She would rather remain in the world of her books. After settling in with her poor and boisterous host family, she discovers that the vampires and Greek gods that people her favorite books actually exist! Yes. The city of Athens has secrets. Her host family calls them "tramps." In Greek, they are called vrykolakas, or "vryks," which sometimes gets translated to "freaks." They are the vampires of Athens, created centuries ago by the Maenads. They live in caves beneath the acropolis without economic resources and according to rules imposed on them by the Olympians. First and foremost, they are forbidden from turning humans into vampires. The human will not turn unless all of the blood is drained, so a vampire is allowed to drink up to one pint per month from a willing mortal. Some mortals are willing because a vampire bite will infect the body for six hours, and during that time, the mortal has the powers of the vampire: flight, invisibility, strength, speed, x-ray vision, and mind control. Such great power can become irresistible, though dangerous and addicting to mortals... As Gertie uncovers the unfathomable secrets of this ancient city, she is drawn to the beauty and deep thoughts of a boy she first met on the bus into Athens--Jeno. Her host family and another boy she later learns is a demigod warn her to stay away from him, but her curiosity gets the best of her and she unwittingly becomes a catalyst in an uprising led by Dionysus, the god of wine and lord of the vampires. "An epic take on vampires and Greek mythology"--Goodreads Reviewer

    But it is also much more than that: in talk and writing, in music and images, in film and television, genres actively generate and shape our knowledge of the world. Understanding genre as a dynamic process rather than a set of stable rules, this book explores:*the relation of simple to complex genres*the history of literary genre in theory*the generic organisation of implied meanings*the structuring of interpretation by genre*the uses of genre in teaching.John Frow’s lucid exploration of this fascinating concept will be essential reading for students of literary and cultural studies.

    Artifice of Absorption, a key essay, is written in verse, and its structures and rhythms initiate the reader into the strength and complexity of the argument. In a wild variety of topics, polemic, and styles, Bernstein surveys the current poetry scene and addresses many of the hot issues of poststructuralist literary theory. Poetics is the continuation of poetry by other means, he writes. What role should poetics play in contemporary culture? Bernstein finds the answer in dissent, not merely in argument but in form--a poetic language that resists being easily absorbed into the conventions of our culture.Insisting on the vital need for radical innovation, Bernstein traces the traditions of modern poetry back to Stein and Wilde, taking issue with those critics who see in the postmodern a loss of political and aesthetic relevance. Sometimes playful, often hortatory, always intense, he joins in the debate on cultural diversity and the definition of modernism. We encounter Swinburne and Morris as surprising precursors, along with considerations of Wittgenstein, Khlebnikov, Adorno, Jameson, and Pac-Man. A Poetics is both criticism and poetry, both tract and song, with no dull moments.

    This book collects TV and movie critic Matt Zoller Seitz’s celebrated Mad Men recaps—as featured on New York magazine's Vulture blog—for the first time, including never-before-published essays on the show’s first three seasons. Seitz’s writing digs deep into the show’s themes, performances, and filmmaking, examining complex and sometimes confounding aspects of the series. The complete series—all seven seasons and ninety-two episodes—is covered.   Each episode review also includes brief explanations of locations, events, consumer products, and scientific advancements that are important to the characters, such as P.J. Clarke’s restaurant and the old Penn Station; the inventions of the birth control pill, the Xerox machine, and the Apollo Lunar Module; the release of the Beatles’ Revolver and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds; and all the wars, protests, assassinations, and murders that cast a bloody pall over a chaotic decade.  Mad Men Carousel is named after an iconic moment from the show’s first-season finale, “The Wheel,” wherein Don delivers an unforgettable pitch for a new slide projector that’s centered on the idea of nostalgia: “the pain from an old wound.” This book will soothe the most ardent Mad Men fan’s nostalgia for the show. New viewers, who will want to binge-watch their way through one of the most popular TV shows in recent memory, will discover a spoiler-friendly companion to one of the most multilayered and mercurial TV shows of all time. It's the perfect gift for Mad Men fans and obsessives. Also available from Matt Zoller Seitz: The Oliver Stone Experience, The Wes Anderson Collection: Bad Dads, The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel, and The Wes Anderson Collection.

