Steiner’s discussion of the break with the traditional literary past (Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Latin) is illuminating and attractively undogmatic.  He writes as a man sharing ideas, and his original notions, though scarcely cheerful, have the bracing effect that first-rate thinking always has.” –New Yorker“In Bluebeard’s Castle is a brief and brilliant book.  An intellectual tour de force, it is also a book that should generate a profound excitement and promote a profound unease…like the great culturalists of the past.  Steiner uses a dense and plural learning to assess his topic: his book has the outstanding quality of being not simply a reflection on culture, but an embodiment of certain contemporary resources within it.  The result is one of the most important books I have read for a very long time.”—New Society

    Musicians of this genre have developed an often impenetrable sound that teeters on the edge of screaming, incomprehensible noise. Extreme metal circulates on the edge of mainstream culture within the confines of an obscure 'scene', in which members explore dangerous themes such as death, war and the occult, sometimes embracing violence, neo-fascism and Satanism. In the first book-length study of extreme metal, Keith Kahn-Harris draws on first-hand research to explore the global extreme metal scene. He shows how the scene is a space in which members creatively explore destructive themes, but also a space in which members experience the everyday pleasures of community and friendship. Including interviews with band members and fans, from countries ranging from the UK and US to Israel and Sweden, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge demonstrates the power and subtlety of an often surprising and misunderstood musical form.

    The tussle between the father and the son was the most poignant and pathetic stories of their lives. Gandhi,who was busy attending meetings and conferences where the fate of forty crore Indians was to be decided, would often find headlines in a newspaper screaming 'Police arrested drunk Harilal for creating a scene on the road'. And sometimes, Harilal himself from the dias of the fundamentalist Muslim organization's meeting - 'I shall continue fighting till Ba and Bapu embrace Islam.'In this book the author tries to make an ardent effort to understand yet another enigmatic facet of human life.

    Fighting to keep her life on track, her world is blown apart by some dreadful news one sunny June afternoon.Fiona’s insular life becomes lonelier as she gets to know her husband more after his death than when he was alive.Who can she believe? And who will believe her?A story that shows the darkness which exists within families, and the damage that people can do to each other.

    And while art criticism is ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and exhibition brochures, it is also virtually absent from academic writing. How is it that even as criticism drifts away from academia, it becomes more academic? How is it that sifting through a countless array of colorful periodicals and catalogs makes criticism seem to slip even further from our grasp? In this pamphlet, James Elkins surveys the last fifty years of art criticism, proposing some interesting explanations for these startling changes."In What Happened to Art Criticism?, art historian James Elkins sounds the alarm about the perilous state of that craft, which he believes is 'In worldwide crisis . . . dissolving into the background clutter of ephemeral cultural criticism' even as more and more people are doing it. 'It's dying, but it's everywhere . . . massively produced, and massively ignored.' Those who pay attention to other sorts of criticism may recognize the problems Elkins describes: 'Local judgments are preferred to wider ones, and recently judgments themselves have even come to seem inappropriate. In their place critics proffer informal opinions or transitory thoughts, and they shy from strong commitments.' What he'd like to see more of: ambitious judgment, reflection about judgment itself, and 'criticism important enough to count as history, and vice versa.' Amen to that."—Jennifer Howard, Washington Post Book World

    Indeed, in this pioneering exploration of the cinema of fear, Barry Keith Grant and twenty other film critics posit that horror is always rooted in gender, particularly in anxieties about sexual difference and gender politics.The book opens with the influential theoretical works of Linda Williams, Carol J. Clover, and Barbara Creed. Subsequent essays explore the history of the genre, from classic horror such as King Kong and Bride of Frankenstein to the more recent Fatal Attraction and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Other topics covered include the work of horror auteurs David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and George Romero; the Aliens trilogy; and the importance of gender in relation to horror marketing and reception.Other contributors include Vera Dika, Thomas Doherty, Lucy Fischer, Christopher Sharrett, Vivian Sobchack, Tony Williams, and Robin Wood. Writing across a full range of critical methods from classic psychoanalysis to feminism and postmodernism, they balance theoretical generalizations with close readings of films and discussions of figures associated with the genre.The Dread of Difference demonstrates that horror is hardly a uniformly masculine discourse. As these essays persuasively show, not only are horror movies about patriarchy and its fear of the feminine, but they also offer feminist critique and pleasure.

    Welcome to the hell house! Hardcore Gaming 101 Presents: Castlevania includes 158 pages with full reviews of over thirty Castlevania titles - starting from the 1986 Nintendo original up to the 2014 Lords of Shadow 2 - plus reviews of clone games, soundtracks, books, trivia, and more!

