An instant New York Times bestseller! From the bestselling author of But What if We’re Wrong, a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history. It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn’t know who it was. By the end, exposing someone’s address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn’t know who it was. The 90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we’re still groping to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job. Beyond epiphenomena like "Cop Killer" and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. On a 90’s Thursday night, more people watched any random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones. But nobody thought that was important; if you missed it, you simply missed it. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it. In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, “The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany” make complete sense. Chuck Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.

In nineties small-town Surrey, watching Top of the Pops was Malcolm's only escape from boredom and the bullies at school ... until a phone call from a pop star changed his life forever. Before long, he was getting compliments from BeyoncaA(c), hanging out at award ceremonies with Posh Spice's mum and sneaking onto All Saints' tour bus. Freak Like Me is the true story of one teenage pop fan who, with a group of like-minded outcasts, witnesses the disposable music industry of the late nineties and early noughties first-hand. Tracking down A-lister itineraries, he gets to meet the real personalities behind the Smash Hits posters adorning his bedroom walls. This hilarious memoir is packed with scandalous gossip and poignant memories from the era of Nokia 3310s and dial-up Internet, when chart positions meant everything and, if you wanted to know what your idols were up to off-screen, you had to track them down yourself!

Marcus offers this animated history of the visionaries--editors, illustrators, and others--whose books have transformed American childhood and American culture.

You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might become clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not... So begins our nameless hero's trawl through the brightly lit streets of Manhattan, sampling all this wonderland has to offer yet suspecting that tomorrow's hangover may be caused by more than simple excess. Bright Lights, Big City is an acclaimed classic which marked Jay McInerney as one of the major writers of our time.

The canon of postwar American fiction has changed over the past few decades to include far more writers of color. It would appear that we are making progress—recovering marginalized voices and including those who were for far too long ignored. However, is this celebratory narrative borne out in the data? Richard Jean So draws on big data, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publishing that reveals the persistence of an extreme bias toward white authors. In fact, a defining feature of the publishing industry is its vast whiteness, which has denied nonwhite authors, especially black writers, the coveted resources of publishing, reviews, prizes, and sales, with profound effects on the language, form, and content of the postwar novel. Rather than seeing the postwar period as the era of multiculturalism, So argues that we should understand it as the invention of a new form of racial inequality—one that continues to shape the arts and literature today. Interweaving data analysis of large-scale patterns with a consideration of Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House and readings of individual works by Octavia Butler, Henry Dumas, Amy Tan, and others, So develops a form of criticism that brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of literature. A vital and provocative work for American literary studies, critical race studies, and the digital humanities, Redlining Culture shows the importance of data and computational methods for understanding and challenging racial inequality.

Laura Lojo is Associate Professor of English literature and language at the University of Santiago de Compostela and has a Ph.D. in VirginiaWoolf's writing. Lojo is the author of Introduction to Virginia Woolf's Short Fiction (2003), and is co-editor of Writing Bonds: Irish and Galician Contemporary Women Poets (2009). She has also published book chapters and articles in literary journals on various topics, such as the reception of British modernism in Spanish-speaking countries, Irish women's poetry, women's studies, and comparative literature. --

Seeing in Spanish brings together 22 chapters which share a focus on aspects of visual cultures from the Spanish speaking world. Together these chapters address film, photography, cover art, body art, posters, television, architecture, ekphrasis, biography, murals, graffiti, and digital photo-montage. Between Don Quixote and Daddy Yankee, the essays move from the seventeenth century to the present and traverse Europe, the Americas, and cyberspace. The book is divided into five sections. The first of these, on Spain, includes chapters on the representation of women on LP covers in Spain in the 60s and 70s; portrayals in Spanish cinema of Saint Teresa; Luis Buñuel’s adaptation of Tristana; urban and rural space in recent Spanish documentary film; Catalan television; fine art in Don Quixote; and visions of adoption in three narratives by Spanish writers and filmmakers. The second section, on Mexico and Peru, includes chapters on the fragmentary body in images of Mexico; the art of Abraham Ángel; Jesús Ruiz Durand’s agrarian reform posters; Diego Rivera’s murals; and the role of artistic production in staging the 2006 Oaxaca conflict. The third section, on Cuba, looks at the portrayal of women and of children in recent cinema from the island. It also examines Nancy Morejón’s celebration of the life and art of exiled Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. Section four includes chapters on Chile and Argentina. It addresses street art and graffiti; new forms of publishing; Chilean cinema after Pinochet; and Violeta Parra’s appliqué and collage works. Section five embraces Colombia, Bolivia, and virtual spaces. The contributions to this last section of the book examine childhood in Colombian cinema; the online creativity of pro- and anti-fans of reggaeton; and the photographic diaries of T. Ifor Rees, the UK’s first ambassador to Bolivia. In addition to the geo-political structure which underpins the book’s five sections, the introduction suggests pathways through the contributions focussed on public art and graffiti, women, children, cyberspace and diplomacy, and reconstruction and disintegration. Seeing in Spanish includes 50 illustrations—stills from films, photographs, reproductions of paintings, and screen grabs from the internet—which complement the chapters’ analyses of aspects of Hispanic visual cultures. To aid accessibility, footnotes throughout the book provide English translations of all references from texts in other languages. Taken together, the book’s 22 chapters make a valuable contribution to the existing literature on figures like Don Quixote and Saint Teresa. They also break new ground in approaches to novel areas of scholarship such as sleeve design, artisanal book production, and digital image manipulation. The book will appeal to students and scholars of Spain and Latin America as well as to a general readership with an interest in the visual cultures of the Spanish speaking world.

This volume analyzes the cultural origins, precedents, influences and aspirations of the contemporary Chinese artists.