Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on this subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.

    A collection of twenty of Paglia's out-spoken essays on contemporary issues in America's ongoing cultural debate such as Anita Hill, Robert Mapplethorpe, the beauty myth, and the decline of education in America.

    This book investigates not only how feminists understand pornography, but also how feminists do porn—that is, direct, act in, produce, and consume one of the world's most lucrative and growing industries. With original contributions by Susie Bright, Candida Royalle, Betty Dodson, Nina Hartley, Buck Angel, and more, The Feminist Porn Book updates the debates of the porn wars of the 1980s, which sharply divided the women's movement, and identifies pornography as a form of expression and labor in which women and other minorities produce power and pleasure.Tristan Taormino is an award-winning author, columnist, editor, sex educator, and feminist pornographer. She is the author of seven books including The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women and Opening Up. She runs the adult film production company Smart Ass Productions and is an exclusive director for Vivid Entertainment.Celine Parreñas Shimizu is an associate professor of film and performance studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and founding editor of Camera Obscura. She is the author of Straitjacket Sexualities and the 2009 Cultural Studies Book Award winning, The Hypersexuality of Race.Mireille Miller-Young is assistant professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her forthcoming book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography (Duke University Press) examines African American women’s sex work in the porn industry.

    Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan's work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.

    And the stars of yesteryear? They weren’t always the saints that we make them out to be. BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen, author of Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, is here to set the record straight. Pulling little-known gems from the archives of film history, Petersen reveals eyebrow-raising information, including:*The smear campaign against the original It Girl, Clara Bow, started by her best friend *The heartbreaking story of Montgomery Clift’s rapid rise to fame, the car accident that destroyed his face, and the “long suicide” that followed *Fatty Arbuckle’s descent from Hollywood royalty, fueled by allegations of a boozy orgy turned violent assault *Why Mae West was arrested and jailed for “indecency charges” *And much more Part biography, part cultural history, these stories cover the stuff that films are made of: love, sex, drugs, illegitimate children, illicit affairs, and botched cover-ups. But it’s not all just tawdry gossip in the pages of this book. The stories are all contextualized within the boundaries of film, cultural, political, and gender history, making for a read that will inform as it entertains. Based on Petersen’s beloved column on the Hairpin, but featuring 100% new content, Scandals of Classic Hollywood is sensationalism made smart.

    With never-heard-before anecdotes and new interviews with Reed's family, friends and peers, What Fresh Lunacy Is This? is a revealing examination of his mould-breaking personality.

    More manifesto than polite discussion, more call to action than criticism, The Invisible Dragon aims squarely at the hyper-institutionalism that, in Hickey’s view, denies the real pleasures that draw us to art in the first place. Deploying the artworks of Warhol, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Mapplethorpe and the writings of Ruskin, Shakespeare, Deleuze, and Foucault, Hickey takes on museum culture, arid academicism, sclerotic politics, and more—all in the service of making readers rethink the nature of art. A new introduction provides a context for earlier essays—what Hickey calls his "intellectual temper tantrums." A new essay, "American Beauty," concludes the volume with a historical argument that is a rousing paean to the inherently democratic nature of attention to beauty.Written with a verve that is all too rare in serious criticism, this expanded and refurbished edition of The Invisible Dragon will be sure to captivate a new generation of readers, provoking the passionate reactions that are the hallmark of great criticism.

    So great was his stature as an Urdu poet that he never had to mould his poetry to suit the demands of film songwriting; instead, producers and composers adapted their requirements to his poetry. His songs in films like Pyaasa, Naya Daur and Phir Subah Hogi have attained the status of classics. This exhaustive biography traces the poet’s rich life, from his troubled childhood and his equally troubled love relationships, to his rise as one of the pre-eminent personalities of the Progressive Writers Movement and his journey as lyricist through the golden era of Hindi film music, the 1950s and 1960s.

    . . Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on paraphilosophical modes of discourse. The sections on Céline, for example, are indispensable reading for those interested in this writer and place him within a context that is both illuminating and of general interest." -Paul de Man

    A beautifully written memoir, candid and definitive, that tells the story of Bast's five year relationship with the charismatic actor and American legend--James Dean.

    In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?

    Look at me: I'm short, stocky, slightly overweight, deep of voice, passionate, dark haired, olive skinned, hardly your typical Englishman. What chance did I have, going into the world of British theatre? David Suchet has been a stalwart of British stage and screen for fifty years. From Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, Freud to Poirot, Edward Teller to Doctor Who, Harold Pinter to Terence Rattigan, Questions of Faith to Decline and Fall, right up to 2019's The Price, David has done it all. Throughout this spectacular career, David has never been without a camera, enabling him to vividly document his life in photographs. Seamlessly combining photo and memoir, Behind the Lens is the story of David's remarkable life, showcasing his wonderfully evocative photographs and accompanied by his insightful and engaging commentary.In Behind the Lens, David discusses his London upbringing and love of the city, his Jewish roots and how they have influenced his career, the importance of his faith, how he really feels about fame, his love of photography and music, and his processes as an actor. He looks back on his fifty-year career, including reflections on how the industry has changed, his personal highs and lows, and how he wants to be remembered. And, of course, life after Poirot and why he's still grieving for the eccentric Belgian detective. An autobiography with a difference, this is David Suchet as you've never seen him before - from behind the lens. 'The book offers more insight into the mind and philosophy of this remarkable man than a more conventional biographical approach could have achieved' Country Life

    Polanski would go on to become one of the best and most infamous directors in Hollywood’s history, with a list of achievements that includes Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown, Tess, Frantic, and more recently, the Golden Globe- and Oscar-winning The Pianist.Yet the most dramatic story has unfolded within his own personal life: in August 1969, his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and seven of their friends were butchered by the Manson family. Polanski was in London at the time. Eight years later he was arrested by L.A. police on charges of drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl in Jack Nicholson’s home. Polanski fled the country and has since lived in exile in Paris.The director is currently filming Oliver Twist and promises to follow it with his version of the Tate killings. Both projects, dealing with child exploitation and murder, can only fuel the controversy that surrounds him. This biography is timed to coincide with the release of the movies, and will be the first opportunity to read about this talented yet wildly excessive personality in such depth for over fourteen years.

    One of the chapters, for example, answers which race Kevin Costner was able to white savior the best, because did you know that he white saviors Mexicans in McFarland, USA, and white saviors Native Americans in Dances with Wolves, and white saviors Black people in Black or White, and white saviors the Cleveland Browns in Draft Day? Another of the chapters, for a second example, answers what other high school movie characters would be in Regina George's circle of friends if we opened up the Mean Girls universe to include other movies (Johnny Lawrence is temporarily in, Claire from The Breakfast Club is in, Ferris Bueller is out, Isis from Bring It On is out...). Another of the chapters, for a third example, creates a special version of the Academy Awards specifically for rom-coms, the most underrated movie genre of all. And another of the chapters, for a final example, is actually a triple chapter that serves as an NBA-style draft of the very best and most memorable moments in gangster movies. Many, many things happen in Movies (And Other Things), some of which funny, others of which are sad, a few of which are insightful, and all of which are handled with the type of care and dedication to the smallest details and pockets of pop culture that only a book by Shea Serrano can provide.

    Frank wore a big fake head. Nobody outside his inner circle knew his true identity. This became the subject of feverish speculation during his zenith years. Together, they rode relatively high. Then it all went wrong.Twenty-five years later and Jon has co-written a movie, Frank, inspired by his time in this great and bizarre band. Frank is set for release in 2014, starring Michael Fassbender, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Domhnall Gleeson and directed by Lenny Abrahamson.Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie is a memoir of funny, sad times and a tribute to outsider artists too wonderfully strange to ever make it in the mainstream. It tells the true story behind the fictionalized movie.