Search results for ""University Press of Mississippi""

With a career spanning four decades, Wes Craven (1939–2015) bridged independent exploitation cinema and Hollywood big-budget horror. A pioneer of the modern horror cinema, Craven directed such landmark films as The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream—considered not only classics of the genre, but examples of masterful filmmaking. Producing an impressive oeuvre that mixed intellectual concerns and political ideas, Craven utilized high-tension suspense, devastating visual brutality, and dark humor to evoke a unique brand of fear. Moreover, his films draw attention to the horror of American society—Namely racism, classism, and the traumas often associated with family. This collection of twenty-nine interviews—spanning from 1980 until his final interview in 2015—traces Craven’s life and career, from his upbringing in a strict religious family and his life as an academic to his years toiling in exploitation cinema. The volume also chronicles Craven’s ascendancy as an independent director, his work within the studio system, and his eventual triumph in mainstream cinema. Within the interviews gathered here, including three previously unpublished pieces, Craven reflects on failed projects and the challenges of working with studios while offering thoughtful meditations on the dynamics and appeal of horror. Wes Craven: Interviews cements Craven’s legacy as a master of horror who left an indelible mark on the genre by forever altering expectations of—and approaches to—the cinema of fear.

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In this famed collection of full-color photographs, Birney Imes reveals a previously unexplored and now nearly vanished domain, the black juke joints of the Mississippi Delta. Imes's work transforms these common gathering places in Delta cultural life into something rich and strange. The evocative Mississippi place names in Imes's photographs are as captivating as the names of the juke joints themselves: the Pink Pony in Darling, the People's Choice Café in Leland, Monkey's Place in Merigold, the Evening Star Lounge in Shaw, the Playboy Club in Louise, Juicy's Place in Marcella, the Social Inn in Gunnison, and A. D.'s Place in Glendora. To the volume Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sportswriter and Independence Day, contributes a long, perceptive essay that probes the photographs for their aesthetic value and for what they reveal beyond their obvious documentary qualities. Juke Joint includes approximately sixty photographs taken between 1983 and 1989 as Imes traveled throughout the Delta. Many of the images are the result of long exposures that show the blur of human movement as a figure lounges at a bar or steps across a room to feed quarters into a juke box. The resulting ""ghosts"" animate the pictures and give them an otherworldly quality. Today, many of these places no longer exist. And yet these photographs continue to inspire songs, poetry, movie sets, and the interior designs of countless bars, restaurants, and live music venues striving for authenticity and that inimitable Delta Blues feeling.

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In American popular culture, Marilyn Monroe(1926-1962) has evolved in stature from movie superstar to American icon. Monroe's own understanding of her place in the American imagination and her effort to perfect her talent as an actress are explored with great sensitivity in Carl Rollyson's engaging narrative. He shows how movies became crucial events in the shaping of Monroe's identity. He regards her enduring gifts as a creative artist, discussing how her smaller roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve established the context for her career, while in-depth chapters on her more important roles in Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot, and The Misfits provide the centerpiece of his examination of her life and career. Through extensive interviews with many of Monroe's colleagues, close friends, and other biographers, and a careful rethinking of the literature written about her, Rollyson is able to describe her use of Method acting and her studies with Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg, head of the Actors' Studio in New York. The author also analyzes several of Monroe's own drawings, diary notes, and letters that have recently become available. With over thirty black and white photographs (some published for the first time), a new foreword, and a new afterword, this volume brings Rollyson's 1986 book up to date. From this comprehensive, yet critically measured wealth of material, Rollyson offers a distinctive and insightful portrait of Marilyn Monroe, highlighted by new perspectives that depict the central importance of acting to the authentic aspects of her being.

