Best known for his incomparably sexy 'femme fatale' images for pulp paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s, Robert A Maguire built a long and legendary career showcasing character portraits that were iconic and beautiful, painting subjects that felt simultaneously real and sensually compelling. This book explores the legacy of this artist.
Now celebrating seventy-five years of continuous publication, Prairie Schooner has been called one of the best magazines in America by Nan Talese, "the roots" in Esquire's garden of contemporary literature, and one of the best places for "fabulous fiction" by the Washington Post. One of the oldest and most prestigious literary journals in the country, it ranks among Writer's Digest's "Nineteen Magazines That Matter." This anthology collects some of the best fiction and poetry from the writers who have appeared in the journal's pages.
Brimming over with the inspirational words and thoughts of some of our finest writers, "Cries of the Spirit" is a beautiful sourcebook of poetry and prose in praise of life and all that it entails. Here women's voices fill the age-old silence about matters central to their experience-from menstruation, sexual intimacy, and childbirth to caretaking, household rituals, and death. These writings represent a healing vision of the sacred that emerges from the particular consciousness of women-a vision that partakes of the world of earth and flesh. With contributions by Maya Angelou, Julia Alvarez, Margaret Atwood, Hildegard of Bingen, Lucille Clifton, Annie Dillard, Joy Harjo, Erica Jong, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Kathleen Norris, Marge Piercy, Starhawk, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, and others.
When Timothy Dane is hired by a ruthless gang of hoodlums to find the killer of their chief, the tough private eye finds himself caught in a crossfire between vicious mobsters, gun-happy cops, and men living by the jungle law of the waterfront plus a luscious show-girl whose specialty is a certain kind of "private party." Dane, as usual, does a swift, tidy job of unraveling the case with some boudoir assistance from Stanzyck's ex-moll, Roxy Garde. Roxy was down on the police blotter as "profession unknown," but Dane knew how the beautiful redhead earned her living. When mobster Al Stanzyck was rubbed out, Roxy decided she'd had enough of hoodlums. So she made a desperate play for Dane. But the night Stanzyck's toughest henchman turned up at her apartment, ready to take up where the boss left off, Roxy knew she'd have to meet violence with the only weapon a woman has.
By broadening the focus beyond classic English detective fiction, the American 'hard-boiled' crime novel and the gangster movie, Crime Culture breathes new life into staple themes of crime fiction and cinema. Leading international scholars from the fields of literary and cultural studies analyze a range of literature and film, from neglected examples of film noir and 'true crime', crime fiction by female African American writers, to reality TV, recent films such as Elephant, Collateral and The Departed, and contemporary fiction by J. G. Ballard, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Margaret Atwood. They offer groundbreaking interpretations of new elements such as the mythology of the hitman, technology and the image, and the cultural impact of 'senseless' murders and reveal why crime is a powerful way of making sense of the broader concerns shaping modern culture and society.