Search results for ""University Press of Mississippi""

This is the first collection of interviews with John Ford (1895--1973), whom many aficionados of fine films consider not only the major American filmmaker but also one of the most extraordinary American artists of the twentieth century. Among the world's filmmakers who have been devotees of Ford's work are Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Wim Wenders, and Orson Welles, who, when asked from whom he learned how to make Citizen Kane, exclaimed ""John Ford, John Ford, John Ford!"" And yet, Ford, unquestionably a giant of the international film world, is far less known, his genius less recognized, although his accomplishments comprise perhaps the best film biography of all time (Young Mr. Lincoln), the best war film (They Were Expendable), a masterly romance (The Quiet Man), a sublime film of childhood (How Green Was My Valley), classic adaptations from fiction (The Grapes of Wrath, The Long Voyage Home), and the American Western, on which he left his indelible signature (Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Searchers). Although his was a brilliant career, Ford was not a self-promoter. He refused to discuss his film art. In fact, with interviewers he proved to be gruff and impatient. With those who asked him intellectual questions he was downright cantankerous. His sarcasm, impatience, and occasional mean-spiritedness were quick to surface during interviews. The legend is that he was the interviewee from hell. Yet there were times when he let the walls down and spoke openly and even generously. This book includes at least a dozen such lucid encounters with him, many reprinted for the first time. Also for the first time, several French interviews have been translated into English and show how with French critics Ford enjoyed making conversation. Included too are interviews newly discovered and not listed previously in any bibliography, as well as his poignant and revelatory interviews granted when he knew he was dying. Gerald Peary, a professor of communication and journalism at Suffolk University in Boston, is a film critic for the Boston Phoenix and editor of Quentin Tarantino: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi).

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Pulitzer Prize--winning author Richard Ford is a leading figure among American writers of the post--World War II generation. His novel The Sportswriter (1986), along with its sequel Independence Day (1995)--the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year--made Frank Bascombe, Ford's suburban Everyman, as much a part of the American literary landscape as John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom. With three other novels, a critically acclaimed volume of short stories, and a trilogy of novellas to his credit, Ford's reputation and his place in the canon is certainly secure. In Conversations with Richard Ford, the first collection of this author's interviews and profiles, editor Huey Guagliardo has gathered together twenty-eight revealing conversations spanning a quarter of a century. These show that Ford is a writer of paradoxes. He was born in the South, but unlike many southern-born writers of his generation he eschews writing set in just one region. When his first novel, A Piece of My Heart (1976), was so often compared to William Faulkner's work, Ford disdained setting another novel in his native South. A recurring question that Ford addresses in these interviews is his view of the role of place in both his fiction and his life. ""I need to be certain that I have a new stimulus,"" he says, explaining his traveling lifestyle. Not wishing to be confined by place in his writing any more than in his own life, Ford rejects the narrow concerns of regionalism, serving notice in several interviews that he is interested in exploring the entire country, that his goal is ""to write a literature that is good enough for America."" Ford also discusses the broader themes of his work, such as the struggle to overcome loneliness, the consoling potential of language, and the redeeming quality of human affection. This American writer talks extensively about his abiding devotion to language and of his profound belief in the power of narrative to forge human connections. Words, Ford says, can ""narrow that space Emerson calls the infinite remoteness that separates people."" The interviews also provide rare glimpses into the personal life of this intriguing and complex man. Ford discusses his fondness for motorcycles, Brittany spaniels, bird hunting, fishing, and Bruce Springsteen. He also talks about his reputation as a ""tough guy,"" shares his political views, and admits to being ""drawn to places where life is a little near the edge."" Huey Guagliardo is a professor and coordinator of English at Louisiana State University at Eunice. He edited Perspectives on Richard Ford (University Press of Mississippi).

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Second Line Rescue: Improvised Responses to Katrina and Rita chronicles the brave and creative acts through which Gulf Coast people rescued their neighbors during the chaotic aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Ordinary citizens joined in with whatever resources they had. Unlike many of the official responders, vernacular rescuers found ways around paralysis produced by a breakdown in communications and infrastructure. They were able to dispel unfounded fears produced by erroneous or questionable reporting. The essays, personal narratives, media reports, and field studies presented here all have to do with effective and often ingenious answers that emerged from the people themselves. Their solutions are remarkably different from the hamstrung government response, and their perspectives are a tonic to sensationalized media coverage.The first part of the collection deals with Gulf Coast rescuers from outside stricken communities: those who, safe in their own homes and neighborhoods, marshaled their resources to help their fellow citizens. It includes some analysis and scholarly approaches, but it also includes direct responses and first-hand field reports. The second part features the words of hurricane survivors displaced from New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities to Houston, Texas. In many cases, the ""victims"" themselves were the first responders, rescuing family, friends, and strangers. All of the stories, whether from the ""outside"" or ""inside"" responders, reveal a shared history of close-knit community bonds and survival skills sharpened by hard times. This book is about what went right in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita--in spite of all that went so wrong.