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In the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including the Choking Doberman, the Eaten Ticket, and the Vanishing Hitchhiker. But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right. In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, Simon Young fills this gap for British folklore (and for the wider English-speaking world) of the 1800s. Young introduces seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from Beetle Eyes to the Shoplifter''s Dilemma and from Hands in the Muff to the Suicide Club. While a handful of these stories are already known, the vast majority have never been identified, and they have certainly never received scholarly treatment. Young begins the volume with a lengthy introduction assessing nineteenth-century media

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In full command of both Hollywood stylistics and camp aesthetics, Spain's Pedro Almodóvar (b. 1951) has become a master of the audacious and the unorthodox, of the permissive and the polemical. Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews documents the 22-year-long cinematic career of the most internationally celebrated Spanish art-film director since Luís Buñuel. Many of these interviews, from French, Italian, and Spanish periodicals, appear for the first time in English. Almodóvar's early cinematic ventures in Super 8 and 16mm in the 1970s marked and memorialized the rise of the Movida, Madrid's underground vanguard artistic movement. Almodóvar's critical success in his native Spain came with What Have I Done to Deserve This? Almodóvar made his mark in the United States with his kitschy, melodramatic comedy and Academy Award nominee Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and his outlandish and irreverently funny Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! For all its taboo-breaking plots, eccentric characterizations, and explosive palettes, Almodóvar's cinema of excess has matured into one of tender compassion. All About My Mother, winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and of Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival, and his fourteenth feature to date, Talk to Her, winner of the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, 2003, cement Almodóvar's commitment to characters on the margins and to social critique. Covering more than two decades, the interviews collected here trace Almodóvar's journey from the small village of Calzada de Calatrava to Madrid, from his humble and Catholic provincial upbringing to his superstar status as Spain's leading postmodern auteur. Originally published in Spain, France, Italy, and the United States, these conversations disclose as much about Almodóvar's personal biography as they do about his thematic universe, his directorial personality, and his maturing style. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi is assistant professor of media arts at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is the co-editor of Peter Greenaway's Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema.

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Abraham Polonsky (19101999), screenwriter and filmmaker of the mid-twentieth-century Left, recognized his writerly mission to reveal the aspirations of his characters in a material society structured to undermine their hopes. In the process, he ennobled their struggle. His auspicious beginning in Hollywood reached a zenith with his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Robert Rossen's boxing noir film, Body and Soul (1947), and his inaugural film as writer and director, Force of Evil (1948), before he was blacklisted during the McCarthy witch hunt. Polonsky envisioned cinema as a modern artist. His aesthetic appreciation for each technical component of the screen aroused him to create voiceovers of urban cadencespoetic monologues spoken by the city's everyman, embodied by the actor who played his heroes best, John Garfield. His use of David Raksin's score in Force of Evil, against the backdrop of the grandeur of New York City's landscape and the conflict between the brothers Joe and Leo Mo

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Few directors in the past three decades have produced movies more compelling, controversial, or confounding than David Lynch (b. 1946). And fewer still have been so reluctant to talk about what they do. In this collection, editor Richard A. Barney has chosen the rare interviews in which Lynch opens up to questions rather than deflecting them. Whether Lynch is talking about his earliest film shorts such as The Grandmother or the break-out surrealist feature Eraserhead, the hit TV series Twin Peaks or his Oscar-nominated The Elephant Man or Blue Velvet or his most recent experimental tours de force, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, he stresses the power of image and sound to communicate his vision.David Lynch: Interviews is the first survey of conversations with the director covering the broad spectrum of his artistic activities throughout his career, including filmmaking, painting, music production, and furniture design. It documents the evolution of Lynch's role in discussing his movies, from his self-described ""pre-verbal stage"" in the early years to his increasingly elaborate, though persistently elusive, articulations. It also registers the intense international interest in Lynch's work, with interviews from French and Spanish sources translated here for the first time.

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Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) was one of Russia's most influential and renowned filmmakers, despite an output of only seven feature films in twenty years. Revered by such filmmaking giants as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, Tarkovsky is famous for his use of long takes, languid pacing, dreamlike metaphorical imagery, and meditations on spirituality and the human soul. His Andrei Roublev, Solaris, and The Mirror are considered landmarks of postwar Russian cinema.Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews is the first English-language collection of interviews with and profiles of the filmmaker. It includes conversations originally published in French, Italian, Russian, and British periodicals. With pieces from 1962 through 1986, the collection spans the breadth of Tarkovsky's career. In the volume, Tarkovsky candidly and articulately discusses the difficulties of making films under the censors of the Soviet Union. He explores his aesthetic ideology, filmmakers he admires, and his eventual self-exile from Russia. He talks about recurring images in his movies--water, horses, fire, snow--but adamantly refuses to divulge what they mean, as he feels that would impose his own meaning onto the audience. At times cagey and resistant to interviewers, Tarkovsky nevertheless reveals his vision and his rigorous devotion to his art.

