Contemporary Art History

An extraordinary story of friendship and love across class lines, this rich, evocative novel traces the history of modern Italy, from 1975 to 2013, through the fate of one couple. Valerio and Olivia grow up together in the Morganti family’s opulent villa in Bologna, inseparable friends even...

Two people, two lives, one unfulfilled promise . . . She, smiles wide, and her happiness brightens up the world around her. Elusive, charismatic and incredibly rich, He runs away from his past and the grief it brings with it. She is capable of breaking down all his barriers, imploring his heart...

"Sanam is a carefree, but headstrong young girl. A spat with a politician's son pushes her take up a big challenge-to become an IAS. At the same time, a small-town boy, Aamir, is nudged into studying for the civil services too. Their hard work pays off when both become rank holders.And soon...

The Boys in the Band's debut was revolutionary for its fictional but frank presentation of a male homosexual subculture in Manhattan. Based on Mart Crowley's hit Off-Broadway play from 1968, the film's two-hour running time approximates real time, unfolding at a birthday party attended by nine men whose language, clothing, and behavior evoke a range of urban gay "types." Although various popular critics, historians, and film scholars over the years have offered cursory acknowledgment of the film's importance, more substantive research and analysis have been woefully lacking. The film's neglect among academics belies a rich and rewarding object of study. The Boys in the Band merits not only the close reading that should accompany such a well-made text but also recognition as a landmark almost ideally situated to orient us amid the highly complex, shifting cultural terrain it occupied upon its release-and has occupied since.

Award-winning author Michèle Phoenix weaves an unforgettable tale of hope and survival in The Space Between Words. In this split-time "powerful and compelling novel" (Library Journal starred review), one woman recovers from a traumatic event by uncovering secrets from the past. "There were...

In Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity, Scott Balcerzak reads the performances of notable comedians such as W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello through humor and queer theory to expose a problematic history of maleness in their personas.

In the tradition of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse comes a new spiritual novel that is a stunning feat of storytelling and imagination. A Poet of the Invisible World follows a boy named Nouri, born in thirteenth-century Persia, with four ears instead of two. Orphaned as an infant, he's taken...

The award-winning international sensation that poses the question: Was Sigmund Freud responsible for the death of his sister in a Nazi concentration camp? The boy in her memories who strokes her with the apple, who whispers to her the fairy tale, who gives her the knife, is her brother Sigmund...

“Vintage Contemporaries is about being young and becoming less young, exploring friendship (sometimes magical, sometimes messy), parenthood (ditto), and how to reconcile youthful ambition and ideals with real life. It’s a warm and big-hearted coming of age story that made me wistful for my...

The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly fifth century BC). The work, which is attributed to the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu , is composed of 13 chapters. Each chapter is devoted to an aspect of warfare and how it applies to military strategy and tactics. For almost 1,500 years The Art of War has been the lead text in an anthology that would be formalised as the Seven Military Classics by Emperor Shenzong of Song in 1080.

Was It Yesterday? explores the impact of nostalgia in 21st-century American film and television. Cultural nostalgia, in both real and imagined forms, is dominant today, but what does the concentration on bringing back the past mean for an understanding of our cultural moment, and what are the consequences for viewers? This book questions the nature of this nostalgic phenomenon, the politics associated with it, and the significance of the different periods, in addition to offering counterarguments that see nostalgia as prevalent throughout film and television history.

Even as actresses become increasingly marginalized by Hollywood, French cinema is witnessing an explosion of female talent - a Golden Age unlike anything the world has seen since the days of Stanwyck, Hepburn, Davis, and Garbo. In France, the joy of acting is alive and well. Scores of French actresses are doing the best work of their lives in movies tailored to their star images and unique personalities. Yet virtually no one this side of the Atlantic even knows about them. Viewers who feel shortchanged by Hollywood will be thrilled to discover The Beauty of the Real.

Script Culture and the American Screenplay treats the screenplay as a literary work in its own right, presenting analyses of screenplays from a variety of frameworks, including feminism, Marxism, structuralism, philosophy, and psychology. Boon demonstrates that whether we are concerned with aesthetics and identifying rules for distinguishing the literary from the non-literary, or whether we align ourselves with more contemporary theories, which recognize texts as distinguishable in their inter-relationships.