The 1950s television game show was a cultural touchstone, reflecting the zeitgeist of a flourishing modern nation. The author explores the iconography of the mid-20th century U.S. in the context of TV watching, game playing and prize winning. The scandals that marred the genre's reputation are revisited, highlighting American's propensity for both gullibility and winking cynicism.
This collection brings together 11 contemporary American writers. It includes long stories by Edwidge Danticat, Stanley Elkin, Ernest J. Gaines, Barry Hannah, Joyce Carol Oates, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Jane Smiley, William Styron, Peter Taylor and Eudora Welty.
This second volume in "The Americans" trilogy deals with the crucial period of American history from the Revolution to the Civil War. Here we meet the people who shaped, and were shaped by, the American experience—the versatile New Englanders, the Transients and the Boosters. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize.
The Cinema of Emir Kusturica: Notes from the Underground is the first book on the Sarajevan film-maker to be published in English. With seven highly acclaimed films to his credit, Kusturica is already established as one of the most important of contemporary filmmakers, with each of his films winning prizes at major festivals around the world. In covering films such as Underground, Arizona Dream, and Black Cat, White Cat, this timely new study delves into diverse facets of Kusturica's work, much of which is passionately dedicated to the marginal and the outcast, as well as discourses of national and cultural identity.
This book examines the quest for/failure of Utopia across a range of contemporary American/transnational fictions in relation to terror and globalization through authors such as Susan Choi, André Dubus, Dalia Sofer, and John Updike. While recent critical thinkers have reengaged with Utopia, the possibility of terror — whether state or non-state, external or homegrown — shadows Utopian imaginings. Terror and Utopia are linked in fiction through the exploration of the commodification of affect, a phenomenon of a globalized world in which feelings are managed, homogenized across cultures, exaggerated, or expunged according to a dominant model. Narrative approaches to the terrorist offer a means to investigate the ways in which fiction can resist commodification of affect, and maintain a reasoned but imaginative vision of possibilities for human community. Newman explores topics such as the first American bestseller with a Muslim protagonist, the links between writer and terrorist, the work of Iranian-Jewish Americans, and the relation of race and religion to Utopian thought.