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Contributions by Michelle Ann Abate, William S. Armour, Alison Bechdel, Jennifer Camper, Tesla Cariani, Matthew Cheney, Hillary Chute, Edmond (Edo) Ernest dit Alban, Ramzi Fawaz, Margaret Galvan, Justin Hall, Alison Halsall, Lara Hedberg, Susanne Hochreiter, Sheena C. Howard, Rebecca Hutton, remus jackson, Keiko Miyajima, Chinmay Murali, Marina Rauchenbacher, Katharina Serles, Sathyaraj Venkatesan, Jonathan Warren, and Lin Young The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader explores the exemplary trove of LGBTQ+ comics that coalesced in the underground and alternative comix scenes of the mid-1960s and in the decades after. Through insightful essays and interviews with leading comics figures, volume contributors illuminate the critical opportunities, current interactions, and future directions of these comics. This heavily illustrated volume engages with the work of preeminent artists across the globe, such as Howard Cruse, Edie Fake, Justin Hall, Jennifer Camper, and Ali

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Joan Didion (b. 1934) is an American icon. Her essays, particularly those in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, have resonated in American culture to a degree unmatched over the past half century. Two generations of writers have taken her as the measure of what it means to write personal essays. No one writes about California, the sixties, media narratives, cultural mythology, or migraines without taking Didion into account. She has also written five novels; several screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne; and three late-in-life memoirs, including The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, which have brought her a new wave of renown.Conversations with Joan Didion features seventeen interviews with the author, spanning decades, continents, and genres. Didion reflects on her childhood in Sacramento; her time at Berkeley (both as a student and later as a visiting professor), in New York, and in Hollywood; her marriage to Dunne; and of course her writing

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Prolific British director Michael Winterbottom (b. 1961) might be hard to pin down and even harder to categorize. Over sixteen years, he has created feature films as disparate and stylistically diverse as Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People, In This World, Butterfly Kiss, and The Killer Inside Me. But in this collection, the first English-language volume to gather international profiles and substantive interviews with the Blackburn native, Winterbottom reveals how working with small crews, available light, handheld digital cameras, radio mics, and minuscule budgets allows him fewer constraints than most filmmakers, and the ability to capture the specificity of the locations where he shoots. In Michael Winterbottom: Interviews he emerges as an industrious filmmaker committed to a stripped-down approach whose concern with outsiders and docu-realist authenticity have remained constant throughout his career. Collecting pieces from news periodicals as well as scholarly journals,

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Examines the works of contemporary writers from eight Caribbean countries. Authors from Anglophone, Francophone, and Spanish-speaking countries illustrate experiences across the African Diaspora, including enslavement, colonialism, revolt, marronnage, and decolonization.

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Liv Ullmann (b. 1938) has played many roles over the course of her long life: actress, mother, activist, author, and director. Her lead performances in such Ingmar Bergman classics as Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, and Cries and Whispers kept her in close proximity to crafts involved in screenwriting, film direction, and production. In 1992, Ullmann directed her first film Sofie and, with the quick succession of such recent masterpieces as Private Confessions, Kristin Lavransdatter, and Faithless, Ullmann has emerged as one of the most challenging, startling filmmakers working today. Tracing her artistic evolution, Liv Ullmann: Interviews reveals how her acting and her personal life have shaped her filmmaking. She also does not shy away from exploring her complicated relationship with Bergman. Ullmann candidly discusses how Bergman's work—he wrote the screenplays for Private Confessions and Faithless—has influenced her own, but she also points out the ways in which she has diverged from his cinematic and moral vision. She talks about her feminist activism, her interest in Jewish culture, and her work as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, and how all of these experiences have affected her filmmaking. The volume features interviews and profiles from the early 1970s through 2004 and closes with a long interview conducted by the editor specifically for this volume. Liv Ullmann: Interviews provides an unusually intimate look at how a major filmmaker has developed her craft, both in front of and behind the camera. Robert Emmet Long is the author of over forty books, including James Ivory in Conversation: How Merchant Ivory Makes Its Movies, The Films of Merchant Ivory, and Broadway, the Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors, 1940 to the Present.

