Mr. Williamson is a talented man. He excelled on the football fi eld and then became one of the fi rst Black, action heroes on fi lm. The Hammer: An American Hero details his rise from obscurity to one of the most talented football players in History. Williamson grew up on the tough streets of Chicago. He excelled in school and graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in architectural engineering. He went on to become a successful football player creating the controversial bump and run technique. He then went on to become a very successful writer, director and star of many exciting, action films. He also starred on several hit television shows. He played a major part in the explosion of Black, action films in the seventies and he continues to make fi lms today. Williamson has successfully brought powerful, intelligent images of African American men to the silver screen for years. He wanted to present positive, strong heroic images of Black men to the world. He is an American icon, a hero to many of his fans. What motivated Williamson to excel? How did he get bullies to leave him alone in high school? How did he get the name The Hammer? Why did he study martial arts? Why did he write, produce and direct his own films? Why does he prefer to make independent films? Why did he create hisown film production company? Why does he make fi lms overseas? What three rules did he give to fi lm producers who wanted to hire him? Read The Hammer: An American Hero to fi nd the answers to these questions. If you are a fan of Mr. Williamson or Black cinema youll enjoy reading The Hammer: An American Hero.

Soon to be a show on Hulu! Rights to develop Wild Cards have been acquired by Universal Cable Productions, the team behind The Magicians and Mr. Robot, with the co-editor of Wild Cards, Melinda Snodgrass, as executive producer. In this bitingly satirical companion novel to the Wild Cards title Inside Straight, American Hero combines two quintessentially pop culture phenomena: superheroes and reality TV. American Hero, the nation’s most highly anticipated competition show, kicks off its first season! People with incredible powers – from possessing death-defying healing to transforming into an insect swarm to shifting the earth itself – have been selected from all walks of life. Their goal: to win one million dollars and the admiration of millions more viewers by answering one question, “Do you have what it takes to be the next American Hero?” Contains week-by-week action-packed recaps and no-holds-bars contestant confessionals, all edited by New York Times #1 bestselling author George R. R. Martin. Features writing by Martin as well as Carrie Vaughn, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Walter Jon Williams, Victor Milan, Daniel Abraham, Stephen Leigh, and many more of the genre’s most innovative writers. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

For readers of Brent Weeks, Joe Abercrombie, Peter V. Brett, and Scott Lynch comes the first book in a fantastic, hilarious new sword-and-sorcery series that puts a clever new twist on the golden age of epic fantasy. Robbing tombs for fun and profit might not be a stable career, but Egil and Nix aren’t in it for the long-term prospects. Egil is the hammer-wielding warrior-priest of a discredited god. Nix is a roguish thief with just enough knowledge of magic to conjure up trouble. Together, they seek riches and renown, yet often find themselves enlisted in lost causes—generally against their will. So why should their big score be any different? The trouble starts when Nix and Egil kill the demonic guardian of a long-lost crypt, nullifying an ancient pact made by the ancestors of an obscenely powerful wizard. Now the wizard will stop at nothing to keep that power from slipping away, even if it means freeing a rapacious beast from its centuries-old prison. And who better than Egil and Nix—the ones responsible for his current predicament—to perform this thankless task? Praise for The Hammer and the Blade and Paul S. Kemp “A gripping tale [with] the feeling of a classic Dungeons & Dragons campaign.”—Publishers Weekly “Most heroes work up to killing demons. Egil and Nix start there and pick up the pace.”—Elaine Cunningham, author of the Thorn Trilogy “Kemp delivers sword and sorcery at its rollicking best, after the fashion of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.”—Library Journal

The Classic New York Times Bestseller The man who shattered Babe Ruth's lifetime home run record, Henry "Hammering Hank" Aaron left his indelible mark on professional baseball and the world. But the world also left its mark on him. I Had a Hammer is much more than the intimate autobiography of one of the greatest names in pro sports—it is a fascinating social history of twentieth-century America. With courage and candor, Aaron recalls his struggles and triumphs in an atmosphere of virulent racism. He relives the breathtaking moment when, in the heat of hatred and controversy, he hit his 715th home run to break Ruth's cherished record—an accomplishment for which Aaron received more than 900,000 letters, many of them vicious and racially charged. And his story continues through the remainder of his milestone-setting, barrier-smashing career as a player and, later, Atlanta Braves executive—offering an eye-opening and unforgettable portrait of an incomparable athlete, his sport, his epoch, and his world.

