New Arrivals: PN 6010 - PN 9999
Showing 1 - 25 of 65 new items.
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© 2016,A brilliantly funny exploration of the Sunshine State from the man who knows it best: Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times -bestselling author Dave Barry. We never know what will happen next in Florida. We know only that, any minute now, something will. Every few months, Dave Barry gets a call from some media person wanting to know, "What the hell is wrong with Florida?" Somehow, the state's acquired an image as a subtropical festival of stupid, and as a loyal Floridian, Dave begs to differ. Sure, there was the 2000 election. And people seem to take their pants off for no good reason. And it has flying insects the size of LeBron James. But it is a great state, and Dave is going to tell you why. Join him as he celebrates Florida from Key West at the bottom to whatever it is that's at the top, from the Sunshine State's earliest history to the fun-fair of weirdness that it is today. It's the most hilarious book yet from "the funniest damn writer in the whole country" (Carl Hiaasen, and he should know). By the end, you'll have to admit that whatever else you might think about Florida--you can never say it's boring.
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© 2016,"Doonesbury is one of the most overrated strips out there. Mediocre at best." --Donald Trump, 1989 He tried to warn us. Ever since the release of the first Trump-for-President trial balloon in 1987, Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau has tirelessly tracked and highlighted the unsavory career of the most unqualified candidate to ever aspire to the White House. It's all there--the hilarious narcissism, the schoolyard bullying, the loathsome misogyny, the breathtaking ignorance; and a good portion of the Doonesbury cast has been tangled up in it. Join Duke, Honey, Earl, J.J., Mike, Mark, Roland, Boopsie, B.D., Sal, Alice, Elmont, Sid, Zonker, Sam, Bernie, Rev. Sloan, and even the Red Rascal as they cross storylines with the big, orange airhorn who's giving the GOP such fits. Garry Trudeau is the "sleazeball" "third-rate talent" who draws the "overrated" comic strip Doonesbury, which "very few people read." He lives in New York City with his wife Jane Pauley, who "has far more talent than he has."
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© 2014,This volume offers newly translated texts that exemplify the two most important traditions of Arthurian literature in the Middle Ages. Encompassing such key works such as Lawman's Brut and Wace's Romance of Brut, written in Middle English and Old French, respectively, the Arthurian Epic Tradition depends on Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, written in Latin. Many modern readers are more familiar with Arthur and his fabled court as the centerpiece of a massive fictional tradition, well represented in the second part of this volume, including Chretien de Troyes's Story of the Grail, The Quest of the Holy Grail, and the Perlesvaus. These selections emphasize the connection between secular and religious understandings of chivalry that is the most distinctive quality of medieval Arthurian romance. Useful as a classroom text, the volume provides material for a semester's worth of study. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here .
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© 2016,A witty, intelligent cultural history from NPR book critic Glen Weldon explains Batman's rises and falls throughout the ages--and what his story tells us about ourselves. Since his creation, Batman has been many things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy Pop-art sensation; a pointy-eared master spy; and a grim and gritty ninja of the urban night. For more than three quarters of a century, he has cycled from a figure of darkness to one of lightness and back again; he's a bat-shaped Rorschach inkblot who takes on the various meanings our changing culture projects onto him. How we perceive Batman's character, whether he's delivering dire threats in a raspy Christian Bale growl or trading blithely homoerotic double-entendres with partner Robin on the comics page, speaks to who we are and how we wish to be seen by the world. It's this endlessly mutable quality that has made him so enduring. And it's Batman's fundamental nerdiness--his gadgets, his obsession, his oath, even his lack of superpowers--that uniquely resonates with his fans who feel a fiercely protective love for the character. Today, fueled by the internet, that breed of passion for elements of popular culture is everywhere. Which is what makes Batman the perfect lens through which to understand geek culture, its current popularity, and social significance. In The Caped Crusade , with humor and insight, Glen Weldon, book critic for NPR and author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography , lays out Batman's seventy-eight-year cultural history and shows how he has helped make us who we are today and why his legacy remains so strong.