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In the early twentieth century, the art world was captivated by the imaginative, totally original paintings of Henri Rousseau, who, seemingly without formal art training, produced works that astonished not only the public but great artists such as Pablo Picasso. Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) is known as the ""Rousseau of the cinema,"" a mostly ""B"" genre Hollywood moviemaker deeply admired by ""A"" filmmakers as diverse as Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and John Cassavetes, all of them dazzled by Fuller's wildly idiosyncratic primitivist style. A high-school dropout who became a New York City tabloid crime reporter in his teens, Fuller went to Hollywood and made movies post-World War II that were totally in line with his exploitative newspaper work: bold, blunt, pulpy, excitable. The images were as shocking, impolite, and in-your-face as a Weegee photograph of a gangster bleeding on a sidewalk. Fuller, who made twenty-three features between 1949 and 1989, is the very definition of a ""cult"" director, appreciated by those with a certain bent of subterranean taste, a penchant for what critic Manny Farber famously labeled as ""termite art."" Here are some of the crazy, lurid, comic-book titles of his movies: Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, Verboten!, Pickup on South Street. Fuller isn't for everybody. His fans have to appreciate low-budget genre films, including westerns and war movies, and make room for some hard-knuckle, ugly bursts of violence. They also have to make allowance for lots of broad, crass acting, and scripts (all Fuller-written) that can be stiff, sometimes campy, often laboriously didactic. Fuller is for those who love cinema--images that jump, shout, dance. As he put it in his famous cigar-chomping cameo, acting in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965): ""Film is like a battleground . . . love, hate, violence, death. In a single word: emotion."" After directing, Sam Fuller's greatest skill was conversation. He could talk, talk, talk, from his amazing experiences fighting in World War II to the time his brother-in-law dated Marilyn Monroe, and vivid stories about his moviemaking. Samuel Fuller: Interviews, edited by Gerald Peary, is not only informative about the filmmaker's career but sheer fun, following the wild, totally uninhibited stream of Fuller's chatter. He was an incredible storyteller, and, no matter the interview, he had stories galore for all sorts of readers, not just academics and film historians.

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What Moves at the Margin collects three decades of Toni Morrison's writings about her work, her life, literature, and American society. The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931) was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate. Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison's viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture. The first section of the book, ""Family and History,"" includes Morrison's writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, ""Writers and Writing,"" offers her assessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, ""Politics and Society,"" includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture. Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones's Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison's Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature's most thoughtful and eloquent writers. Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University and is the author of Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and other novels. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the Toni Morrison Society.

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This reprinting makes available again the only book of its kind to be focused upon the prehistoric Indians of Mississippi. Although written expressly for the layreader, it has continued for more than eighty years to appeal to a wide audience that ranges from professional archeologists and scholars to weekend artifact collectors.Published originally in 1926, Archeology of Mississippi details Brown's records collected during more than a decade of research. Anyone wishing to investigate archeology in Mississippi must start with this book. As early as 1912 Brown, a professor of romance languages at the University of Mississippi, began taking photographs of Mississippi Indian mounds. His are the only photographic records of certain cultural sites that have since then been drastically altered.

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What do such artists as Bob Marley, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Nina Simone, and Sun Ra have in common? All created uniquely powerful musical art that had a profound effect on their audiences. Through their music and their lives they became forces for liberation, challenging the established order and inspiring people around the world to look at life in new ways. So great was their originality that to a large extent they created their own musical genres, and listeners claim the music leads them to a higher state of being. Great Spirits: Portraits of Life-Changing World Music Artists presents personal encounters with some of the most interesting and important musical artists of the past fifty years--Bob Marley, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Nina Simone, Sun Ra, Augustus Pablo, the Neville Brothers, Yabby You, and Nadia Gamal. Based on the author's meetings and interviews with these giants, the pieces reveal the unique essence of each musician as a person, as an artist, and as a force for social change. Spanning the realms of jazz, blues, reggae, gospel, African, and Middle Eastern music, these artists epitomize musical creation at its highest level.

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Despite appearing in twenty-eight movies in little over a decade, Carole Landis (1919-1948) never quite became the major Hollywood star her onscreen presence should have afforded her. Although she acted in such enduring films as A Scandal in Paris and Moon over Miami, she was most often relegated to supporting roles. Even when she played the major role in a feature, as she did in The Powers Girl and the film noir I Wake Up Screaming!, she was billed second or third behind other actors. This biography traces Landis's life, chronicling her beginnings as a dance hall entertainer in San Francisco, her career in Hollywood and abroad, her USO performances, and ultimately her suicide. Using interviews with actors who worked with Landis, contemporary movie magazines and journals, and correspondence, biographer Eric Gans reveals a tragic figure whose life was all too brief. Landis's big break came in 1940 with Hal Roach's One Million B.C. She appeared in thirteen Twentieth Century-Fox pictures between 1941 and 1946. In 1942-43, Landis entertained troops in England and North Africa in the only all-female USO tour. The trip led to her memoir, Four Jills in a Jeep, and a Fox movie of the same title. After her last American film in 1947, she completed two projects in England while having an affair with married actor Rex Harrison. Tormented by a love that could not lead to matrimony and depressed about growing older, she took a fatal drug overdose on July 5, 1948.

