Librarians who work with readers will find this well-loved guide to be a treasure trove of information. With descriptive annotations of thousands of genre titles mapped by genre and subgenre, this is the readers' advisor's go-to reference. Next to author, genre is the characteristic that readers use most to select reading material and the most trustworthy consideration for finding books readers will enjoy. With its detailed classification and pithy descriptions of titles, this book gives users valuable insights into what makes genre fiction appeal to readers. It is an invaluable aid for helping readers find books that they will enjoy reading. Providing a handy roadmap to popular genre literature, this guide helps librarians answer the perennial and often confounding question "What can I read next?" Herald and Stavole-Carter briefly describe thousands of popular fiction titles, classifying them into standard genres such as science fiction, fantasy, romance, historical fiction, and mystery. Within each genre, titles are broken down into more specific subgenres and themes. Detailed author, title, and subject indexes provide further access. As in previous editions, the focus of the guide is on recent releases and perennial reader favorites. In addition to covering new titles, this edition focuses more narrowly on the core genres and includes basic readers' advisory principles and techniques.

The Signifying Self: Cervantine Drama as Counter-Perspective Aesthetic offers a comprehensive analysis of all eight of Cervantes's Ocho comedias (published 1615), moving beyond conventional anti-Lope approaches to Cervantine dramatic practise in order to identify what, indeed, his theatre promotes. Considered on its own aesthetic terms, but also taking into account ontological and socio-cultural concerns, this study compels a re-assessment of Cervantes's drama and conflates any monolithic interpretations which do not allow for the textual interplay of contradictory and conflicting discourses which inform it. Cervantes's complex and polyvalent representation of freedom underpins such an approach; a concept which is considered to be a leitmotif of Cervantes's work but which has received scant attention with regards to his theatre. Investigation of this topic reveals not only Cervantes's rejection of established theatrical convention, but his preoccupation with the difficult relationship between the individual and the early modern Spanish world. Cervantes's comedias emerge as a counter-perspective to dominant contemporary Spanish ideologies and more orthodox artistic imaginings. Ultimately, The Signifying Self seeks to recuperate the Ocho comedias as a significant part of the Cervantine, and Golden-Age, canon and will be of interest and benefit to those scholars who work on Cervantes and indeed on early modern Spanish theatre in general.

Alison Green used to be a superhero. With unlimited strength and invulnerability, she fought crime with a group of other teens under the alter ego Mega Girl. All that changed after an encounter with Menace, her mind-reading archenemy, who showed her evidence of a sinister conspiracy that made battling giant robots suddenly seem unimportant. Now, Alison is going to college in New York City, trying to find ways to actually help the world while making friends and getting to class on time. It's impossible to escape the past, however, and trouble comes in the form of mysterious murders, ex-teammates with grudges, robots with a strange sense of humor, an inconvenient crush, a cantankerous professor, and many different kinds of people who think they know the best way to be a hero. Author: Brennan Lee Mulligan. Illustrator: Molly Ostertag. © Molly Ostertag and Brennan Lee Mulligan.

Now with an Historical Afterword by Ron Miller Featured in Ron Millers _The Conquest of Space Book Series.Ó An instant best-seller when it appeared in 1871, tells of a race of super-scientific super-beings living deep beneath the surface of the Earth. And the beautiful Zee is a super-woman among these super-beings...beings destined to conquer the upper world. A science fiction classic from Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Last Days of Pompeii. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

While television has always played a role in recording and curating history, shaping cultural memory, and influencing public sentiment, the changing nature of the medium in the post-network era finds viewers experiencing and participating in this process in new ways. They skim through commercials, live tweet press conferences and award shows, and tune into reality shows to escape reality. This new era, defined by the heightened anxiety and fear ushered in by 9/11, has been documented by our media consumption, production, and reaction. In Small Screen, Big Feels, Melissa Ames asserts that TV has been instrumental in cultivating a shared memory of emotionally charged events unfolding in the United States since September 11, 2001. She analyzes specific shows and genres to illustrate the ways in which cultural fears are embedded into our entertainment in series such as The Walking Dead and Lost or critiqued through programs like The Daily Show. In the final section of the book, Ames provides three audience studies that showcase how viewers consume and circulate emotions in the post-network era: analyses of live tweets from Shonda Rhimes's drama, How to Get Away with Murder (2010–2020), ABC's reality franchises, The Bachelor (2002–present) and The Bachelorette (2003–present), and political coverage of the 2016 Presidential Debates. Though film has been closely studied through the lens of affect theory, little research has been done to apply the same methods to television. Engaging an impressively wide range of texts, genres, media, and formats, Ames offers a trenchant analysis of how televisual programming in the United States responded to and reinforced a cultural climate grounded in fear and anxiety.

