It's the day after Labor Day, 2008, and the elite universe of New York's Upper East Side is about to unravel along with the economy. Socialite Grigsby Somerset is barely aware of her changing world, and has no idea her investment banker husband Blake is about to enter into a devil's bargain with hedge fund owner John Cutter. As autumn unfolds, Grigsby's fairytale life starts to unwind. Street-smart Renee Parker has been hired as John's executive assistant and is convinced that something is amiss with her new boss. Renee enlists her friend Sasha Silver, CEO of Silver Partners, to help her decipher what is happening. They soon discover that John is nearly ruined, except for the assets he is hiding in the Cayman Islands from his wife Mimi, and has concocted with Blake a scheme to redeem himself. This tale of expulsion from a modern-day Garden of Eden captures what happens when economic decline spells ruin for Manhattan's pampered elite. eBook Edition includes 5 investment tips by author Alexandra Lebenthal.

This timely, necessary collection of essays provides feminist analyses of a recession-era media culture characterized by the reemergence and refashioning of familiar gender tropes, including crisis masculinity, coping women, and postfeminist self-renewal. Interpreting media forms as diverse as reality television, financial journalism, novels, lifestyle blogs, popular cinema, and advertising, the contributors reveal gendered narratives that recur across media forms too often considered in isolation from one another. They also show how, with a few notable exceptions, recession-era popular culture promotes affective normalcy and transformative individual enterprise under duress while avoiding meaningful critique of the privileged white male or the destructive aspects of Western capitalism. By acknowledging the contradictions between political rhetoric and popular culture, and between diverse screen fantasies and lived realities, Gendering the Recession helps to make sense of our postboom cultural moment. Contributors. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Hamilton Carroll, Hannah Hamad, Anikó Imre, Suzanne Leonard, Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Sinéad Molony, Elizabeth Nathanson, Diane Negra, Tim Snelson, Yvonne Tasker, Pamela Thoma

It's the day after Labor Day, 2008, and the elite universe of New York's Upper East Side is about to unravel along with the economy. Socialite Grigsby Somerset is barely aware of her changing world, and has no idea her investment banker husband Blake is about to enter into a devil's bargain with hedge fund owner John Cutter. As autumn unfolds, Grigsby's fairytale life starts to unwind. Street-smart Renee Parker has been hired as John's executive assistant and is convinced that something is amiss with her new boss. Renee enlists her friend Sasha Silver, CEO of Silver Partners, to help her decipher what is happening. They soon discover that John is nearly ruined, except for the assets he is hiding in the Cayman Islands from his wife Mimi, and has concocted with Blake a scheme to redeem himself. This tale of expulsion from a modern-day Garden of Eden captures what happens when economic decline spells ruin for Manhattan's pampered elite.

Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity and quantity of ’quality’ television programs, many of which featuring complicated versions of masculinity that are informed not only by the women’s movement of the sixties and seventies, but also by several decades of backlash and debate about the effects of women’s equality on men, masculinity, and the relationship between men and women. Drawing upon studies of contemporary television programs, including popular series viewed internationally such as Mad Men, The League, Hung, Breaking Bad, Louie, and Girls, this book explores the ways in which popular cultural texts address widely circulating discourses of the ostensible ’crisis of masculinity’ in contemporary culture. A rich study of masculinity and its representation in contemporary television, Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television will appeal to scholars and students of cultural and media studies, popular culture, television studies and cultural sociology with interests in gender, masculinities, and sexuality.

Scholars and readers alike need little help identifying the infamous Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw. While it is no stretch to say that these fictional characters are the most recognizable within the chic lit genre, there are certainly many others that have helped define this body of work. While previous research has focused primarily on white American chick lit, Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre, takes a wider look at the genre, by exploring chick lit novels featuring protagonists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds set both within and outside of the US.

Chick lit is the marketing label attributed to a surge of books published in the wake of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City (1997). Branded by their pink or pastel-coloured book covers, chick-lit novels have been a highly successful and ubiquitous product of women's popular culture since the late 1990s. This study traces the evolution of chick lit not only as a genre of popular fiction, but as a cultural phenomenon. It complicates the genealogy of the texts by situating them firmly in the context of age-old debates about female literary creation, and by highlighting the dynamics of the popular-fiction market. Offering a convincing dissection of the formula which lies at the heart of chick lit, as well as in-depth analyses of a number of chick-lit titles ranging from classic to more recent and edgier texts, this book yields new insights into a relatively young field of academic study. Its close readings provide astute assessments of chick lit's notoriously skewed representational politics, especially with regard to sexuality and ethnicity, which feed into current discussions about postfeminism. Moreover, the study makes a unique contribution to the scholarly debate of chick lit by including an analysis of the (online) fan communities the genre has fostered. The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit weaves a sound methodological network, drawing on reader-response criticism; feminist, gender, and queer theory; affect studies; and whiteness studies. This book is an accessible and engaging study for anyone interested in postfeminism and popular culture.

Breaking In: Tales from the Screenwriting Trenches is a no-nonsense, boots-on-the-ground exploration of how writers REALLY go from emerging to professional in today’s highly saturated and competitive screenwriting space. With a focus on writers who have gotten representation and broken into the TV or feature film space after the critical 2008 WGA strike and financial market collapse, the reader will learn from tangible examples of how success was achieved via hard work and specific methodology. This book includes interviews from writers who wrote major studio releases (The Boy Next Door), staffed on television shows (American Crime, NCIS New Orleans, Sleepy Hollow), sold specs and television shows, placed in competitions, and were accepted to prestigious network and studio writing programs. These interviews are presented as Screenwriter Spotlights throughout the book and are supported by insight from top-selling agents and managers (including those who have sold scripts and pilots, had their writers named to prestigious lists such as The Black List and The Hit List) as well as working industry executives. Together, these anecdotes, learnings and perceptions, tied in with the author's extensive experience in and knowledge of the industry, will inform the reader about how the industry REALLY works, what it expects from both working and emerging writers, as well as what next steps the writer should engage in, in order to move their screenwriting career forward.

The financial crisis of 2008 quickly gave rise to a growing body of fiction: "Crunch Lit". These 'recession writings' take the financial crisis as their central narrative concern and explore its effects on consumer culture, gender roles and contemporary communities. Examining a range of texts including Sebastian Faulks' A Week in December, Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic, and John Lanchester's Capital, this book offers the first wide-ranging guide to these new millennial writings.

Sparkling with creative, fanciful and stylish shoe images SHOEISMS is for thoughtful, enquiring, stylish business women who look at the world from atop their magical shjoes and query and question everything in their lives. The world has changed and finding your role in the world as a powerful woman just got more difficult. Shoeisms will enable you to think independently and to care out your own destiny. Introduce Shoeisms into your life and take control! Be the sassy, successful woman you know you can be.

Offering a fresh perspective on women's fiction for a broad reading audience—fans as well as librarians—this book defines and maps the genre, and describes hundreds of relevant titles. Women's Fiction: A Guide to Popular Reading Interests celebrates the books in this broad genre—titles that explore the lives of female protagonists, with a focus on their relationships with family, friends, and lovers. After a brief introductory history and a chapter that defines the characteristics of women's fiction, the author showcases annotations and suggestions of approximately 300 titles by more than 100 authors. She explains how women's fiction differs from romance fiction, enabling readers to appreciate this rich body of literature that encompasses titles as diverse as Meg Cabot's lighthearted chick lit to the more serious novels of Elizabeth Berg and Maeve Binchy. The book identifies some of the most popular and enduring women's fiction authors and titles, and provides invaluable reading lists and readalike suggestions that will be appreciated by both librarians and general readers.