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A maverick, unionist district in the heart of the Old South? A notorious county that seceded from the Confederacy? This is how Jones County, Mississippi, is known in myth and legend.Since 1864, the legend has persisted. Differing versions give the name of this new nation as Republic of Jones, Jones County Confederacy, and Free State of Jones. Over the years this story has captured the imaginations of journalists, historians, essayists, novelists, short story writers, and Hollywood filmmakers, although serious scholars long ago questioned the accuracy of local history accounts about a secessionist county led by Newt Knight and a band of renegades.Legend of the Free State of Jones was the first authoritative explanation of just what did happen in Jones County in 1864 to give rise to the legend. This book surveys the facts, the records, and the history of the ""Free State of Jones"" and well may provide the whole story.

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In Thomas Jefferson on Wine, John Hailman celebrates a founding father's lifelong interest in wine and provides unprecedented insight into Jefferson's character from this unique perspective. In both his personal and public lives, Jefferson wielded his considerable expertise to influence the drinking habits of his friends, other founding fathers, and the American public away from hard liquor toward the healthier pleasures of wine.An international wine judge and nationally syndicated wine columnist, Hailman discusses how Jefferson's tastes developed, which wines and foods he preferred at different stages of his life, and how Jefferson became the greatest wine expert of the early American republic. Hailman explores the third president's fascination with scores of wines from his student days at Williamsburg to his lengthy retirement years at Monticello, often using Jefferson's own words from hundreds of immensely readable and surprisingly modern letters on the subject. A new epilogue covers the ongoing saga of the alleged wine swindle involving bottles of Bordeaux purported to belong to Jefferson.

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Queen Latifah's lyrics tout female superiority. Salt 'n Pepa energize with eroticism. Julie Brown's unsettling version of a campus queen dethrones the mainstream icon. Martina McBride's song of liberation gives new meaning to Independance Day. Today in the music video industry such women artists have assumed a remarkable and refreshing new presence. Although many popular videos have been condemned for sexism, the medium has experienced a striking change. Both in repertoires and in performances the politics of feminism has moved to the front row. More and more, women are being presented as strong and positive. Ladies First takes a close look at this exciting phenomenon and shows how both on and off screen strong females have assumed larger roles in the industry. Whether their songs are country, rock, or rap, the ladies of contemporary music video continue to assert, confront, and challenge. Demolishing stereotypes, today's singers expose the flawed images that have restricted women. They condemn male dominance. They assert the right of women to be sexual and to express sexuality. In country music, they rely on the power of sincerity and storytelling. In rap songs they self-promote, reach out, and give uplift. Their lyrics are skillful, clever, and infectiously appealing, and their inviting sense of humor makes a large audience embrace them and their messages.

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Especially in academia, controversy rages over the merits or evils of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in particular its portrayal of Jim, the runaway slave. Opponents disrupt classes and carry picket signs, objecting with strong emotion that Jim is no fit model for African-American youth of today. In continuing outcries they claim that he and the dark period of American history he portrays are best forgotten. That time has gone, Jim's opponents charge. This is a new day. But is it? Dare we forget? The author of The Jim Dilemma argues that Twain's novel, in the tradition of all great literature, is invaluable for transporting readers to a time, place, and conflict essential to understanding who we are today. Without this work, she argues, there would be a hole in American history and a blank page in the history of African-Americans. To avoid this work in the classroom is to miss the opportunity to remember. Few other popular books have been so much attacked, vilified, or censored. Yet Ernest Hemingway proclaimed Twain's classic to be the beginning of American literature, and Langston Hughes judged it as the only nineteenth-century work by a white author who fully and realistically depicts an unlettered slave clinging to the hope of freedom. A teacher herself, the author challenges opponents to read the novel closely. She shows how Twain has not created another Uncle Tom but rather a worthy man of integrity and self-reliance. Jim, along with other black characters in the book, demands a rethinking and a re-envisioning of the southern slave, for Huckleberry Finn, she contends, ultimately questions readers' notions of what freedom means and what it costs. As she shows that Twain portrayed Jim as nobody's fool, she focuses her discussion on both sides of the Jim dilemma and unflinchingly defends the importance of keeping the book in the classroom. Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua is director of the American studies program at Dallas Institute for the Humanities.

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Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald assembles over thirty interviews with one of America's greatest novelists, the author of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. Although most of these are not standard interviews in the modern sense, the quotes from Fitzgerald and the contemporary journalistic reaction to him reveal much about his writing techniques, artistic wisdom, and life. Editors Matthew J. Bruccoli, the foremost Fitzgerald scholar, and Judith S. Baughman have collected the most usable and articulate pieces on Fitzgerald, including a three-part 1922 interview conducted for the St. Paul Daily News. Fitzgerald (1896-1940) died before the authorial interview became a literary subgenre after World War II. Although Fitzgerald enjoyed his celebrity, as is clear in these pieces, he had a poor sense of public relations and provided interviewers with opportunities to trivialize him. As a result, Fitzgerald was often treated condescendingly in the press. Seven of his interviews-five printed before 1924-have flapper in their headlines. In the Jazz Age-a term Fitzgerald coined-he was regarded as a spokesman for rebellious youth, as a playboy, as an authority on sex and marriage, as an expert on Prohibition, and as an immensely popular writer for his work published in the Saturday Evening Post. Yet his literary ambitions were sizable and his impact on American fiction immeasurable. Matthew J. Bruccoli is Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He has written or edited thirty volumes on Fitzgerald, including the standard biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Judith S. Baughman, who works in the department of English at the University of South Carolina, has written the F. Scott Fitzgerald volume in the Gale Study Guides series and has edited American Decades: 1920-1929.

