction Books from 2020. Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Joyce Carol Oates prize. One of Exile in Bookville’s Favorite Books of 2020. In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times. Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a “road bum,” an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Héctor Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum. A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, which chart Sanderson’s freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador—a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism. The Last Great Road Bum is the great American novel Joe Sanderson never could have written, but did truly live—a fascinating, timely hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that only a master of both like Héctor Tobar could pull off.
Preliminary Material -- Reading Feminism in Kate Grenville's Fiction /Susan Sheridan -- Kate Grenville as Public Intellectual /Brigid Rooney -- Author, Author!: The Two Faces of Kate Grenville /Elizabeth Mcmahon -- Madness and Power: Lilian's Story and the Decolonized Body /Bill Ashcroft -- “Africa and Australia” Revisited: Reading Kate Grenville's Joan Makes History /Kwaku Larbi Korang -- “Mobility is the Key”: Bodies, Boundaries, and Movement in Kate Grenville's Lilian's Story /Ruth Barcan -- Homeless and Foreign: The Heroines of Lilian's Story and Dreamhouse /Kate Livett -- “Impossible Speech” and the Burden of Translation: Lilian's Story from Page to Screen /Alice Healy -- Constructions of Nation and Gender in The Idea of Perfection /Sue Kossew -- Poison in the Flour: Kate Grenville's The Secret River /Eleanor Collins -- History, Fiction, and The Secret River /Sarah Pinto -- Learning From Each Other: Language, Authority and Authenticity in Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant /Lynette Russell -- Bibliography -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.
"The funniest book Pynchon has written." — Rolling Stone "Entertainment of a high order." - Time Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era. In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there. It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex- girlfriend. Suddenly she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Undeniably one of the most influential writers at work today, Pynchon has penned another unforgettable book.
Adaptation constitutes the driving force of contemporary culture, with stories adapted across an array of media formats. However, adaptation studies has been concerned almost exclusively with textual analysis, in particular with compare-and-contrast studies of individual novel and film pairings. This has left almost completely unexamined crucial questions of how adaptations come to be made, what are the industries with the greatest stake in making them, and who the decision-makers are in the adaptation process. The Adaptation Industry re-imagines adaptation not as an abstract process, but as a material industry. It presents the adaptation industry as a cultural economy of six interlocking institutions, stakeholders and decision-makers all engaged in the actual business of adapting texts: authors; agents; publishers; book prize committees; scriptwriters; and screen producers and distributors. Through trading in intellectual property rights to cultural works, these six nodal points in the adaptation network are tightly interlinked, with success for one party potentially auguring for success in other spheres. But marked rivalries between these institutional forces also exist, with competition characterizing every aspect of the adaptation process. This book constructs an overdue sociology of contemporary literary adaptation, never losing sight of the material and institutional dimensions of this powerful process.
