A collection of three novels from the experimental feminist writer: “Literal Madness is Acker at her most powerful, disturbing, and provocative.” —Catherine Texier, author of Victorine Kathy Goes to Haiti, the first of three novels in Literal Madness, “speaks to us out of a delightful mock-naivete that reminds one at times of the Dick and Jane readers rewritten as manuals for politics and sex . . . At once hilarious and terrifying, [it] has all the logic of a Caribbean tour and a nightmare combined” (Los Angeles Times). My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini—wherein, among other things, the late Italian filmmaker solves his own murder, with the help of, among others, Romeo, Juliet, and the Bronté sisters—is a “scathing commentary on false values in art” (The Hartford Courant). In the haunting Florida, Acker achieves “a nearly telegraphic reduction of the Bogart-Bacall movie Key Largo to fatalistic, tough-guy essentials” (Booklist). “There’s a haunting method to Acker’s ‘madness’: a rough, raw, erudite wail against the postmodern loss of meaning and emotion.” —Kirkus Reviews

Millennium Madness begins a downward spiral into madness for the author. Poetry describing the pain, wild life events and agong on not finding a cuse for his suffering.Yosha is a Self published writer, poet, and fine artist. His creative products can be found at: www.HowardYosha.com ; including art at www.howardeyosha.etsy.com,; a collection of self published poetry chapbooks titled Illumination Millennium published by Author House, graphic T-shirts, bags, jackets, calendars, postcards and many other items on Cafepress.com.

My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini imagines the Italian filmmaker and writer returning to the Roman homosexual hustlers he knew, in a "scathing commentary on false values in art" (The Hartford Courant).

What is ‘creativity’? And what is ‘madness’? How far can we interpret an artist’s work through our knowledge of his or her mental state, and how far can we infer a mental state from a work of art? When does a work of art cease to be a personal statement by the artist and become a matter of public concern? The contributions to this book attempt to answer some of these questions. They come from a wide range of disciplines and experiences – a practising psychiatrist, a practising artist suffering from reactive depression, and critics working in literature, film, music and the visual arts. The essays include discussions of the ‘myth of creativity’, the music of Robert Schumann, the borders of sanity in the writing of Lawrence Durrell, the ‘insane truth’ of Virginia Woolf, the meeting of doctor and patient in the poetry of Anne Sexton, mood disorders in the fiction of David Foster Wallace, love and madness in the poetry of Hafiz of Shiraz, and the paintings of Adolf Wölfli. Central to this discussion of creativity, madness and civilisation is the difficulty of establishing an appropriate and effective vocabulary and mindset between critics and clinical psychiatrists, which would enable them to work together in understanding mental disturbance in creative artists.

Studies of opera, film, television, and literature have demonstrated how constructions of madness may be referenced in order to stigmatise but also liberate protagonists in ways that reinforce or challenge contemporaneous notions of normality. But to date very little research has been conducted on how madness is represented in popular music. In an effort to redress this imbalance, Nicola Spelman identifies links between the anti-psychiatry movement and representations of madness in popular music of the 1960s and 1970s, analysing the various ways in which ideas critical of institutional psychiatry are embodied both verbally and musically in specific songs by David Bowie, Lou Reed, Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, The Beatles, and Elton John. She concentrates on meanings that may be made at the point of reception as a consequence of ideas about madness that were circulating at the time. These ideas are then linked to contemporary conventions of musical expression in order to illustrate certain interpretative possibilities. Supporting evidence comes from popular musicological analysis - incorporating discourse analysis and social semiotics - and investigation of socio-historical context. The uniqueness of the period in question is demonstrated by means of a more generalised overview of songs drawn from a variety of styles and eras that engage with the topic of madness in diverse and often conflicting ways. The conclusions drawn reveal the extent to which anti-psychiatric ideas filtered through into popular culture, offering insights into popular music's ability to question general suppositions about madness alongside its potential to bring issues of men's madness into the public arena as an often neglected topic for discussion.

Both writers' novels borrow heavily from other authors, and in doing so they offer strategies for a politically committed rereading of literary history and its interaction with the popular imagination.".

In this book the author examines how women detectives are portrayed in film, in literature and on TV. Chapters examine the portrayal of female investigators in each of these four genres: the Gothic novel, the lesbian detective novel, television and film.

A series of interconnected studies which analyze the seven surviving tragedies by Sophocles.