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Pierrot Barra and his wife Marie Cassaise are the most astonishing artists that the author of this fascinating book has encountered in more than a decade of researching Vodou in Haiti. He discovered them deep in the ramshackle Iron Market of downtown Port-au-Prince where they make and sell what he considers to be the most original Vodou art in the world. In the glitter and bustle of the market Barra and Cassaise discern the lurking forms of divinities they serve as both priests and artists. From rubber dolls, sunglasses, holy cards, barbecue forks, goats' horns, speedometers, rosaries, junk jewelry, compact mirrors, Christmas ornaments, crucifixes, sequins, and velour they assemble fantastic sculptures that portray the fiery and potent gods of Haiti. Inspired through dreams sent by his divine mentor Ogou - generalissimo of the Vodou pantheon - Pierrot tears apart these random commodities and brings them back to new life with pop-it beads and tinselcord. Displaying the power of a magician, he transforms heaps of rubble into glamorous repositories for the capricious and demanding gods who rule his life and guide his work. This volume focuses on how Barra and Cassaise redefine ancient African-American traditions of sacred art, even as they push those traditions in directions the author views as ""postmodern"" or ""outsider art."" The author warns, however, that no matter how their appreciators may choose to label their art, Pierrot Barra and Marie Cassaise remain deeply Haitian and profoundly Vodou. Their sculptures capture the cultural history of a country sustained by distant memories of Africa, haunted by the imagery of Catholic saints and Masonic regalia, and bewitched by imported Hollywood kitsch. For them, lithographs of the Virgin Mary nestle easily with plastic figurines of Bugs Bunny. Yet even within a tradition open to these sorts of commercial pentecosts, the liberties taken by the artists are breathtaking. Donald J. Cosentino is chair of the folklore program at UCLA and editor of African Arts magazine.

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Contributions by Daniel J. Connell, Esther De Dauw, Craig Haslop, Drew Murphy, Richard Reynolds, Janne Salminen, Karen Sugrue, and James C. TaylorThe superhero permeates popular culture from comic books to film and television to internet memes, merchandise, and street art. Toxic Masculinity: Mapping the Monstrous in Our Heroes asks what kind of men these heroes are and if they are worthy of the unbalanced amount of attention. Contributors to the volume investigate how the (super)hero in popular culture conveys messages about heroism and masculinity, considering the social implications of this narrative within a cultural (re)production of dominant, hegemonic values and the possibility of subaltern ideas, norms, and values to be imagined within that (re)production.Divided into three sections, the volume takes an interdisciplinary approach, positioning the impact of hypermasculinity on toxic masculinity and the vilification of 'other' identities through such mediums as fi

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Throughout his career Oliver Stone (b. 1946) has broken traditions and challenged audiences with a series of daring, angry, violent, and often confrontational films. Politically charged movies such as Nixon (1995), JFK (1991), and Wall Street (1987), and his Vietnam trilogy of Platoon (1986), Born on the 4th of July (1989), and Heaven and Earth (1993) provoke and enrage critics and audiences from all ideological walks. In a short time, Stone has established himself as one of the most admired and most reviled directors in American cinema. Ranging from 1981 to 1997, the fifteen conversations featured in Oliver Stone: Interviews reveal a man frustrated by what he sees as the hypocrisies of American politics, of conservatism, and of the Hollywood film industry. But the conflicts and tensions these issues generate spellbind him. In the interviews, Stone comes off as a man as brash, outspoken, confident, and complicated as his movies. His obsessions -- the 1960s, the ways in which Vietnam shaped the country, the nature of violence, and the role of the media in shaping it -- resurface again and again, no matter what film Stone is discussing. Though the subjects of Nixon, JFK, Born on the 4th of July, The Doors (1991), and Heaven and Earth are rooted in the turbulent 1960s, Stone as interviewee and filmmaker is firmly entrenched in the present. He fiercely discusses how the attitudes and political effects of the 1960s have defined later decades and generations, as he talks about his satire of the stock market (Wall Street, 1987) and media exposure (Natural Born Killers, 1994). Bolts of the director's raw wit and enthusiasm for the cinema shine through all of Stone's ferocious rage. Stone loves writing as well as directing. Whether discussing his screenplays written for other directors -- which include Scarface (1983), Midnight Express (1978), or Conan the Barbarian (1982, with director John Milius) -- or his own films, Stone emphasizes how crucial screenwriting is to making great movies. ""Directing is a natural extension of writing,"" he says in a 1987 interview with Michel Ciment. ""A director can always pull through with noise everywhere and his colleagues around. I don't think a good director can make a good film with a bad screenplay, but a bad director can deliver an acceptable film if he has a good screenplay. So for me, that's the number one priority."" Charles L. P. Silet is a professor of English at Iowa State University.