    From his perch as a staff writer at The New Yorker, Cuppy observed the world and found a great deal that annoyed him. This collection of essays on animals includes "Birds Who Can't Even Fly," "Optional Insects," "Octopuses and Those Things", and "How to Swat a Fly," which codifies the essentials in ten hilarious principles. And three essays on wombats. Perfect reading for the perplexed, befuddled, and perpetually irritated.

    L. Mencken's astonishing career as the premier American social critic of the twentieth century. Gathered by Mencken himself before he died in 1956, this second chrestomathy ("a collection of selected literary passages," with the accent on the tom) contains writings about a variety of subjects - politics, war, music, literature, men and women, lawyers, brethren of the cloth. Some of his essays have beguiling titles - "Notes for an Honest Autobiography," "The Commonwealth of Morons," "Le Vice Anglais," "Acres of Babble," "Hooch for the Artist." All of them are a pleasure to read, and we are reminded that what Mencken wrote in the early years of this century remains applicable to a very different America.Publishers WeeklyThis book's precursor, A Mencken Chrestomathy (collection), was a bestseller in 1949; this anthology of 238 short excerpts from a range of works, selected and annotated by Mencken but unfinished, lay undisturbed in a Baltimore library until Teachout, an arts columnist for the New York Daily News, found it in 1992, while working on a Mencken biography. Teachout considers Mencken's work still immediate. Indeed, quotable lines abound: ``His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses,'' writes Mencken on ``the politician under democracy.'' Baltimore's bard can be magnificent and maddening in the same passage, damning American idiocies while disparaging immigrants. But what impresses most about this collection is Mencken's breadth; few contemporary writers would assume such a broad brief, writing not only about politics, law and the clergy but also about geography, literature, music and drink. To apply a Mencken sobriquet, he was no lesser eminento. (Jan.)Library JournalSelected as a continuation of the original chrestomathy by the Baltimore iconoclast himself before his death, this logically organized sampling of his pre-Depression credos (mostly from The Smart Set and American Mercury) suggests why Mencken was to a whole generation of American youth not just a witty newspaperman with a dazzling style but a force gleefully battering America's deep-rooted Puritan inhibitions. An early champion of Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, and Theodore Dreiser, Mencken ridiculed America's institutions, from Rotary Clubs to Harvard professors to the Senate. Sometimes wrongheaded in his judgments, he was unschooled but self-educated in music and politics. His views are sometimes racist and sexist, but they're seldom dull and-in an age of self-conscious "niceness"-never polite. Well worth dipping into.-Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.Gilbert TaylorFollowing My Life as Author and Editor" (1993) and Fred Hobson's biography , the Menckenian revival continues apace with this sparkling successor to the first chrestomathy, which was a best-seller in 1949. More than an anthology, the second volume represents pieces (some previously unpublished) that Mencken himself selected and revised before his stroke aborted the project; another proposal to publish came to nought in 1963. Over 60 percent of the 238 items, many from Mencken's magazines Smart Set" and American Mercury", are not available elsewhere, which in itself makes the publication of this title something of a literary event. That it parades again the sage of Baltimore in his incisive, if often irksome, eloquence only confirms him as one of the better belletrists of the century. The job of discriminator of taste exists to be seized in any age, and in the teens and twenties, Mencken extolled and excoriated with idiosyncratic abandon. The books and music he reviewed have faded from memory, but his satirical exfoliations remain fresh, for example, in praise of a bartender's memoir of the bibulous arts or in contempt for a Rotarian's history of his organization. Edited by New York critic Terry Teachout, who is preparing his own biography of the provocateur, this entertaining, exasperating collection captures Mencken's gloomy view of human nature and his bright delight in stripping from it all cant and concealment.

    It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

    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.

    Sly Stone began recording "There's a Riot Goin' On" in late 1970 as afollow-up to the commercially successful "Stand!" In this brisk,inventive book, Miles Marshall Lewis chronicle Sly's descent into a hazeof drug addiction and delirium as he rejects the successful formula -"Dance to the Medley, dance to the shmedley" - and creates one of themost powerful and haunting albums to inspire the hiphop movement.

    A key feature of the program is his daily award for "The Worst Person in the World." From Ann Coulter and Barbara Bush to Bill O'Reilly and more, he brings the best of his "worsts" together in a wildly entertaining collection that reveals just how twisted people can be-and how much fun it is to call them out on it.

    In his inimical style, Zizek links Deleuze's work with both Oedipus and Hegel, figures from whom the French philosopher distanced himself. Zizek turns some Deleuzian concepts around in order to explore the 'organs without bodies' in such films as Fight Club and the works of Hitchcock. Finally, he attacks what he sees as the 'radical chic' Deleuzians, arguing that such projects turn Deleuze into an ideologist of today's 'digital capitalism'. With his brilliant energy and fearless argumentation, Zizek sets out to restore a truer, more radical Deleuze than the one we thought we knew.

    This is a collection of his memories with famous and notable people and incidents.