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Jazz is typically characterized as a uniquely American form of artistic expression, and narratives of its history are almost always set within the United States. Yet, from its inception, this art form exploded beyond national borders, becoming one of the first modern examples of a global music sensation. Jazz Planet collects essays that concentrate for the first time on jazz created outside the United States. What happened when this phenomenon met with indigenous musical practices? What debates on cultural integrity did this ""American"" styling provoke in far-flung places? Did jazz's insistence on individual innovation and its posture as a music of the disadvantaged generate shakeups in national identity, aesthetic values, and public morality? Through new and previously published essays, Jazz Planet recounts the music's fascinating journeys to Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. What emerges is a concept of jazz as a harbinger of current globalization, a process that has engendered both hope for a more enlightened and tranquil future and resistance to the anticipated loss of national identity and sovereignty. Essays in this collection describe the seldom-acknowledged contributions non-Americans have made to the art and explore the social and ideological crises jazz initiated around the globe. Was the rise of jazz in global prominence, they ask, simply a result of its inherent charm? Was it a vehicle for colonialism, Cold War politics, and emerging American hegemony? Jazz Planet provokes readers to question the nationalistic bias of most jazz scholarship, and to expand the pantheon of great jazz artists to include innovative musicians who blazed independent paths. E. Taylor Atkins is an associate professor of history at Northern Illinois University and is the author of Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan, awarded the John W. Hall Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2003 as the best book on Northeast Asia. His work has appeared in such periodicals as Japanese Studies and East-West Connections: Review of Asian Studies.

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With essays by Jan Baetens, David A. Beronä, Frank L. Cioffi, N. C. Christopher Couch, Robert C. Harvey, Gene Kannenberg, Jr., Catherine Khordoc, David Kunzle, Marion D. Perret, and Todd Taylor.In our culture, which depends increasingly on images for instruction and recreation, it is important to ask how words and images make meaning when they are combined. Comics, one of the most widely read media of the twentieth century, serves as an ideal for focusing an investigation on the word-and-image question.This collection of essays attempts to give an answer. The first six see words and images as separate art forms that play with or against each other. David Kunzle finds that words restrict the meaning of the art of Adolphe Willette and Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen in Le Chat Noir. David A. Beronä, examining wordless novels, argues that the ability to read pictures depends on the ability to read words. Todd Taylor draws on classical rhetoric to demonstrate that images in The Road Runner are more persuasive than words. N. C. Christopher Couch--writing on The Yellow Kid--and Robert C. Harvey--discussing early New Yorker cartoons--are both interested in the historical development of the partnership between words and images in comics. Frank L. Cioffi traces a disjunctive relationship of opposites in the work of Andrzej Mleczko, Ben Katchor, R. Crumb, and Art Spiegelman.The last four essays explore the integration of words and images. Among five comic book adaptations of Hamlet Marion D. Perret finds one in which words and images form a dialectic. Jan Baetens critiques the semiotically inspired theory of Phillippe Marion. Catherine Khordoc explores speech balloons in Asterix the Gaul. Gene Kannenberg, Jr., demonstrates how the Chicago-based artist Chris Ware blurs the difference between word and image.The Language of Comics, however, is the first collection of critical essays on comics to explore a single issue as it affects a variety of comics.

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In outstanding films that are sharply focused on unusual women Jane Campion has gained worldwide admiration and respect. This New Zealand director first attracted international attention with her 1989 film Sweetie, an acerbic study of two sisters in a wildly dysfunctional family. She followed this in 1990 with the television miniseries An Angel at My Table, based on the autobiography of New Zealand author Janet Frame. Subsequently released in theatres, the film chronicles the early trials of the young writer. Poor, timid, and physically awkward, Frame was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and was scheduled for a lobotomy, but her success as a writer enabled her to escape this fate and won her fame and acceptance. In 1993 in yet another story about an extraordinary woman, Campion made the award-winning film The Piano. It starred Holly Hunter as the Victorian mail-order bride who refuses to speak. Arriving in New Zealand with her young daughter, the young Scottish widow confronts isolation in the wilderness and communicates only via her piano until she finds real love in her husband's neighbor, played by Harvey Keitel. Campion next adapted Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, starring Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer, a young American heiress seduced by a decadent pair of expatriates living in Italy. In this collection of interviews Campion speaks of these films that have given women a revival as a strong screen presence. Campion tells of her early life in Wellington and of her training as a filmmaker in the 1980s at the Australian School of Film and Television. She speaks of those who have influenced her style and her experiences in making movies. Campion received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1993 and was the first woman director to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Virginia Wright Wexman, a professor of English and Associate Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs at University of Illinois, Chicago, has published Creating the Couple, Roman Polanski, and Letter from an Unknown Woman, as well as articles in Film Quarterly and Cinema Journal.