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© 2016,A witty, intelligent cultural history from NPR book critic Glen Weldon explains Batman's rises and falls throughout the ages--and what his story tells us about ourselves. Since his creation, Batman has been many things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy Pop-art sensation; a pointy-eared master spy; and a grim and gritty ninja of the urban night. For more than three quarters of a century, he has cycled from a figure of darkness to one of lightness and back again; he's a bat-shaped Rorschach inkblot who takes on the various meanings our changing culture projects onto him. How we perceive Batman's character, whether he's delivering dire threats in a raspy Christian Bale growl or trading blithely homoerotic double-entendres with partner Robin on the comics page, speaks to who we are and how we wish to be seen by the world. It's this endlessly mutable quality that has made him so enduring. And it's Batman's fundamental nerdiness--his gadgets, his obsession, his oath, even his lack of superpowers--that uniquely resonates with his fans who feel a fiercely protective love for the character. Today, fueled by the internet, that breed of passion for elements of popular culture is everywhere. Which is what makes Batman the perfect lens through which to understand geek culture, its current popularity, and social significance. In The Caped Crusade , with humor and insight, Glen Weldon, book critic for NPR and author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography , lays out Batman's seventy-eight-year cultural history and shows how he has helped make us who we are today and why his legacy remains so strong.
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© 2016,Hellboy, Mike Mignola's famed comic book demon hunter, wanders through a haunting and horrific world steeped in the history of weird fictions and wide-ranging folklores. Hellboy's World shows how our engagement with Hellboy's world is a highly aestheticized encounter with comics and their materiality. Scott Bukatman's dynamic study explores how comics produce a heightened "adventure of reading" in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the reader's imagination to inhabit. Drawing upon other media--including children's books, sculpture, pulp fiction, cinema, graphic design, painting, and illuminated manuscripts--Bukatman reveals the mechanics of creating a world on the page. He also demonstrates the pleasurable and multiple complexities of the reader's experience, invoking the riotous colors of comics that elude rationality and control and delving into shared fictional universes and occult detection, the horror genre and the evocation of the sublime, and the place of abstraction in Mignola's art. Monsters populate the world of Hellboy comics, but Bukatman argues that comics are themselves little monsters, unruly sites of sensory and cognitive pleasures that exist, happily, on the margins. The book is not only a treat for Hellboy fans, but it will entice anyone interested in the medium of comics and the art of reading.
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© 2016,Hellboy, Mike Mignola's famed comic book demon hunter, wanders through a haunting and horrific world steeped in the history of weird fictions and wide-ranging folklores. Hellboy's World shows how our engagement with Hellboy's world is a highly aestheticized encounter with comics and their materiality. Scott Bukatman's dynamic study explores how comics produce a heightened "adventure of reading" in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the reader's imagination to inhabit. Drawing upon other media--including children's books, sculpture, pulp fiction, cinema, graphic design, painting, and illuminated manuscripts--Bukatman reveals the mechanics of creating a world on the page. He also demonstrates the pleasurable and multiple complexities of the reader's experience, invoking the riotous colors of comics that elude rationality and control and delving into shared fictional universes and occult detection, the horror genre and the evocation of the sublime, and the place of abstraction in Mignola's art. Monsters populate the world of Hellboy comics, but Bukatman argues that comics are themselves little monsters, unruly sites of sensory and cognitive pleasures that exist, happily, on the margins. The book is not only a treat for Hellboy fans, but it will entice anyone interested in the medium of comics and the art of reading.