    Loring, "For the Blood Is the Life" by F. Marion Crawford, "The Room in the Tower" and "Mrs. Amworth" by E.F. Benson, "The Transfer" by Algernon Blackwood, "The Vampire" by Jan Neruda, "Four Wooden Stakes" by Victor Roman, and "An Authenticated Vampire Story" by Dr. Franz Hartmann. **Lightning Print On Demand Title

    But the time is not far off, Live Cinema and Its Techniques demonstrates, when a director or a collaborative team of filmmakers working across the internet will create "live" movies that will be sent instantly via satellite for viewing throughout the world.Yet the creative demands posed by airing live sporting contests, as impressive as the final product is, pale in contrast with the ambitions of "cinematic auteurs," who are inspired by great directors, like Serge Eisenstein, Max Ophuls, or Alfred Hitchcock, among many others. As daunting as the challenge is, the process of integrating the highest artistic standards of previous generations into the medium of "live cinema" can, Coppola explains, be achieved, thus creating an entirely new art form for the so-called "screen." Tapping into his own encyclopedic knowledge of twentieth-century film history, Coppola threads his vision of this burgeoning cinematic medium with autobiographical and historical vignettes gleaned from the past, recalling his own boyhood obsession with film and his early fascination with the "Golden Age of Television," when 1950s viewers were treated to live productions of classics, like Days of Wine and Roses and Requiem for a Heavyweight.Especially exciting is the exhilaration and drama that results from retraining actors and using a multitude of cameras to create a film that has the in-the-moment energy of a live event. Having already tried out this new medium with "proof-of-concept workshops" at Oklahoma City Community College and at UCLA, Coppola has created an invaluable guide for students and teachers alike. Filled with discussions of how to rehearse actors, how to choose scenery and location, and how to overcome theatrical, as well as technical, obstacles, Live Cinema and Its Techniques reveals how the spontaneity of this new genre can ultimately transport filmmaking into a new era of creativity still unimaginable today.Featuring chapters on:A Short History of Film and TelevisionThe Actors, Acting, and RehearsalThe Question of Style in the CinemaObstacles and Other Thoughts on Live Cinema No Matter What They May BeEquipment: Now and in the Near Future

    The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away?Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

    In Pornocracy, a beautiful woman wanders through a gay disco and engages a man, confident that he will follow her. Perversely and dispassionately, she offers her body as the ground of a ritualistic game in which, over the course of three evenings, the two will explore the numbing mechanics of sexual brutality. What follows is an exchange between a man and a woman that is both frankly sexual and deeply philosophical. Adapted and directed for film in France by Breillat as Anatomy of Hell (2004), Pornocracy leads the reader through an undulating and atmospheric exploration of the criminal and the erotic, finally climaxing in a place well beyond more familiar moral terrain. Although Breillat's films—most recently Fat Girl (2001) and Romance (1999)—are well known to international audiences, this publication marks her literary debut in America. It will demonstrate that Breillat's famous films are but one aspect of her strikingly original poetic and philosophical vision.

    It connects the roles played by industry critics and audiences in making and re-making genre. In a critique of major voices in the history of genre theory from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, Altman reveals the conflicting stakes for which the genre game has been played. Recognizing that the very term "genre" has different meaning for different groups, he bases his genre theory on the uneasy competitive yet complimentary relationship among genre users and discusses a range of films from "The Great Train Robbery" to "Star Wars", and from "The Jazz Singer" to "The Player".