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From his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953), to his final, posthumously released Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick excelled at probing the dark corners of human consciousness. In doing so, he adapted such popular novels as The Killing, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining and selected a wide variety of genres for his films -- black comedy (Dr. Strangelove), science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey), and war (Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket). Because he was peerless in unveiling the intimate mysteries of human nature, no new film by Kubrick ever failed to spark debate or to be deeply pondered. Kubrick (1928-1999) has remained as elusive as the subjects of his films. Unlike many other filmmakers he was not inclined to grant interviews, instead preferring to let his movies speak for themselves. By allowing both critics and moviegoers to see the inner workings of this reclusive filmmaker, this first comprehensive collection of his relatively few interviews is invaluable. Ranging from 1959 to 1987 and including Kubrick's conversations with Gene Siskel, Jeremy Bernstein, Gene D. Phillips, and others, this book reveals Kubrick's diverse interests -- nuclear energy and its consequences, space exploration, science fiction, literature, religion, psychoanalysis, the effects of violence, and even chess -- and discloses how each affects his films. He enthusiastically speaks of how advances in camera and sound technology made his films more effective.Kubrick details his hands-on approach to filmmaking as he discusses why he supervises nearly every aspect of production. ""All the hand-held camerawork is mine,"" he says in a 1972 interview about A Clockwork Orange. ""In addition to the fun of doing the shooting myself, I find it virtually impossible to explain what I want in a hand-held shot to even the most talented and sensitive camera operator. ""Neither guarded nor evasive, the Kubrick who emerges from these interviews is candid, opinionated, confident, and articulate. His incredible memory and his gift for organization come to light as he quotes verbatim sections of reviews, books, and articles. Despite his reputation as a recluse, the Kubrick of these interviews is approachable, witty, full of anecdotes, and eager to share a fascinating story.

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Nominated for both an Academy Award for scriptwriting and a National Book Award, John Sayles has written screenplays, teleplays, short stories, and novels and has worked as a script doctor for a virtual who's who of Hollywood film and television talent. He has acted in films and on stage and even directed a music video for Bruce Springsteen. In making movies, Sayles has handled subjects as diverse as seventies activists in The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980); a 1920s Appalachian miners' strike in Matewan (1987); the 1919 Black Sox scandal in Eight Men Out (1988); the Selkies of Ireland in The Secret of Roan Inish (1994); and Latin American guerilla warfare in Men with Guns (1997). Conducted over a period of twenty years, these interviews span Sayles's career as a writer, director, and sometimes actor. Whether he is interviewed in The Progressive, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, or Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, Sayles is always direct and candid. In each conversation, he cuts to the core of the film business and to the meat of what he is trying to accomplish as an artist. Known for his fiercely independent vision, his authentic characters, and his provocative observations on the human condition, Sayles demonstrates in these interviews what an endurably original director and artist he is. As he tells Sight and Sound, ""First of all, I'm not afraid of failure. I don't get upset if people don't like it. I'm doing it because I'm interested. . . [Return of the Secaucus Seven] was the start, because even if I hadn't got it released, at least I've made a movie I wanted to make."" Diane Carson is Professor of Film Studies at St. Louis Community College at Meramec and Adjunct Professor of Film at Webster University, both in St. Louis, Missouri. A film critic for Riverfront Times and KDHX in St. Louis, she is also the editor of Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism.

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The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight features twenty-one conversations with musicians who have had at least fifty years of professional experience, and several as many as seventy-five. In all, these voices reflect some seventeen hundred years'' worth of paying dues. Appealing to casual fans and jazz aficionados alike, these interviews have been carefully, but minimally edited by Peter Zimmerman for sense and clarity, without changing any of the musicians'' actual words. Five of the interviewees--Dick Hyman, Jimmy Owens, Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, and Yusef Lateef--have received the National Endowment for the Arts'' prestigious Jazz Masters Fellowship, attesting to their importance and ability. While not official masters, the rest are veteran performers willing to share their experiences and knowledge. Artists such as David Amram, Charles Davis, Clifford Jordan, Valery Ponomarev, and Sandy Stewart, to name a few, open their hearts and memories and reveal who they a

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In the midst of calls for the removal of Confederate monuments across the South, tens of thousands of museums, buildings, and other historical sites currently comprise a tourist infrastructure of the southern heritage industry. Louisiana, one of the most prominent and frequently visited states that benefit from this tourism, has more than sixty heritage sites housed in former slave plantations. These sites contain the remains, restorations, reconstructions, and replicas of antebellum slave cabins and slave quarters. In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana is the first book to tackle the role, treatment, and representation of slave cabins at plantation museum sites in contemporary heritage tourism. In this volume, author Stephen Small describes and analyzes sixteen twenty-first-century antebellum slave cabins currently located on three plantation museum sites in Natchitoches, Louisiana: Oakland Plantation

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Examines Black-authored historical novels and films for children that depict creative means by which ordinary African Americans survived slavery and racism in early America. The book argues that this important, understudied historical writing calls on young readers to be active, critical thinkers about the past and its legacies within the present.