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This wide-ranging and insightful collection of interviews with D. A. Pennebaker (19252019) spans the prolific career of this pioneer of observational cinema. From the 1950s, Pennebaker made documentary films that revealed the world of politics, celebrity culture, and the music industry. Following his early collaborations with Robert Drew on a number of works for television, his feature-length portrait of Bob Dylan on tour in England in 1965 (the landmark film Dont Look Back) established so-called direct cinema as a form capable of achieving broad theatrical release. With Monterey Pop, Pennebaker inaugurated the popular mode of rock concert film (or rockumentary), a style of filmmaking he expanded on through a number of films, including Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Depeche Mode: 101. Pennebaker always regarded collaboration as an integral part of his filmmaking methods. His long-running collaboration with Richard Leacock and subsequently his work with Chris Hegedus en

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This first-of-its-kind collection of interviews documents the engagement of filmmaker Gaspar Noé (b. 1963) with the feverish reception of his work and received ideas about his life and politics. Collecting conversations with critics, scholars, and artists, Noé speaks about his process as a writer, director, cinematographer, and editor.

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Who Framed Roger Rabbit emerged at a nexus of people, technology, and circumstances that is historically, culturally, and aesthetically momentous. By the 1980s, animation seemed a dying art. Not even the Walt Disney Company, which had already won over thirty Academy Awards, could stop what appeared to be the end of an animation era. To revitalize popular interest in animation, Disney needed to reach outside its own studio and create the distinctive film that helped usher in a Disney Renaissance. That film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, though expensive and controversial, debuted in theaters to huge success at the box office in 1988. Unique in its conceit of cartoons living in the real world, Who Framed Roger Rabbit magically blended live action and animation, carrying with it a humor that still resonates with audiences. Upon the film's release, Disney's marketing program led the audience to believe that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was made solely by director Bob Zemeckis, director of animation Dick Williams, and the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, though many Disney animators contributed to the project. Author Ross Anderson interviewed over 140 artists to tell the story of how they created something truly magical. Anderson describes the ways in which the Roger Rabbit characters have been used in film shorts, commercials, and merchandising, and how they have remained a cultural touchstone today.

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David Fincher (b. 1962) did not go to film school and hates being defined as an auteur. He prefers to see himself as a craftsman, dutifully going about the art and business of making film. Trouble is, it's hard to be self-effacing when you are the director responsible for Se7en, Fight Club, and The Social Network. Along with Quentin Tarantino, Fincher is the most accomplished of the Generation X filmmakers to emerge in the early 1990s. This collection of interviews highlights Fincher's unwavering commitment to his craft as he evolved from an entrepreneurial music video director (Fincher helped Madonna become the undisputed queen of MTV) into an enterprising feature filmmaker. Fincher landed his first Hollywood blockbuster at twenty-seven with Alien3, but that film, handicapped by cost overruns and corporate mismanagement, taught Fincher that he needed absolute control over his work. Once he had it, with Se7en, he achieved instant box-office success and critical acclaim, as well as a close partnership with Brad Pitt that led to the cult favorite Fight Club. Fincher became circumspect in the 2000s after Panic Room, shooting ads and biding his time until Zodiac, when he returned to his mantra that ""entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything's not okay."" Zodiac reinvigorated Fincher, inspiring a string of films--The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo--that enthralled audiences and garnered his films dozens of Oscar nominations.

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American filmmaker John Cassavetes (1929-1989) made only nine independent films during a quarter century, but those films affected the cinema culture of the 1960s to the 1980s in unprecedented ways. With a close nucleus of actors and crew members on his team, Cassavetes created films that explored the gritty side of human relationships.

