A lyrical interrogation of the American Dream in Paterson, New Jersey Born and raised in New Jersey, Hong Kong-based American photographer Todd R. Darling (born 1967) photographed Paterson because it was a prototype for industrial cities. Inspired by local poets William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, Darling wandered the city crafting an allegory of America through the city of Paterson and her people. Paterson is the second most densely populated city in America after New York. 150,000 people comprising around 50 ethnic groups are packed into eight square miles. There are about 25 million people in America, living in small cities like Paterson. Founded in 1792 by Alexander Hamilton as a corporation, Paterson was ruled by corrupt industrialists who paid no taxes and crippled the city's development. The consequences of its corrupted origins ripple through it today. In black and white, American Idylldepicts a broken city that mirrors American society.

Of all the firearms in the world owned by private citizens for non-military purposes, half are in the United States of America. In number they exceed the country's population: 393 million for 372 million people. Photographer Gabriele Galimberti has travelled to every corner of the United States, to meet proud gun-owners, and to see their firearms collections. These, often unsettling, portraits, along with the accompanying stories of the owners and their firearms, provide an uncommon and unexpected insight into what today is really represented by the institution of the Second Amendment.

Profiles the life and work of a nineteenth century pioneer of photography and offers a selection of her portraits of women

What do contemporary American movies and directors have to say about the relationship between nature and art? How do science fiction films like Steven Spielberg's A.I. and Darren Aronofsky's π represent the apparent oppositions between nature and culture, wild and tame? Steven Dillon's intriguing new volume surveys American cinema from 1990 to 2002 with substantial descriptions of sixty films, emphasizing small-budget independent American film. Directors studied include Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky, Todd Haynes, Harmony Korine, and Gus Van Sant, as well as more canonical figures like Martin Scorcese, Robert Altman, David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg. The book takes its title and inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, a science fiction ghost story that relentlessly explores the relationship between the powers of nature and art. The author argues that American film has the best chance of aesthetic success when it acknowledges that a film is actually a film. The best American movies tell an endless ghost story, as they perform the agonizing nearness and distance of the cinematic image. This groundbreaking commentary examines the rarely seen bridge between select American film directors and their typically more adventurous European counterparts. Filmmakers such as Lynch and Soderbergh are cross-cut together with Tarkovsky and the great French director, Jean-Luc Godard, in order to test the limits and possibilities of American film. Both enthusiastically cinephilic and fiercely critical, this book puts a decade of U.S. film in its global place, as part of an ongoing conversation on nature and art.

WINNER OF THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to? Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in lifeâe(tm)s bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.

The Greek novel occupies a special place in the debate on gender in antiquity, forcing us to ask why the female protagonists are such strong and positive characters. This book rejects the hypothesis of a largely female readership, and also sees a problem in ascribing this pattern to the reflection of a blanket improvement in the status of women. Katharine Haynes shows that the strong heroines are best understood not as an undistorted mirror on an improved social reality, but as a type of 'constructed feminine'. The book offers a wealth of fascinating insights into the kaleidoscopic world of male and female in the Greek novel, which will inform and illuminate the reader whatever the text being studied. The related issues of ethnicity and self-definition also explored will be of interest for all those working on ancient fiction or the culture of the Second Sophistic

The Media Book provides today's students with a comprehensive foundation for the study of the modern media. It has been systematically compiled to map the field in a way which corresponds to the curricular organization of the field around the globe, providing a complete resource for students in their third year to graduate level courses in the U.S.

Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.

“Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.” — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? A New York Times Bestseller Best Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe • Newsweek • Time Out New York • Oprah.com • Miami Herald • Book Riot • Buzz Feed • Globe and Mail (Toronto) • The Root • Shelf Awareness A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched cultural observers of her generation In these funny and insightful essays, Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture. Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better, coming from one of our most interesting and important cultural critics.