Drawn by the lodestone his father gave him years before, twelve-year-old orphan Ray travels south, meeting along the way various characters from folklore who are battling against an evil industry baron known as the Gog.

This is a larger-than-life tale about the African American hero who was born with a hammer in his hand. Join John Henry on a scenic journey from cotton country to the wilderness, where he finds men of all colors working together to build a great railroad. In no time, John Henry becomes king of the railroad camps by driving more steel than any man alive. And, in an exciting contest that pits man against machine, he single-handedly out-performs a new-fangled steam drill. This rousing tale delivers an inspirational message about pride and perseverance.

Creating Television brings television and its creators to life, presenting fascinating in-depth interviews with the creators of American TV. Having interviewed more than 100 television professionals over the course of his 15 years of research, Professor Robert Kubey presents here the 40 conversations that provide the most illuminating insights about the industry and the people working in it. These interviews bring television's creators to life, revealing their backgrounds, work, and thoughts about the audience and the television programs they create. Each interview tells a compelling tale of an individual's struggles and successes within a complex collaborative and highly commercial medium, offering readers rare insights on the human component in television's development. Featured in this volume are actors, agents, writers, directors, producers, and executives, representing television's earliest days through to the present day. Spanning shows from I Love Lucy and The Tonight Show through to Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and The Sopranos, these creators share the stories of how they gained entry to the industry and built their careers, offering readers a rare opportunity to meet, up close, the people involved in creating many of the most famous and successful programs in the medium's history, and linking the creators' personal histories to the television programs they create. With its unique insights on the people responsible for making television, this volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers in television history, sociology of culture, human creativity, television production, media studies, and mass media ethics. It will also be a popular reader for undergraduate and graduate students in courses addressing television, mass culture, media and society, American Studies, creativity, television history, and media ethics.

Stellar Transformations: Movie Stars of the 2010s circles around questions of stardom, performance, and their cultural contexts in ways that remind us of the alluring magic of stars while also bringing to the fore the changing ways in which viewers engaged with them during the last decade. A salient idea that guides much of the collection is the one of transformation, expressed in these pages as the way in which post-millennial movie stars are in one way or another reshaping ideas of performance and star presence, either through the self-conscious revision of aspects of their own personas or in redirecting or progressing some earlier aspect of the culture. Including a diverse lineup of stars such as Oscar Isaac, Kristen Stewart, Tilda Swinton, and Tyler Perry, the chapters in Stellar Transformations paint the portrait of the meaning of star images during the complex decade of the 2010s, and in doing so will offer useful case studies for scholars and students engaged in the study of stardom, celebrity, and performance in cinema.

The New York Times bestseller from master biographer Evan Thomas brings to life the tumultuous story of the father of the American Navy. John Paul Jones, at sea and in the heat of the battle, was the great American hero of the Age of Sail. He was to history what Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey and C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower are to fiction. Ruthless, indomitable, clever; he vowed to sail, as he put it, “in harm’s way.” Evan Thomas’s minute-by-minute re-creation of the bloodbath between Jones’s Bonhomme Richard and the British man-of-war Serapis off the coast of England on an autumn night in 1779 is as gripping a sea battle as can be found in any novel. Drawing on Jones’s correspondence with some of the most significant figures of the American Revolution—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson—Thomas’s biography teaches us that it took fighters as well as thinkers, men driven by dreams of personal glory as well as high-minded principle, to break free of the past and start a new world. Jones’s spirit was classically American.