Making It Like a Man: Canadian Masculinities in Practice is a collection of essays on the practice of masculinities in Canadian arts and cultures, where to “make it like a man” is to participate in the cultural, sociological, and historical fluidity of ways of being a man in Canada, from the country’s origins in nineteenth-century Victorian values to its immersion in the contemporary post-modern landscape. The book focuses on the ways Canadian masculinities have been performed and represented through five broad themes: colonialism, nationalism, and transnationalism; emotion and affect; ethnic and minority identities; capitalist and domestic politics; and the question of men’s relationships with themselves and others. Chapters include studies of well-known and more obscure figures in the Canadian arts and culture scenes, such as visual artist Attila Richard Lukacs; writers Douglas Coupland, Barbara Gowdy, Simon Chaput, Thomas King, and James De Mille; filmmakers Clement Virgo, Norma Bailey, John N. Smith, and Frank Cole; as well as familiar and not-so-familiar tokens of Canadian masculinity such as the hockey hero, the gangsta rapper, the immigrant farmer, and the drag king. Making It Like a Man is the first book of its kind to explore and critique historical and contemporary masculinities in Canada with a special focus on artistic and cultural production and representation. It is concerned with mapping some of the uniquely Canadian places and spaces in the international field of masculinity studies, and will be of interest to academic and culturally informed audiences.

For more than 30 years, Lifetime has aired a broad range of programming, including original movies, sitcoms, dramas and reality shows. As other networks dedicated to women have come and gone, Lifetime continues to thrive in an ever-expanding cable marketplace, exploring such sensitive topics as race, commercialism, eating disorders, rape and domestic violence. This collection of new essays is the first to focus on Lifetime and the programs that helped define the network's brand that appeals to both viewers and advertisers. Series like Project Runway, Girlfriend Intervention and Army Wives are explored in depth. The contributors discuss the network's large opus of original films, as well at its online presence.

This book explores anime auteur Hayao Miyazaki's films through the lens of the monomyth of the Heroic Quest Cycle. According to Joseph Campbell and other mythology researchers, the Quest is for boys and men, with women acting as either the Hero's mother or the Prize at the end of the journey. Miyazaki nearly exclusively portrays girls and young women as heroes, arguing that we must reassess Campbell's archetype. The text begins with a brief history of animation and anime, followed by Miyazaki's background and rise to prominence. The following chapters look at each of Miyazaki's films from the perspective of the Heroic Quest Cycle, with the last section outlining where Miyazaki and other animators can lead the archetype of the Hero in the future.

With superstrength and invulnerability, Alison Green used to be one of the most powerful superheroes around. Fighting crime with other teenagers under the alter ego Mega Girl was fun until an encounter with Menace, her mind reading arch enemy. He showed her evidence of a sinister conspiracy, and suddenly battling giant robots didn't seem so important. Now Alison is going to college and trying to find ways to help the world while still getting to class on time. It's impossible to escape the past, however, and everyone has their own idea of what it means to be a hero. Strong Female Protagonist has been published online since 2012, where it attracted a large fan base, and earned positive reviews on sites such as io9, ComicsAlliance, The Beat, and ThinkProgress. After a successful Kickstarter, Brennan and Molly now bring their series to print, with a book collecting the first four chapters and bonus material, self-published by the authors and distributed by Top Shelf. Author: Brennan Lee Mulligan. Illustrator: Molly Ostertag. © Molly Ostertag and Brennan Lee Mulligan.

Transmedia Character Studies provides a range of methodological tools and foundational vocabulary for the analysis of characters across and between various forms of multimodal, interactive, and even non-narrative or non-fictional media. This highly innovative work offers new perspectives on how to interrelate production discourses, media texts, and reception discourses, and how to select a suitable research corpus for the discussion of characters whose serial appearances stretch across years, decades, or even centuries. Each chapter starts from a different notion of how fictional characters can be considered, tracing character theories and models to approach character representations from perspectives developed in various disciplines and fields. This book will enable graduate students and scholars of transmedia studies, film, television, comics studies, video game studies, popular culture studies, fandom studies, narratology, and creative industries to conduct comprehensive, media-conscious analyses of characters across a variety of media.