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From the 1920s through the 1960s, Pittsburgh's Hill District was the heart of the city's Black cultural life and home to a vibrant jazz scene. In Jazz in the Hill, Colter Harper looks at how jazz shaped the neighbourhood and created a way of life.

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Jack Kent (1920-1985) had two distinct and successful careers: newspaper cartoonist and author of children''s books. For each of these he drew upon different aspects of his personality and life experiences. From 1950 to 1965 he wrote and drew King Aroo, a nationally syndicated comic strip beloved by fans for its combination of absurdity, fantasy, wordplay, and wit. The strip''s DNA was comprised of things Kent loved--fairytales, nursery rhymes, vaudeville, Krazy Kat, foreign languages, and puns. In 1968, he published his first children''s book, Just Only John, and began a career in kids'' books that would result in over sixty published works, among them such classics as The Fat Cat and There''s No Such Thing as a Dragon. Kent''s stories for children were funny but often arose from the dark parts of his life--an itinerant childhood, an unfinished education, two harrowing tours of duty in World War II, and a persistent lack of confidence--and tackled su

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No city in America knows how to mark death with more funerary panache than New Orleans. The pageants commemorating departed citizens are often in themselves works of performance art. A grand obituary remains key to this Stygian passage. And no one writes them like New Orleanian John Pope. Collected here are not just simple, mindless recitations of schools and workplaces, marriages, and mourners bereft. These pieces in Getting Off at Elysian Fields are full-blooded life stories with accounts of great achievements, dubious dabblings, unavoidable foibles, relationships gone sour, and happenstances that turn out to be life-changing. To be sure, there are stories about Carnival monarchs, great philanthropists, and a few politicians. But because New Orleans embraces eccentric behavior, there are stories of people who colored way outside the lines. For instance, there was the doctor who used his plasma to make his flowers grow, and the philanthropist who took money she had put aside for a f

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Rooted in close analyses of the artist's numerous series and collections, each chapter in Ben Katchor is dedicated to a distinct aspect of the urban experience. Individual pages from Katchor's work depict not only the visual, but also the auditory, tactile, and olfactory dimensions of life in the city.

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The first book-length study of the acclaimed artist who brought journalistic reportage to comicsContributors: Georgiana Banita, Lan Dong, Ann D''Orazio, Kevin C. Dunn, Alexander Dunst, Jared Gardner, Edward C. Holland, Isabel Macdonald, Brigid Maher, Ben Owen, Rebecca Scherr, Maureen Shay, Marc Singer, Richard Todd Stafford, and Øyvind VågnesThe Comics of Joe Sacco addresses the range of his award-winning work, from his early comics stories as well as his ground-breaking journalism Palestine (1993) and Safe Area to Gorade (2000), to Footnotes in Gaza (2009) and his most recent book The Great War (2013), a graphic history of World War I.First in the new series Critical Approaches to Comics Artists, this edited volume explores Sacco''s comics journalism, and features established and emerging scholars from comics studies, cultural studies, geography, literary studies, political science, and communication studies. Sacco''s work has already found a place in some of the foundational scholars

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Offers analyses of the works of writers of the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora. The volume addresses the four language regions, early children’s literature of conquest - in particular, the US colonization of Puerto Rico - and the fine line between children’s and adult literature.

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Brings together fourteen profiles of and conversations with Albert Brooks, in which he contemplates, expounds upon, and hilariously jokes about the connections between his show business upbringing, an ambivalence about the film industry, the nature of fame and success, and the meaning and purpose of comedy.

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In the midst of calls for the removal of Confederate monuments across the South, tens of thousands of museums, buildings, and other historical sites currently comprise a tourist infrastructure of the southern heritage industry. Louisiana, one of the most prominent and frequently visited states that benefit from this tourism, has more than sixty heritage sites housed in former slave plantations. These sites contain the remains, restorations, reconstructions, and replicas of antebellum slave cabins and slave quarters. In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana is the first book to tackle the role, treatment, and representation of slave cabins at plantation museum sites in contemporary heritage tourism. In this volume, author Stephen Small describes and analyzes sixteen twenty-first-century antebellum slave cabins currently located on three plantation museum sites in Natchitoches, Louisiana: Oakland Plantation

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Presents eleven interviews, drawn from Jimmy Carter’s five decades as a public figure, that capture the complexities and contradictions that have defined him - and that have helped to both reflect and shape the highest aspirations of the American experiment.

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Contributions by Georgiana Banita, Colin Beineke, Harriet Earle, Ariela Freedman, Liza Futerman, Shawn Gilmore, Sarah Hamblin, Cara Koehler, Lee Konstantinou, Patrick Lawrence, Philip Smith, and Kent Worcester A carefully curated, wide-ranging edited volume tracing Art Spiegelman''s exceptional trajectory from underground rebellion to mainstream success, Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman reveals his key role in the rise of comics as an art form and of the cartoonist as artist. The collection grapples with Spiegelman''s astonishing versatility, from his irreverent underground strips, influential avant-garde magazine RAW, the expressionist style of the comics classic Maus, the illustrations to the Jazz Age poem The Wild Party, and his response to the September 11 terrorist attacks to his iconic cover art for the New Yorker, his children''s books, and various cross-media collaborations. The twelve chapters cut across Spiegelman''s career

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Part history, part memoir, Outliving the White Lie charts conflicting narratives of American and southern identity through a blend of public, family, and deeply personal history. James Wiggins, who was raised in rural Mississippi, pairs thorough historical research with his own lived experiences.