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Minas Gerais is a state in southeastern Brazil deeply connected to the nation’s slave past and home to many traditions related to the African diaspora. Addressing a range of traditions helping to define the region, Jonathon Grasse examines the complexity of Minas Gerais by exploring the intersections of its history, music, and culture.

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Virtuoso Chris Ware (b. 1967) has achieved some noteworthy firsts for comics. Editor Jean Braithwaite compiles interviews displaying both Ware's erudition and his quirky self-deprecation. They span Ware's career from 1993 to 2015, creating a time-lapse portrait of the artist as he matures.

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During his life, Gene Nunnery was recognized as a master turkey hunter and an artisan who crafted unique, almost irresistible turkey calls. In The Old Pro Turkey Hunter, the vaunted sportsman shares over fifty years of personal experience in Mississippi and surrounding states, along with the decades-old wisdom of the huntsmen who taught him.

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Reveals the poignant experiences of American youth who were sent out on the road by grinding poverty, shattered family relationships, and financially strapped schools that locked their doors. The book captures an appalling spectacle and social problem in America’s history before any effort was made to meet the problem on a nationwide basis.

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Innovative and intense, Cloverfield was blockbuster filmmaking at its best. The film’s franchising followed the path of high-profile Hollywood properties. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the franchise, measuring how it steers between the commercial potential, creative risks, and political challenges in Hollywood.

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Though he has made only five films in two decades, Australian writer-director Baz Luhrmann is an internationally known brand name. In this collection of interviews, Luhrmann discusses his methods and his motives, explaining what has been important to him and his collaborators from the start and how he has been able to maintain an independence from the studios that have backed his films.

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Winnie Lightner (1899-1971) stood out as the first great female comedian of the talkies. David L. Lightner shows how Winnie Lightner's hilarious performance in the 1929 musical comedy Gold Diggers of Broadway made her an overnight sensation. At long last, this biography gives Winnie Lightner the recognition she deserves as a notable figure in film history.

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The interviews in this book offer a range of insights into the theoretical, critical, and practical circumstances of Eric Rohmer's remarkably coherent body of films, but also allow Rohmer to act as his own critic, providing us with an array of readings concerning his interest in setting, season, colour, and narrative.

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Includes twenty interviews with Fred Schepisi and two with longtime collaborators, cinematographer Ian Baker and composer Paul Grabowsky. The interviews trace the filmmaker's career from his beginnings in advertising, through his two early Australian features to his subsequent work in the United States and beyond.

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With this new collection of interviews, readers will recognise the themes that motivate Steven Spielberg, the cinematic techniques he employs to create his feature films, and the emotional connection he has to his movies. The result is a nuanced and engaging portrait of the most popular director in American cinema history.

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This collection of interviews with James Baldwin covers the period 1961 to 1987, from the year of the publication of Nobody Knows My Names, his fourth book, to just a few weeks before his death. It includes the last formal conversation with him.

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Shows how L. Frank Baum exploited the freedoms of children’s literature, in its carnivalesque celebration of a world turned upside-down, to reimagine the meanings of gender and sexuality in early twentieth-century America and to re-envision them for the future.

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During the years 1959-1966 Mississippi universities dominated the Southeastern Conference (SEC) in the big three sports - basketball, baseball, and football. Picking up in the late fifties, James Crockett explores the most decisive wins in each major sport, beginning at the source of these victories: the extraordinary coaches.

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The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 took the American military by surprise. Rushing to respond, the US and its allies developed a selective overflight program to gather intelligence. This book offers a history of the Cold War overflights of the Soviet Union and China, based on extensive interviews with dozens of pilots.

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A collaboration between Kyle DeCoste and more than a dozen members of the Stooges Brass Band, past and present. Told with humor and candour, this book is as much a personal account of the Stooges' careers as it is a story of New Orleans' musicians and a coming-of-age tale about black men in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century.

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Tells the story of Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Iola Brubeck and the stand they took against segregation by writing and performing a jazz musical titled The Real Ambassadors. First conceived in 1956, the musical's journey to the stage tracks extraordinary twists and turns across the backdrop of the civil rights movement.

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