While 97 percent of all American cities are smaller than 50,000 and millions of Americans experience civic life in these communities, what we know about their politics and governance is limited, particularly how local board systems operate, who the board members are, what motivates them to serve, and what they think about their experiences. Drawing on a unique and extensive set of survey data from board members, mayors, and city councilors in sixty cities across six states, Government in the Twilight Zone significantly expands our knowledge of small city boards and politics. By embedding the empirical research in the historical trajectory of small towns, John R. Baker provides a rich narrative that discusses the role of entities such as planning commissions, parks and recreation boards, and zoning appeals boards. He also clarifies how board and commission members are recruited in small cities, explains how these organizations work to make the decisions required of them, and reveals what they and their city councilors and mayors think about their importance and effectiveness.

Can you live your life by what The Twilight Zone has to teach you? Yes, and maybe you should. The proof is in this lighthearted collection of life lessons, ground rules, inspirational thoughts, and stirring reminders found in Rod Serling’s timeless fantasy series. Written by veteran TV critic, Mark Dawidziak, this unauthorized tribute is a celebration of the classic anthology show, but also, on another level, a kind of fifth-dimension self-help book, with each lesson supported by the morality tales told by Serling and his writers. The notion that “it’s never too late to reinvent yourself” soars through “The Last Flight,’’ in which a World War I flier who goes forward in time and gets the chance to trade cowardice for heroism. A visit from an angel blares out the wisdom of “follow your passion” in “A Passage for Trumpet.” The meaning of “divided we fall” is driven home with dramatic results when neighbors suspect neighbors of being invading aliens in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” The old maxim about never judging a book by its cover is given a tasty twist when an alien tome is translated in “To Serve Man.”

The Twilight Zone explores the possibilities inhering in the ordinary. A Twilight Zone episode can move us by being poignant and intimate, rambunctious or thought provoking. It can also be orchestrated as a set of intertwined plot developments or as a serial progression. But regardless of whether it takes place on an asteroid, in a city pool room, or in the backwoods, it will usually convey both a folklorist's eye for detail and the born raconteur's sense of pace. Rod Serling, the show's founder, main scriptwriter, and artistic director, knew how much burden he could place on his rhetorical and dramatic gifts. Deservedly celebrated as a pioneer in TV science fiction, he also writes about history and loyalty, the grip of everyday reality, and the dangers of both forgetting about one's ghosts and giving them the upper hand.

A visually stunning backstage glimpse through time and space into the history and making of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. This is an invitation to explore a portion of the show's archives: over 300 original behind-the-scenes production stills taken during filming, accompanied by insightful captions, rare documents and interviews with 40 producers, directors, writers and actors who worked on the series including Bill Murray and Earl Hammer, Jr. With a foreword by Neil Gaiman.

* Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature * An engrossing, incantatory novel about the legacy of historical crimes by the author of Space Invaders It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández’s mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man’s face on the magazine’s cover with the words “I Tortured People.” His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fernández follows the “man who tortured people” to places that archives can’t reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel’s title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime. How do crimes vanish in plain sight? How does one resist a repressive regime? And who gets to shape the truths we live by and take for granted? The Twilight Zone pulls us into the dark portals of the past, reminding us that the work of the writer in the face of historical erasure is to imagine so deeply that these absences can be, for a time, spectacularly illuminated.

Rod Serling’s pioneering series TheTwilight Zone (1959 to 1964) is remembered for its surprise twist endings and pervading sense of irony.While other American television series of the time also experimented with ironic surprises, none depended on these as much as Serling’s. However, irony was not used merely as a structural device—Serling and his writers used it as a provocative means by which to comment on the cultural landscape of the time. Irony in The Twilight Zone: How the Series Critiqued Postwar American Culture explores the multiple types of irony—such as technological, invasive, martial, sociopolitical, and domestic—that Serling, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and other contributors employed in the show. David Melbye explains how each kind of irony critiqued of a specific aspect of American culture and how all of them informed one another, creating a larger social commentary. This book also places the show’s use of irony in historical and philosophical contexts, connecting it to a rich cultural tradition reaching back to ancient Greece. The Twilight Zone endures because it uses irony to negotiate its definitively modernist moment of “high” social consciousness and “low” cultural escapism. With its richly detailed, frequently unexpected readings of episodes, Irony in The Twilight Zone offers scholars and fans a fresh and unique lens through which to view the classic series.

Rod Serling's anthology series The Twilight Zone is recognized as one of the greatest television shows of all time. Always intelligent and thought-provoking, the show used the conventions of several genres to explore such universal qualities as violence, fear, prejudice, love, death, and individual identity. This comprehensive reference work gives a complete history of the show, from its beginning in 1959 to its final 1964 season, with critical commentaries, incisive analyses, and the most complete listing of casts and credits ever published. Biographical profiles of writers and contributors are included, followed by detailed appendices, bibliography and index.

Utilizing a series of essays examining the broad philosophical concepts embedded in Rod Serling's series, The Twilight Zone, Philosophy in The Twilight Zone provides a platform for further philosophical discussion. Features essays by eminent contemporary philosophers concerning the over-arching themes in The Twilight Zone, as well as in-depth discussions of particular episodes Fuses popular cult entertainment with classical philosophical perspectives Acts as a guide to unearthing larger questions - from human nature to the nature of reality and beyond - posed in the series Includes substantial critical and biographical information on series creator Rob Serling