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Memories of Africa: Home and Abroad in the United States suggests a new lens for viewing African diaspora studies: the experiences of African memoirists who live in the United States. The book shows how African diaspora memoirs beautifully and grippingly depict the experiences of African migrants over time through political, social, and cultural spheres. In reading African diaspora memoirs from the transatlantic slave trade period to the present, a reader can understand the complexity of the African migrant legacy and evolution.Author Toyin Falola argues that memoirs are significant not only in their interpretation of events conveyed by the memoirists but also in demonstrating how interpersonal and human the stories told can be. Memoirs are powerful because they are emotionally captivating and because important themes and events circulate aroun

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Beginning in 1957 with the release of his directorial debut The Left Handed Gun, Arthur Penn (b. 1922) quickly became an iconoclastic and influential American film director. Moving deftly between comedy and tragedy, realism and absurdity, his films Mickey One, Bonnie and Clyde, Alice's Restaurant, Little Big Man, and Night Moves speak to the troubled times--the 1960s and 1970s--in which they were made while remaining timeless in their unsettling portrayal of characters on the margins of society. Arthur Penn: Interviews is the first collection to explore every stage of the director's career. These conversations span forty-five years, from his first in-depth discussion with Cahiers du cinéma in 1963 to a new interview from 2007, and reveal Penn's ever-changing ideas on the nature of film and filmmaking. This volume also presents newly translated interviews from European film periodicals, published in English for the first time.

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In a world where movie marketers are the stars of the story, Opening Weekend recounts Jim Fredrick's journey through the realm of movie marketing. Fredrick offers exclusive access to behind-the-scenes anecdotes and firsthand accounts of working with studio executives and navigating relationships with famous movie stars and directors.

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Though George Perez's style is highly recognizable, his contributions to comic art and history have not been fully acknowledged. Patrick Hamilton addresses this neglect, by discussing Perez's artistic style within the context of Bronze Age superhero art, and by analysing Perez's work for its representations of race, disability, and gender.

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This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement is a paradigm-shifting publication that presents the Civil Rights Movement through the work of nine photographers who participated in the movement as activists with SNCC, SCLC, and CORE. Unlike images produced by photojournalists, who covered breaking news events, these photographers lived within the movement—primarily within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) framework—and documented its activities by focusing on the student activists and local people who together made it happen. The core of the book is a selection of 150 black-and-white photographs, representing the work of photographers Bob Adelman, George Ballis, Bob Fitch, Bob Fletcher, Matt Herron, David Prince, Herbert Randall, Maria Varela, and Tamio Wakayama. Images are grouped around four movement themes and convey SNCC's organizing strategies, resolve in the face of violence, impact on local and national politics, and influence on the nation's consciousness. The photographs and texts of This Light of Ours remind us that the movement was a battleground, that the battle was successfully fought by thousands of "ordinary" Americans among whom were the nation's courageous youth, and that the movement's moral vision and impact continue to shape our lives.

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Once heralded as the Black Mecca of the South, Atlanta's Black community is now under threat of dislocation by gentrification. Amid the city's urban renaissance, residents face rising costs, and the loss of a collective identity and belonging. This book examines the fading echoes of African American memory and historical narratives in Atlanta.

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In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family’s roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. Theirs is a tale of suspense, awkward romance, naughty French lessons, and an insider’s take on a truly remarkable, not-yet-homogenized pocket of American culture.

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Ashton, Mississippi, provides the deceptively sterile, conforming, and blindly respectable background in The Welcome, a novel written by Hubert Creekmore in 1948. Ahead of its time in the depiction of same-sex relationships, the novel caused a scandal upon release.

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Creole Soul: Zydeco Lives is an exquisitely photographed volume of interviews with contemporary zydeco musicians. Featuring the voices of zydeco’s venerable senior generation and its current agents of change, this book celebrates a musical world full of passion, energy, cowboy hats and boots, banging bass, horse trailers, joy, and dazzling dance moves. Author Burt Feintuch captures an important American music in the process of significant—and sometimes controversial—change. Creole Soul draws us into conversations with zydeco musicians from Texas and Louisiana, most of them bandleaders, including Ed Poullard, Lawrence "Black" Ardoin, Step Rideau, Brian Jack, Jerome Batiste, Ruben Moreno, Nathan Williams Jr., Leroy Thomas, Corey Ledet, Sean Ardoin, and Dwayne Dopsie. Some of the interviewees represent the contemporary scene and are among today’s most popular performers along the Creole Corridor. Others are rooted in older French music forms and are especially well qualified to talk about zydeco’s origins. The musicians speak freely, whether discussing the death of a famed musician or describing a memorable performance, such as when Boozoo Chavis played the accordion while dripping blood on stage shortly after a freak barbeque-building accident that sliced off parts of two of his fingers. They address the influence of rap on today’s zydeco music and discuss how to pass music along to a younger generation—and how not to. They weigh the merits of the old-time zydeco clubs versus today’s casinos and African American trailrides, which come complete with horses and the loudest zydeco bands you can imagine. In Creole Soul, zydeco musicians give an unprecedented look into their lives, their music, and their culture.

