Set mostly in rural Maine, Bjarki, Not Bjarki is an expansive book. It is a standard work of journalism, describing with nuance and humanity the people and processes that transform the forest into your floor. It is also a meditation on what it means to know another person and to connect with them, especially in an increasingly polarized America. And it is a ghost story about marriage. It is an inquiry into the limits of language and certainty, a rumination on North American colonization, masculinity, gift cards, crab rangoon, bald eagles, and wood, all of it told in an exciting, energized, and original prose.
Polish Theatre Revisited explores nineteenth-century Polish theatre through the lens of theatre audiences. Agata Luksza places special emphasis on the most engaged spectators, known as "theatremaniacs"--from what they wore, to what they bought, to what they ate. The theatre was one of the key areas where early fan cultures emerged, and theatremaniacs indulged in diverse fan practices in opposition to the forces reforming the theatre and its spectatorship.
Food banks have expanded into one of the largest mechanisms to redistribute food waste. This book analyzes the development of food banks across the world and the limits of food charity as a means to reduce food insecurity and food waste.
Much has changed with Iowa's wildlife in the years 1990 to 2020. Iowa's Changing Wildlife provides an up-to-date, scientifically based summary of changes in the distribution, status, conservation needs, and future prospects of about sixty species of Iowa's birds and mammals whose populations have increased or decreased in the past three decades. Readers will learn more about familiar species, become acquainted with the status of less familiar species, and find out how many of the species around them have fared during this era of transformation.
"Beyond Ridiculous tells the story of Theatre-in-Limbo, a downtown band of actors formed in 1984 by playwright and soon-to-be drag legend Charles Busch, and director Kenneth Elliott. They performed Vampire Lesbians of Sodom at the Limbo Lounge, a raffish club in the East Village, then considered a dangerous corner of the New York City. But the next year, the show moved to the historic Provincetown Playhouse, a commercial Off-Broadway venue, and famously became the longest-running nonmusical in Off-Broadway history. From 1984 to 1991, Busch starred in eight Limbo productions, always in proud, outrageously fabulous drag. Yet ironically, Busch would eventually become a beloved grand dame of the New York theatre establishment, even including forays onto Broadway. In Beyond Ridiculous, Elliott, Limbo's director, producer, and co-founder, narrates in first-person the company's Cinderella tale of fun, heartbreak, and dishy drama. Scenes include the ecstatic opening night of Vampire Lesbians, complete with a production assistant rushing backstage with a hot-off-the-presses rave from The New York Times; encounters with Todd Rundgren, Joe Papp, and Milton Berle; but also, a thorough analysis of Busch's plays and a vivid account of the now-vanished gay New York theatrical scene of the 1980s. At the center of the book is the young Charles Busch, an unforgettable personality fighting to be seen, be heard, and express his unique style as a writer-performer in plays such as Psycho Beach Party and The Lady in Question. The tragedy of AIDS among treasured friends in the company, the struggle for mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ theatre during the reign of Reagan, and the exploration of new ways of being a gay theatre artist make the book a heartwarming, bittersweet, but ultimately joyous, ride. With queer rights under fire, remembering this inspiring moment in LGBTQ theatre history isn't just important, it's essential"--
"This anthology of articles selected from JAB: The Journal of Artists' Books (1994-2020) contains some of the best critical writing on artists' books produced in the last quarter of a century. Driven by the editorial vision of artist Brad Freeman, JAB began as a provocative pamphlet and expanded to become a significant journal documenting artists' books from multiple perspectives. With its range of participants and approaches, JAB provided a unique venue for sustained critical writing in the field and developed a broad subscriber base among institutional and private collectors and readers. It featured artists' profiles, book reviews, reports from book fairs and conferences, interviews with major figures, and much lively debate about how to engage critically with artists' books. More than two hundred writers and artists from nearly two dozen countries around the globe were published in its pages. Contributions came from authors in Australia, North America, Europe, the UK, and South America and from literary studies, visual arts, photography, media theory, and book history as well as other backgrounds. The original issues each had covers designed-and often printed-by individual book artists. Later issues contained artists' books produced exclusively for its subscribers. No other journal dedicated exclusively to artists' books had so long a run or such broad representation. As JAB's visibility increased, more artists and writers contributed to its ongoing exchanges. The essays in this collection are all exemplary works of critical writing that illuminate individual books, artists, or presses but also offer a diverse range of methodological approaches to interpreting these vibrant and compelling works of art. Providing new access to these essays will hopefully inspire new work in creative and intellectual areas of the field and offer a resource to those responsible for teaching and collecting artists' books"--
"Dissonant Voices: Race, Jazz, and Innovative Poetics in Midcentury America explores the braiding together of racial politics, popular music, and avant-garde poetics in post-war American culture. Ranging from roughly the late-1940s to the early 1970s, this study examines the development of open field poetics, alternately termed projective verse, after Charles Olson's influential essay of the same name. In doing so, it traces projective verse from its creation amidst the crucible of racial integration at Black Mountain College, to its development through a series of interracial friendships explored among writers involved in the Boston, San Francisco, and downtown New York scenes, to its reimagining by African American poets working in Harlem, Los Angeles, and beyond as part of the Black Arts Movement. Because the histories of integration, jazz, and postwar poetics have been studied too often as the subjects of disparate narratives and separate disciplines, this arc of their shared development has also been largely obscured. To remedy this, the present study takes an interdisciplinary approach, with insights from contemporary histories, performance studies, sound studies, critical race theory, and literary criticism informing the mix of literary analysis, musicology, and historical detail that comprises each chapter. Accordingly, the book argues for an integrated approach to the New American Poetry and the Black Arts Movement, one that situates the midcentury poetics of breath and performance in the context of the Civil Rights-era politics and jazz music that informed it. Moreover, it also unearths significant and little understood connections between Black Mountain, the Beats, the Boston Renaissance, the New York scene, and the Black Arts Movement, expanding, thereby, our understandings of each, and, in a more general sense, of contemporary American poetry, politics, and music in the process"--