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© 2013,A celebration of Superman's life and history--in time for his 75th birthday How has the Big Blue Boy Scout stayed so popular for so long? How has he changed with the times, and what essential aspects of him have remained constant? This fascinating biography examines Superman as a cultural phenomenon through 75 years of action-packed adventures, from his early years as a social activist in circus tights to his growth into the internationally renowned demigod he is today. Chronicles the ever-evolving Man of Steel and his world--not just the men and women behind the comics, movies and shows, but his continually shifting origin story, burgeoning powers, and the colorful cast of trusted friends and deadly villains that surround him Places every iteration of the Man of Steel into the character's greater, decades-long story: From Bud Collyer to Henry Cavill, World War II propagandist to peanut butter pitchman, Super Pup to Super Friends , comic strip to Broadway musical, Lori Lemaris to Lois & Clark --it's all here Affectionate, in-depth analyses of the hero's most beloved adventures, in and out of the comics--his most iconic Golden Age tales, goofiest Silver Age exploits, and the contemporary film, television, and comics stories that keep him alive today Written by NPR book critic, blogger, and resident comic book expert, Glen Weldon
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© 2013,A central figure in the emergence of the graphic novel, Daniel Clowes has set the standard for literary cartooning. The Daniel Clowes Reader, a landmark critical compilation, introduces new readers to the cartoonist's award-winning comics and provides those familiar with Clowes new ways of appreciating his visual and literary achievement. The Reader organizes ten Clowes narratives into three thematic sections and supplies each story with an introduction and annotations that will open up its complexities. The collection also includes more than a dozen highly accessible critical essays that examine, from several perspectives, Clowes's comics and place his body of work within numerous biographical, artistic, and cultural contexts, such the 1980s and '90s indie DIY movement, Generation X philosophy, and the traditions of superhero, humor, and alternative comics. Few, if any, cartoonists have Clowes's range: the collection includes a graphic novel, slice-oflife short stories, comic rants, cultural criticism, a superhero tale, and several newspaper style comic strips about artists and their audiences. It includes Ghost World, Clowes's breakthrough graphic novel about female friendship; "Blue Italian Shit" and "Like a Weed, Joe," short stories about male coming-of-age; and never-before-reprinted pieces like "Justin M. Damiano" and the influential prose manifesto"Modern Cartoonist" both of which explore Clowes's interest in the history of cartooning and art criticism. Rounding out the volume are interviews in which Clowes talks at length about his life, career, creative process, and the collection's stories.
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© 2015,Kurtzman's groundwork as the original editor, artist and sole writer of MAD magazine provided the foundation for one of the greatest publishing successes of the 20th century. But how did Kurtzman invent MAD, and why did he leave it so shortly after it burst nova-like on to the American scene? Bill Schelly's biography finally answers these questions for the first time. Featuring fresh interviews with Kurtzman's colleagues, friends and family, including Hugh Hefner, Al Feldstein, R. Crumb and many others.
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© 2015,In God Mocks, Terry Lindvall ventures into the muddy and dangerous realm of religious satire, chronicling its evolution from the biblical wit and humor of the Hebrew prophets through the Roman Era and the Middle Ages all the way up to the present. He takes the reader on a journey through the work of Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales, Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, and Mark Twain, and ending with the mediated entertainment of modern wags like Stephen Colbert. Lindvall finds that there is a method to the madness of these mockers: true satire, he argues, is at its heart moral outrage expressed in laughter. But there are remarkable differences in how these religious satirists express their outrage.The changing costumes of religious satirists fit their times. The earthy coarse language of Martin Luther and Sir Thomas More during the carnival spirit of the late medieval period was refined with the enlightened wit of Alexander Pope. The sacrilege of Monty Python does not translate well to the ironic voices of Soren Kierkegaard. The religious satirist does not even need to be part of the community of faith. All he needs is an eye and ear for the folly and chicanery of religious poseurs. To follow the paths of the satirist, writes Lindvall, is to encounter the odd and peculiar treasures who are God's mouthpieces. In God Mocks, he offers an engaging look at their religious use of humor toward moral ends.