    Just the day before, Shelly and her family had arrived in the northern Philippine village of Mungayang, where she and her husband Renato, both accomplished anthropologists, planned to conduct fieldwork. On October 11, Shelly died after losing her footing and falling some sixty feet from a cliff into a swollen river. Renato Rosaldo explored the relationship between bereavement and rage in his canonical essay, "Grief and a Headhunter's Rage," which first appeared in 1984 and is reprinted here. In the poems at the heart of this book, he returns to the trauma of Shelly's death through the medium of free verse, maintaining a tight focus on the events of October 11, 1981. He explores not only his own experience of Shelly's death but also the imagined perspectives of many others whose lives intersected with that tragic event and its immediate aftermath, from Shelly herself to the cliff from which she fell, from the two young boys who lost their mother to the strangers who carried and cared for them, from a tricycle taxi driver, to a soldier, to priests and nuns. Photographs taken years earlier, when Renato and Shelly were conducting research across the river valley from Mungayang, add a stark beauty. In a new essay, "Notes on Poetry and Ethnography," Rosaldo explains how and why he came to write the harrowing yet beautiful poems in The Day of Shelly's Death. More than anything else though, the essay is a manifesto in support of what he calls antropoesía, verse with an ethnographic sensibility. The essay clarifies how this book of rare humanity and insight challenges the limits of ethnography as it is usually practiced.

    Every word and gesture made headlines and garnered controversy. Her serious gifts as an actor were sometimes eclipsed by her notoriety—and by the way the camera fell helplessly in love with her.Beyond the headlines—and the too-familiar stories of heartbreak and desolation—was a woman far more curious, searching, witty, and hopeful than the one the world got to know. Now, for the first time, readers can meet the private Marilyn and understand her in a way we never have before. Fragments is an unprecedented collection of written artifacts—notes to herself, letters, even poems—in Marilyn's own handwriting, never before published, along with rarely seen intimate photos.Jotted in notebooks, typed on paper, or written on hotel letterhead, these texts reveal a woman who loved deeply and strove to perfect her craft. They show a Marilyn Monroe unsparing in her analysis of her own life, but also playful, funny, and impossibly charming. The easy grace and deceptive lightness that made her performances indelible emerge on the page, as does the simmering tragedy that made her last appearances so affecting.

    Despite--or perhaps because of--this and other familial forces pushing on them, each has a personality and direction of life distinct from her cousins. Celie is the top saleswoman in an upscale dress shop; Cecily is a playwright; Cecilia is a poet; Celine finds her expression in the seduction of men; and Celeste died as an infant. Ceci, the eldest of the Slaughter grandchildren and daughter of the admired and envied family beauty, Rose, died as a young adult and she serves as narrator of the novel from the afterlife. Through reflection, and with the counsel of Lao Tzu, she gradually attains a greater understanding and acceptance of Earthly human weakness, even as the lives of her living cousins lead inexorably to a violent and tragic conclusion. Set in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, this unusual page turner utilizes poetry and a sense of theatrical staging to original and haunting effect, rending a family saga with both distance and intimacy.

    This lavish hardcover brings together rare artwork from around the world. Featuring Hammer’s greatest films, including The Curse of Frankenstein, the Dracula series, and many more.

    Stephen Dobyns, author of the classic book on the beauty of poetry, Best Words, Best Order, moves into new terrain in this remarkable book. Bringing years of experience to bear on issues such as subject matter, the mechanics of poetry, and the revision process, Dobyns explores the complex relationship between writers and their work. From Philip Larkin to Pablo Neruda to William Butler Yeats, every chapter reveals useful lessons in these renowned poets' work. Both enlightening and encouraging, Next Word, Better Word demystifies a subtle art form and shows writers how to overcome obstacles in the creative process.

    It seeks to provoke uniquely strong reactions, such as fear, shock, dread or disgust, and yet remains very popular. Horror is most readily associated with the film industry, but horrific short stories and novels have been wildly loved by readers for well over two centuries. Despite its persistent popularity, until now there has been no up-to-date history of horror fiction for the general reader. This book offers a chronological overview of the genre in fiction and explores its development and mutations over the past 250 years. It also challenges the common misjudgement that horror fiction is necessarily frivolous or dispensable. Leading experts on Gothic and horror literature introduce readers to classics of the genre as well as exciting texts they may not have encountered before. The topics examined include: horror’s roots in the Gothic romance and antebellum American fiction; the penny dreadful and sensation novels of Victorian England; fin-de-siècle ghost stories; decadent fiction and the weird; the familial horrors of the Cold War era; the publishing boom of the 1980s; the establishment of contemporary horror auteurs; and the post-millennial zombie trend.