The New York Times bestselling debut book of poetry from Lana Del Rey, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. “Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is the title poem of the book and the first poem I wrote of many. Some of which came to me in their entirety, which I dictated and then typed out, and some that I worked laboriously picking apart each word to make the perfect poem. They are eclectic and honest and not trying to be anything other than what they are and for that reason I’m proud of them, especially because the spirit in which they were written was very authentic.” —Lana Del Rey Lana’s breathtaking first book solidifies her further as “the essential writer of her times” (The Atlantic). The collection features more than thirty poems, many exclusive to the book: Never to Heaven, The Land of 1,000 Fires, Past the Bushes Cypress Thriving, LA Who Am I to Love You?, Tessa DiPietro, Happy, Paradise Is Very Fragile, Bare Feet on Linoleum, and many more. This beautiful hardcover edition showcases Lana’s typewritten manuscript pages alongside her original photography. The result is an extraordinary poetic landscape that reflects the unguarded spirit of its creator. Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is also brought to life in an unprecedented spoken word audiobook which features Lana Del Rey reading fourteen select poems from the book accompanied by music from Grammy Award–winning musician Jack Antonoff.

Joseph Kupfer removes aesthetics from the exclusive province of museums, concert halls, and the periphery of human interests to reveal the impact of aesthetic experience on daily living. He combines philosophical aesthetics and critical analysis to indicate the status of aesthetic values in ordinary life, showing how aesthetic qualities and relations contribute to social, moral, and personal values. In examining the practical implications of aesthetic values for sports, sexual relationships, violence, and education, Kupfer also looks at the effect of aesthetic deprivation.

This is a Bash Back! anthology. It takes a peek at the radical Queer tendency and/or (non)organization from 2007 to 2011. The anthology includes interviews, analysis, communiques, and other documents relating to Bash Back! and the tendency that it spawned. We view queer as the blurring of sexual and gender identities. Queer is the refusal of fixed identities. It is a war on all identity. In line with the Bash Back! tendency, for the uses of this anthology queer is trans because the gender binary is inherently oppressive. More often than not, our use of the term queer is interchangeable with our use of trans, though that is not necessarily true of the way in which trans-whatever is used. With these notions we are not naïve. We acknowledge that society ensures Queer is an oppressed identity. Anti-Queer oppression is the systematic violence that people who fall outside of traditional sexual or gender categories encounter.

Following the release in 1967 of "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Dirty Dozen", violence has been seen as a defining feature of the modern film. Is it art or exploitation? Danger or liberation? This volume provides an exmination of the history and effects of graphic violence on film.

In the impoverished outskirts of French cities, known as the banlieues, minority communities are turning to American culture, history, and theory to make their own voices, cultures, and histories visible. Filmmakers have followed suit, turning to Hollywood genre conventions to challenge notions of identity, belonging, and marginalization in mainstream French film. French B Movies proposes that French banlieue films, far from being a fringe genre, offer a privileged site from which to understand the current state of the French film industry in an age of globalization. This gritty style appears in popular arthouse films such as Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine and Bande de filles (Girlhood) along with the major Netflix hit series Lupin. David Pettersen traces how, in these works and others, directors fuse features of banlieue cinema with genre formulas associated with both Hollywood and Black cultural models, as well as how transnational genre hybridizations, such as B movies, have become part of the ecosystem of the French film industry. By combining film analysis, cultural history, critical theory, and industry studies, French B Movies reveals how featuring banlieues is as much about trying to imagine new identities and production models for French cinema as it is about representation.

Best-selling author David Shields, and multi-talented writer, actor and director James Franco team up to transform a conversation into a highly original study of celebrity. Flip-Side is a work of dialogue that explores the relationship between performance and persona, on the one hand, and underlying pain and trauma, on the other. The text is complimented by dozens of selfies of James and Lana.

Steven Hyden explores nineteen music rivalries and what they say about life in this "highly entertaining" book (Rolling Stone) perfect for every passionate music fan. Beatles vs. Stones. Biggie vs. Tupac. Kanye vs. Taylor. Who do you choose? And what does that say about you? Actually -- what do these endlessly argued-about pop music rivalries say about us? Music opinions bring out passionate debate in people, and Steven Hyden knows that firsthand. Each chapter in Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me focuses on a pop music rivalry, from the classic to the very recent, and draws connections to the larger forces surrounding the pairing. Through Hendrix vs. Clapton, Hyden explores burning out and fading away, while his take on Miley vs. Sinead gives readers a glimpse into the perennial battle between old and young. Funny and accessible, Hyden's writing combines cultural criticism, personal anecdotes, and music history -- and just may prompt you to give your least favorite band another chance.

In the commodified future the consequences of a failing society are brought to bear upon one man’s ambition and his attempt to escape his own socio-economic hell. The world’s ecosystems have been destroyed by genetic pollution and cities have evolved into mega malls. Budgie is a knife wielding, brass knuckled young man from the impoverished and brutal red section of Toronto’s T-Dot Center. When his best friend is urdered and Budgie falls in love with the woman responsible, he learns that there’s more to life than drugs, blood or money. To escape his past he must give up everything and everyone he knows and sell his perceptions to an enigmatic and dangerous gang leader. Fighting for survival and unwittingly involved in a scheme that only he can stop, Budgie must ask himself: Does he want to? Technicolor Ultra Mall is an ultra-violent science fiction dystopic novel about the value of being human in a completely commodified world.

Popular movies can be surprisingly smart about politics - from the portentous politics of state or war, to the grassroots, everyday politics of family, romance, business, church and school. Politics in Popular Movies analyses the politics in many well-known films across four popular genres: horror, war, thriller and science fiction. The book's aims are to appreciate specific movies and their shared forms, to understand their political engagements and to provoke some insightful conversations. The means are loosely related 'film takes' that venture ambitious, playful and engaging arguments on political styles encouraged by recent films. Politics in Popular Movies shows how conspiracy films expose oppressive systems; it explores how various thrillers prefigured American experiences of 9/11 and shaped aspects of the War on Terror; how some horror films embrace new media, while others use ultra-violence to spur political action; it argues that a popular genre is emerging to examine non-linear politics of globalisation, terrorism and more. Finally it analyses the ways in which sci-fi movies reflect populist politics from the Occupy and Tea Party movements, rethink the political foundations of current societies and even remake our cultural images of the future.

More than any other filmmaker, Sam Peckinpah opened the door for graphic violence in movies. In this book, Stephen Prince explains the rise of explicit violence in the American cinema, its social effects, and the relation of contemporary ultraviolence to the radical, humanistic filmmaking that Peckinpah practiced. Prince demonstrates Peckinpah's complex approach to screen violence and shows him as a serious artist whose work was tied to the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. He explains how the director's commitment to showing the horror and pain of violence compelled him to use a complex style that aimed to control the viewer's response. Prince offers an unprecedented portrait of Peckinpah the filmmaker. Drawing on primary research materials—Peckinpah's unpublished correspondence, scripts, production memos, and editing notes—he provides a wealth of new information about the making of the films and Peckinpah's critical shaping of their content and violent imagery. This material shows Peckinpah as a filmmaker of intelligence, a keen observer of American society, and a tragic artist disturbed by the images he created. Prince's account establishes, for the first time, Peckinpah's place as a major filmmaker. This book is essential reading for those interested in Peckinpah, the problem of movie violence, and contemporary American cinema.