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© 2015,"Quaint, meditative and sometimes dreamy, blankets will take you straight back to your first kiss. " --The Guardian Blankets is the story of a young man coming of age and finding the confidence to express his creative voice. Craig Thompson's poignant graphic memoir plays out against the backdrop of a Midwestern winterscape: finely-hewn linework draws together a portrait of small town life, a rigorously fundamentalist Christian childhood, and a lonely, emotionally mixed-up adolescence. Under an engulfing blanket of snow, Craig and Raina fall in love at winter church camp, revealing to one another their struggles with faith and their dreams of escape. Over time though, their personal demons resurface and their relationship falls apart. It's a universal story, and Thompson's vibrant brushstrokes and unique page designs make the familiar heartbreaking all over again. This groundbreaking graphic novel, winner of two Eisner and three Harvey Awards, is an eloquent portrait of adolescent yearning; first love (and first heartache); faith in crisis; and the process of moving beyond all of that. Beautifully rendered in pen and ink, Thompson has created a love story that lasts.
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© 1992,A monument to the literary genius of women throughout the ages, A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now is an invaluable collection. Here in one volume are the works of three hundred poets from six different continents and four millennia. This revised edition includes a newly expanded section of American poets from the colonial era to the present. "[A] splendid collection of verse by women" (TIME) throughout the ages and around the world; now revised and expanded, with 38 American poets.
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© 1992,A monument to the literary genius of women throughout the ages, A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now is an invaluable collection. Here in one volume are the works of three hundred poets from six different continents and four millennia. This revised edition includes a newly expanded section of American poets from the colonial era to the present. "[A] splendid collection of verse by women" (TIME) throughout the ages and around the world; now revised and expanded, with 38 American poets.
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© 2015,William Marston was an unusual man--a psychologist, a soft-porn pulp novelist, more than a bit of a carny, and the (self-declared) inventor of the lie detector. He was also the creator ofnbsp; Wonder Woman , the comic that he used to express two of his greatest passions: feminism and women in bondage.nbsp; Comics expert Noah Berlatsky takes us on a wild ride through thenbsp; Wonder Woman nbsp;comics of the 1940s, vividly illustrating how Marston's many quirks and contradictions, along with the odd disproportionate composition created by illustrator Harry Peter, produced a comic that was radically ahead of its time in terms of its bold presentation of female power and sexuality. Himself a committed polyamorist, Marston created a universe that was friendly to queer sexualities and lifestyles, from kink to lesbianism to cross-dressing. Written with a deep affection for the fantastically pulpy elements of the earlynbsp; Wonder Woman comics, from invisible jets to giant multi-lunged space kangaroos, the book also reveals how the comic addressed serious, even taboo issues like rape and incest.nbsp; Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics nbsp; 1941-1948nbsp; reveals how illustrator and writer came together to create a unique, visionary work of art, filled with bizarre ambition, revolutionary fervor, and love, far different from the action hero symbol of the feminist movement many of us recall from television.
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© 2014,The Great War gave birth to some of the twentieth century's most celebrated writing; from D. H. Lawrence to Siegfried Sassoon, the literature generated by the war is etched into collective memory. But it is in fiction that we find some of the most profound insights into the war's individual and communal tragedies, the horror of life in the trenches, and the grand farce of the first industrial war. Featuring forty-seven writers from twenty different nations, representing all the main participants in the conflict, No Man's Land is a truly international anthology of World War I fiction. Work by Erich Maria Remarque, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Rose Macaulay sits alongside forgotten masterpieces such as Stratis Myrivilis's Life in the Tomb, Raymond Escholier's Mahmadou Fofana, and Mary Borden's The Forbidden Zone. No Man's Land is a brilliant memorial to the twentieth century's most cataclysmic event.
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© 2005,The Routledge Dictionary of Latin Quotations completes our enormously successful and award-winning Latin for the Illiterati series of volumes, rounding off the trilogy with a comprehensive treasury of classic Latin quotations, mottoes, proverbs, and maxims collected from the worlds of philosophy, rhetoric, politics, science, religion, literature, drama, poetics, and war.Distinguished by the combination of user-friendliness and comprehensiveness, this book will provide students, scholars, and general readers with an eminently browsable resource that is as useful as it is enjoyable.