"This book offers a fresh analytical approach to the plays of Eugene O'Neill with its attention to the engagements, weddings, and marriages so crucial to the tragic action in O'Neill's works. Specifically, the book examines the culturally-sanctioned traditions and gender roles that underscored marital life in the early 20th century and that still haunt and define love and partnership in the modern age. Analyzing and weaving in artifacts like advice columns, advertisements, theatrical reviews, and even the lived experiences of the actors who brought O'Neill's wife characters to life, Wynstra points to new ways of seeing and empathizing with those who are betrothed and new possibilities for reading marriage in literary and dramatic works. She suggests that the various ways women especially were, and still are, expected to divert from their true ambitions, desires, and selves in the service of appropriate wifely behavior is a detrimental performance and one at the crux of O'Neill's marital tragedies. Wynstra's study invites more inclusive and nuanced ways of thinking about the choices married characters must make and the roles they play both on and off the stage"--
"Poetics of Cognition investigates the material effects of experimental poetics using new evidence emerging from cognitive science. It asks, how do experimental poems "think," and how do we think through them? Examining experimental modes such as the New Sentence, proceduralism, projective verse, sound poetry, and visual poetry, Jessica Lewis Luck argues that experimental poems materialize not so much the content as the activity of the embodied mind, and they can thus function as a powerful scaffolding for extended cognition, both for the writer and the reader. While current critical approaches tend to describe the effects of experimentalism solely in terms of (often paralyzing) emotion and sensation, Luck shifts from the feeling to the thinking that these poems can generate, expanding the potential blast radius of experimental poetic effects into areas of linguistic, sonic, and visual processing and revealing a transformational potency that strictly affective approaches miss. The cognitive research she draws upon suggests that the strangeness of experimental poetry can, in fact, re-shape the activity of the reader's mind, creating new forms of attention, perception, and cognition. The book closes by shifting from theory to praxis, extracting forms of teaching from the forms of thinking that experimental poems instill in order to better enable their transformative effects in readers and to bring poetry pedagogy into the twenty-first century"--
"The Global Frontier argues that midcentury American writers were not straitjacketed by the anticommunist Red Scare, but rather pioneered a transnational sensibility. Enabled by air travel and the expansion of the tourist industry, they departed from the West/East binaries criticized by postcolonial writers and academics. American novelists and poets imagined themselves as egalitarian and culturally borderless, an ideology that Strand associates with the frontier. Although we associate the heterosexual white male with the "Ugly American" stereotype, a wide variety of literary travelers sought personal freedom and cultural enrichment outside their nation's borders, including Black, female, and queer writers. However, while minorities as well as straight white males went abroad to achieve autonomy and creativity, they were complicit in imperialism and the formation of global inequality. This book thus takes a critical view of the postwar frontier, a paradigm that displaced the collectivist ethos of the New Deal era. For American writers, the price of incorporation into a transnational professional class was not only forswearing communism, but also rejecting 1930s social commitments and the concept of an interventionist state. Even Richard Wright, who questions the privilege of white flight, himself enjoyed the privilege of the American traveler, leading to a blurring of racial identities. In our day, the explosion of mass air travel, communications, and various subcultures has threatened to discredit the nation-state form altogether. The Global Frontier concludes that a progressive orientation toward state-based reform has never been more important, especially in a new era of ethnocentric nationalisms"--
"Algorithmic data profiling is not merely an important topic in contemporary fiction, it is an increasingly dominant form of storytelling and characterization in our society. These stories are being told inside boardrooms, banks, presidential briefings, police stations, advertising agencies, and technology companies. And so, to the extent that data has taken up storytelling, literature must take up data. After all, profiling coincides with character development; surveillance reflects point of view; and data points track as plot-points in tales of the political-economy. Plotting Profiles engages this energetic reformation of postmodern literature to account for a society and economy of frenetic counting. Indeed, contemporary literature is capable of addressing precisely that which algorithms cannot or do not account for: the affects of profile culture, the ideologies and supposed truth-power of data, the gendered and racialized dynamics of watching and being watched, and the politics of who counts and what gets counted. Each chapter analyzes preeminent and prescient work by contemporary authors such as Jennifer Egan, Claudia Rankine, Mohsin Hamid, and William Gibson to probe how the claims of data surveillance serve to make lives seem legible, intelligible, and sometimes even expendable. This book contributes to literary studies, new media studies, affect studies, surveillance studies, critical race studies, and gender studies because, ultimately, these discourses are inextricably knotted together around the problems of profiling"--
