CHARLES BUKOWSKI & RAYMOND CARVER Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver were credited as the fathers of the "Dirty Realism" genre in the 1980s--branching out from minimalism, the stripping of fiction down to the least amount of words and a concentration on the subject's view of the object. The characters are usually run-of-the-mill, every day people--the lower and middle class worker, the unemployed, the alcoholic, the beaten-down-by-life. In this experimental monograph (in the vein of D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Contemporary American Fiction), avante/pop literary critic Michael Hemmingson examines these dirty works of Bukowski and Carver through the lens of late twentieth-century American culture and the sociological observation of the self, questioning the authority of the "I" in fiction and poetry and its relation to the eye's gaze of the words on a page. Hemmingson offers close readings of selected texts, deconstructing iconic works by Bukowski and Carver to point out the elements of dirty realism and mastery of the language of the common folk, proving that these two writers are an institution in American literature. MICHAEL HEMMINGSON has written over 25 books of literary, western, SF, horror, noir, autobiography, erotica, narrative journalism, gonzo journalism, cultural anthropology, critical theory, critifiction, and ethnography. He lives and works in Southern California.

AUTO/ETHNOGRAPHIES Auto/ethnography is a quickly growing and popular sub-field of research in sociology, anthropology, communications, psychology, and health sciences. It is the examination of the self in culture, a "new" branch of memoir and auto/biography that takes the sociological imagination one step further into the postmodern use of the meta-narrative. It is a passionate blend of the "mystory" with academic discourse. Hemmingson follows in the footsteps of C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman, David Hayano, Norman K. Denzin, and Carolyn Ellis, and then veers off in his own direction, seeking a personal methodology to uncover his own truth, shunning the old and embracing a pristine language of the self-anthropology of the self. A stunning collection! MICHAEL HEMMINGSON has penned over 35 books of literary, western, SF, horror, noir, autobiography, erotica, narrative journalism, gonzo journalism, cultural anthropology, critical theory, critifiction, and ethnography. He lives and works in Southern California.

A prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction and winner of the National Book Award for Europe Central, William T. Vollmann is considered by many to be one of America's most important living writers. Vollmann has written short stories, novels, and essays, and he has contributed to such publications as Esquire, Granta, Harper's, The New Yorker, Playboy, and Spin magazine. As the author of several works of fiction, including Butterfly Stories, The Royal Family, and You Bright and Risen Angels—as well as such nonfiction as the seven-volume Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means—Vollmann continues to produce significant material at an astounding rate. In this annotated bibliography, Michael Hemmingson has assembled a comprehensive list of all editions of Vollmann's books in every language, as well as every short story, every essay, his investigative journalism, and book reviews. This book also includes an extensive listing of Vollmann's limited edition "book object" artist editions. William T. Vollmann: An Annotated Bibliography is a much needed volume for libraries and fans.

As marketing specialists know all too well, our experience of products is prefigured by brands: trademarks that identify a product and differentiate it from its competitors. This process of branding has hitherto gained little academic discussion in the field of literary studies. Literary authors and the texts they produce, though, are constantly 'branded': from the early modern period onwards, they have been both the object and the initiator of a complex marketing process. This book analyzes this branding process throughout the centuries, focusing on the case of the Netherlands. To what extent is our experience of Dutch literature prefigured by brands, and what role does branding play when introducing European authors in the Dutch literary field (or vice versa)? By answering these questions, the volume seeks to show how literary scholars can account for the phenomenon of branding.

"In Don Webb’s ""Weird Wild West,"" Henry James avenges his brother Jesse, Robert E. Howard’s serpent people are a modern gang, Satan flies a Zeppelin, and hobos liberate a zebra from a stolen train. Great weird fiction set in the west! “Don Webb can write straight tales or he can go out to the fringe, where the cutting edge hasn’t even cut yet, [where he] plays head-churning games and word games: [he’s] a full spectrum writer.” —Roger Zelazny"

Well-known writer Michael Hemmingson offers a history and critique of the original Star Trek TV series, and the impact it has had on our culture, language, and science. Also included is the first coverage in book form of the 2009 Star Trek motion picture.

Narcoepics Unbound foregrounds the controversial yet mostly untheorized phenomenon of contemporary Latin American 'narcoepics.' Dealing with literary works and films whose characteristics are linked to illicit global exchange, informal labor, violence, 'bare life,' drug consumption, and ritualistic patterns of identity, it argues for a new theoretical approach to better understand these 'narratives of intoxication.' Foregrounding the art that has arisen from or seeks to describe drug culture, Herlinghaus' comparative study looks at writers such as Gutiérrez, J. J. Rodríguez, Reverte, films such as City of God, and the narratives surrounding cultural villains/heroes such as Pablo Escobar. Narcoepics shows that that in order to grasp the aesthetic and ethical core of these narratives it is pivotal, first, to develop an 'aesthetics of sobriety.' The aim is to establish a criteria for a new kind of literary studies, in which cultural hermeneutics plays as much a part as political philosophy, analysis of religion, and neurophysiological inquiry.

Judas Payne was the devil’s spawn, a product of rape, a half-white, half-Indian outcast who was loved only by his pretty half-sister, Evangeline. When the Reverend Payne finds the two naked in the barn, he takes out one of Judas’s eyes, and Judas chops off one of the Reverend’s arms and then runs for his life. He meets up with a number of colorful characters out there in the weird wild west, from a white slave-trading ex-Confederate colonel to a gun-slinging assassin who quotes scripture as he slaughters his targets. Meanwhile, unknown to Judas, Evangeline Payne has been sold to a brothel and forced to engage in the most vile sexual acts with any man who pays for it.... In the vein of Joe R. Lansdale’s weird westerns, this dark novel is Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name meets Deadwood meets Cowboys and Aliens. Jump on your horse and take a ride....

"Juan Carlos Rodriguez's project is to analyze the ideological unconscious that always exists, without becoming explicit, in any discursive field. Ideology is unconscious because we live it without noticing it and we fail to notice it because it is visible only as the effect of a specific set of social relations. Rodriguez overcomes a variety of obstacles that had previously blocked the development of Marxist theory."--BOOK JACKET.

How many Zavattinis are there? During a life spanning most of the twentieth century, the screenwriter who wrote Sciuscià, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D. was also a pioneering magazine publisher in 1930s Milan, a public intellectual, a theorist, a tireless campaigner for change within the film industry, a man of letters, a painter and a poet. This intellectual biography is built on the premise that in order to understand Zavattini's idea of cinema and his legacy of ethical and political cinema (including guerrilla cinema), we must also tease out the multi-faceted strands of his interventions and their interplay over time. The book is for general readers, students and film historians, and anyone with an interest in cinema and its fate.