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Winner of the 2020 Peter C. Rollins Book AwardLonglisted for the 2020 Moving Image Book Award by the Kraszna-Krausz FoundationNamed a 2019 Richard Wall Memorial Award Finalist by the Theatre Library Association Herman J. (1897-1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture''s only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture. Despite triumphs as diverse as Monkey Business and Cleopatra, and Pride of the Yankees and Guys and Dolls, the witty, intellectual brothers spent their Hollywood years deeply discontented and yearning for what they did not have--a career in New York theater. Herman, formerly an Algonquin Round Table habitué, New York Times and New Yorker theater

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Since the publication of her groundbreaking novel, Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison (b. 1949) has been known—as with Larry Brown and Lee Smith—as a purveyor of the working-class, contemporary South. Allison has frequently used her position, through passionate lectures and enthusiastic interviews, to give voice to issues dear to her: poverty, working-class life, domestic violence, feminism and women’s relationships, the contemporary South, and gay/lesbian life. Often called a "writer-rock star" and a "cult icon," Allison is a true performer of the written word. At the same time, Allison also takes the craft of writing very seriously. In this collection, spanning almost two decades, Allison the performer and Allison the careful craftsperson both emerge, creating a portrait of a complex woman. In the absence of a biography of Allison’s life, Conversations with Dorothy Allison presents Allison’s perspectives on her life, literature, and her conflicted role as a public figure.

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Conversations with Donald Hall offers a unique glimpse into the creative process of a major American poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and teacher. The volume probes in depth Hall's evolving views on poetry, poets, and the creative process over a period of more than sixty years. Donald Hall (1928-2018) reveals vivid, funny, and moving anecdotes about T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the sculptor Henry Moore; he talks about his excitement on his return to New Hampshire and the joys of his marriage with Jane Kenyon; and he candidly discusses his loss and grief when Kenyon died in 1995 at the age of forty-seven. The thirteen interviews range from a detailed exploration of the composition of ""Ox Cart Man"" to the poems that make up Without, an almost unbearable poetry of grief that was written following Jane Kenyon's death. The book also follows Hall into old age, when he turned to essay writing and the reflections on aging that make up Essays after Eighty. This moving and insightful collection of interviews is crucial for anyone interested in poetry and the creative process, the techniques and achievements of modern American poetry, and the elusive psychology of creativity and loss.

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Most people only consider the Mississippi River when they cross it or when it inconveniently abandons its banks. But every year, millions of tons of cargo are transported by towboats on the river. In this volume, Captain Lee Hendrix provides unique insight on people who work and live on and near the Mississippi River.

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Conversations with Colum McCann brings together eighteen interviews with a world-renowned fiction writer. Ranging from his 1994 literary debut, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, to a previously unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews represent the development as well as the continuation of McCann's interests. The number and length of the later conversations attest to his star-power. Let the Great World Spin earned him the National Book Award and promises to become a major motion picture. His most recent novel, TransAtlantic, has awed readers with its dynamic yoking of the 1845-46 visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland, the 1919 first nonstop transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown, and Senator George Mitchell's 1998 efforts to achieve a peace accord in Northern Ireland. An extensive interview by scholar Cécile Maudet is included here, as is an interview by John Cusatis, who wrote Understanding Colum McCann, the first extensive critical analysis of McCann's work.An author who actually enjoys talking about his work, McCann (b. 1965) offers insights into his method of writing, what he hopes to achieve, as well as the challenge of writing each novel to go beyond his accomplishments in the novel before. Readers will note how many of his responses include stories in which he himself is the object of the humor and how often his remarks reveal insights into his character as a man who sees the grittiness of the urban landscape but never loses faith in the strength of ordinary people and their capacity to prevail.

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Former New York Times correspondent John N. Herbers (1923-2017), who covered the civil rights movement for more than a decade, has produced Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist, a compelling story of national and historical significance. Born in the South during a time of entrenched racial segregation, Herbers witnessed a succession of landmark civil rights uprisings that rocked the country, the world, and his own conscience. Herbers's retrospective is a timely and critical illumination on America's current racial dilemmas and ongoing quest for justice.Herbers's reporting began in 1951, when he covered the brutal execution of Willie McGee, a black man convicted for the rape of a white housewife, and the 1955 trial for the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. With immediacy and first-hand detail, Herbers describes the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the death of four black girls in the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing; extensive travels and interviews with Martin Luther King Jr.; Ku Klux Klan cross-burning rallies and private meetings; the Freedom Summer murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi; and marches and riots in St. Augustine, Florida, and Selma, Alabama, that led to passage of national civil rights legislation.This account is also a personal journey as Herbers witnessed the movement with the conflicted eyes of a man dedicated to his southern heritage but who also rejected the prescribed laws and mores of a prejudiced society. His story provides a complex understanding of how the southern status quo, in which the white establishment benefited at the expense of African Americans, was transformed by a national outcry for justice.

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