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© 2015,An essential volume for theater artists and students alike, this anthology includes the full texts of sixteen important examples of avant-garde drama from the most daring and influential artistic movements of the first half of the twentieth century, including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism. Each play is accompanied by a bio-critical introduction by the editor, and a critical essay, frequently written by the playwright, which elaborates on the play's dramatic and aesthetic concerns. A new introduction by Robert Knopf and Julia Listengarten contextualizes the plays in light of recent critical developments in avant-garde studies. By examining the groundbreaking theatrical experiments of Jarry, Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Artaud, and others, the book foregrounds the avant-garde's enduring influence on the development of modern theater.
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© 2015,In Practically Joking , the first full-length study of the practical joke, Moira Marsh examines the value, artistry, and social significance of this ancient and pervasive form of vernacular expression. Though they are sometimes dismissed as the lowest form of humor, practical jokes come from a lively tradition of expressive play. They can reveal both sophistication and intellectual satisfaction, with the best demanding significant skill and talent not only to conceive but also to execute. Practically Joking establishes the practical joke as a folk art form subject to critical evaluation by both practitioners and audiences, operating under the guidance of local aesthetic and ethical canons. Marsh studies the range of genres that pranks comprise; offers a theoretical look at the reception of practical jokes based on "benign transgression"--a theory that sees humor as playful violation--and uses real-life examples of practical jokes in context to establish the form's varieties and meanings as an independent genre, as well as its inextricable relationship with a range of folklore forms. Scholars of folklore, humor, and popular culture will find much of interest in Practically Joking .
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© 2014,Humor has had a profound effect on the way the Jewish people see the world, and has sustained them through millennia of hardships and suffering. God Laughed reviews, organizes, and categorizes the humor of the ancient Jewish texts--the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and Midrash--in a clear, readable, and accessible manner. These works have influenced the Jewish people in many ways, and all are replete with humor and wit. Inevitably, this oeuvre of Jewish humor has itself influenced generations of comics, as well as genres of humor. The authors use examples of Biblical humor from several broad categories, including irony, sarcasm, wordplay, humorous names, humorous imagery, and humorous situations. Because their primary purpose is not to entertain, but to teach humanity how to live the ideal life, much of the humor in the Talmud and the Midrash has a single purpose: to demonstrate that evil is wrong and even, at times, ludicrous. This may help explain why approximately 1,500 years after its closing, the Talmud is still such a fascinating work. God Laughed is the latest addition to Transaction's Jewish Studies series.
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© 2015,During the course of living (mumble, mumble) years, Dave Barry has learned much of wisdom,* (*actual wisdom not guaranteed) and he is eager to pass it on--to the next generation, the generation after that, and to those idiots who make driving to the grocery store in Florida a death-defying experience. In brilliant, brand-new, never-before-published pieces, Dave passes on home truths to his new grandson and to his daughter Sophie, who will be getting her learner's permit in 2015 ("So you're about to start driving! How exciting! I'm going to kill myself"). He explores the hometown of his youth, where the grown-ups were supposed to be uptight fifties conformists, but seemed to have a lot of un- Mad Men- like fun, unlike Dave's own Baby Boomer generation, which was supposed to be wild and crazy, but somehow turned into neurotic hover-parents. He dives into everything from the inanity of cable news and the benefits of Google Glass ("You will look like a douchebag") to the loneliness of high school nerds ("You will never hear a high school girl say about a boy, in a dreamy voice, 'He's so sarcastic!'"), from the perils of home repair to firsthand accounts of the soccer craziness of Brazil and the just plain crazy craziness of Vladimir Putin's Russia ("He stares at the camera with the expression of a man who relaxes by strangling small furry animals"), and a lot more besides. By the end, if you do not feel wiser, richer in knowledge, more attuned to the universe . . . we wouldn't be at all surprised. But you'll have had a lot to laugh about!