"Poetry FM listens back to the experimental period of FM radio's development from the late 1940s to the 1980s to show how American poetry was shaped by, and shaped in turn, the emergence of a radio counterculture. Like FM radio history, the literary history of American poetry during this period is defined by waves of opposition to the literary and critical establishment by poets and movements who likewise stressed experimentalism, alternative networks of distribution, regionalism, and community. In this study, Lisa Hollenbach focuses on two major radio stations-Pacifica's KPFA in Berkeley and WBAI in New York-to develop an institutionally grounded analysis of how poets' involvement with FM radio contributed to postwar aural imaginaries. While poetry programming on Pacifica Radio has always been capacious, including poetry from the past as well as contemporary poetry, poetry in translation, and poetry by unpublished writers, Hollenbach focuses on writers who played important roles at these stations and whose work embraces oral poetics and/or radio and sonic tropes. These especially include poets associated with the New American Poetry-William Everson, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Paul Blackburn, and Amiri Baraka, among others-who brought the oral poetics of the "new" poetry to Pacifica Radio's experiment in FM radio. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the racial, gender, and sexual politics of both the New American Poetry and the FM revolution came under increasing scrutiny and contestation. During these years, poets as different as Spicer, Ginsberg, Baraka, and Audre Lorde responded to this terrain of struggle by creating-in their poetry, performances, and radio work-alternative aural imaginaries, or figurative channels for the transmission of fugitive signals across time and place. This is a book about how radio-the once-dominant mass media form-became an underground medium for and key figure in American poetry in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s"--
The Collaborative Artist's Book offers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from 1945 to the present, and highlights how the artist's book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alexandra Gold provides a broad overview of the artist's book form and the many ongoing debates and challenges, from the disciplinary to the institutional, that these forms continue to pose.
Feminist Rehearsals documents the early stages of feminist theatre in Argentina and Mexico, revealing how various aspects of performance culture--spectator formation, playwriting, professional acting and directing, and dramatic techniques--paralleled political activism and championed the goals of the women's rights movement.
Like the pilgrims in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales who pass the time telling stories while stranded in the Tabard Inn, Memorandum from the Iowa Cloud Appreciation Society tells the tale of a traveling salesman and what really happened over the course of his forty- six years.
The Woods explores the lives of people in a small Vermont college town and its surrounding areas--a place at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed. In the tradition of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, these stories follow people who carry private griefs but search for contentment. As they try to make sense of their worlds, grappling with problems--worried about their careers, their marriages, their children, their ambitions--they also sift through the happiness they have, and often find deep solace in the landscape.
Who writes novels about war? For nearly a century after World War I, the answer was simple: soldiers who had been there. The assumption that a person must have experienced war in the flesh in order to write about it in fiction was taken for granted by writers, reviewers, critics, and even scholars. Contemporary American fiction tells a different story. Less than half of the authors of contemporary war novels are veterans. And that's hardly the only change. Today's war novelists focus on the psychological and moral challenges of soldiers coming home rather than the physical danger of combat overseas. They also imagine the consequences of the wars from non-American perspectives in a way that defies the genre's conventions. To understand why these changes have occurred, David Eisler argues that we must go back nearly fifty years, to the political decision to abolish the draft. The ramifications rippled into the field of cultural production, transforming the foundational characteristics-- authorship, content, and form--of the American war fiction genre.
Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of the stage consumptive. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, tuberculosis was a leading killer. The consumptive character became a vehicle through which standards of health, beauty, and virtue were imposed; constructions of class, gender, and sexuality were debated; the boundaries of nationhood were transgressed or maintained; and an exceedingly fragile whiteness was held up as a dominant social ideal. By telling the story of tuberculosis on the transatlantic stage, Symptoms of the Self uncovers some of the wellsprings of modern Western theatrical practice--and of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die.
"Celebrities depend upon fans to sustain their popularity and livelihood, and fans are happy to oblige. With social media, they can follow their favorite (or least favorite) celebrities' every move, and get glimpses into their lives, homes, and behind-the-scenes work. Fans interact with celebrities now more than ever, and often feel that they have a claim on their time, attention, and accountability. In Fame and Fandom: Functioning On and Offline, contributors examine this tumultuous dynamic, and bring together celebrity studies and fan studies like never before. This volume explores the intersections between fan cultures, communities and practices around the globe; as well as the formation and maintenance of celebrity and public personas. It expands knowledge of the fields by examining both online and offline examples. Readers will find new theoretical approaches to fan/celebrity encounters, as well as discussion of parasocial relationships and fan interactions with celebrities. Case studies include Supernatural, Harry Styles, YouTube influencers, film location sites, Keanu Reeves, and celebrities as fans. This volume is ideal for anyone curious about the mutual influences of fame on fandom, and vice versa"--
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