Los Angeles, 1941. Henry Jokowski is an angry young man. He hates college, has no girlfriend, and dreams of writing the Great American Novel. His sole comfort comes from joining the German-American Bund and their torchlight parades celebrating Hitler's victories across Europe. Then the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. America is gripped with war fever. And Henry realizes that it's maybe not such a good idea to be seen walking around Los Angeles in his Nazi uniform. Too bad it's the only clothes he has after being kicked out of the house by his father. With the FBI in pursuit, Henry is thrown into a bizarre and erotic world of domestic espionage, secret military experiments, mafia hits, Native American spies, dancing girls, and enough material for ten Great American Novels -- if he survives to write it! Author Ben Pleasants dedicates this novel: "To Charles Bukowski, who told me to write it, but make it funnier.
They were identical cousins. One was a TV star. One was a porn star. Each was fascinated by the other's profession. One day they switched places. They exchanged their roles and their lives. Nobody suspected a thing. And nobody foresaw the tragedy that would ensue.
A nostalgic play that evokes early 1960s Hollywood. The famous dead of Westwood Cemetery -- Marilyn Monroe, Donna Reed, Eve Arden, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood, Armand Hammer, Will and Ariel Durant -- enlist Socrates to help them save the life of the UCLA librarian they all knew and loved.
In Contentious Minds, Ben Pleasants targets Hollywood writers and intellectuals who tried to suppress news of a European genocide -- Stalin's holocaust.Contentious Minds dramatizes a series of encounters between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman between 1946 and 1982, the two women arguing about men, art, and politics--with McCarthy accusing Hellman of lying to cover up Stalin's genocide.Screenwriter and playwright Lillian Hellman defended Stalin through to her death in 1984. Mary McCarthy was a critic, writer, and anti-Stalinist leftist . The two literary lionesses' decades-long clashes culminated on October 18, 1979, when McCarthy said on PBS's Dick Cavett Show: "Every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " Hellman filed a libel suit against McCarthy, Cavett, and the Educational Broadcasting Corp.Pleasants says that his play deals with "the coverup of Stalin's crimes in America by writers like Hellman and John Howard Lawson, who attacked writers like Dos Passos and Koestler when they attempted to bring forward the murders of their friends, and the torture and execution of others writers in the USSR. After the HUAC, Hellman and Lawson were placed on Mount Rushmore as martyrs. They should be remembered as gangsters."Contentious Minds reminds audiences that HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) was founded in the 1930s to investigate American Nazis--and that HUAC was supported by American liberals and Leftists until it turned its attention to Communists a decade later. Liberal support for HUAC--even from Hollywood screenwriters--is one of the uncomfortable truths that Contentious Minds forces its Hollywood audiences to confront.
Basing his work on exclusive interviews, Alba has produced a wonderful history of the first "Tonight" show, complete with terrific photos and revealing insights from more than 30 legends who knew and worked with Steve Allen.
Illuminated by interviews with more than fifty people, including the late Joseph Mitchell, William Steig, Roger Angell, Calvin Trillin, Pauline Kael, John Updike, and Ann Beattie, About Town penetrates the inner workings of the New Yorker as no other book has done."--BOOK JACKET.
Slavery is one of the central, most enduringly significant facts of U.S. history. It loomed like a dark cloud over the country’s birth at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and shaped the most important nodes of American history before the Civil War. Even today, the country continues to debate its past as it relates to slavery, and the political and geographic contours of human bondage endure into the twenty-first century. In a deeply researched, wide-ranging book, retired journalist Ben McNitt tells the story of how slavery shaped American politics—and indeed the American story—from the Founding until the Civil War. McNitt’s sharp narrative covers people and events that still resonate: Thomas Jefferson, John Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, the slave revolts of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Brown and Harpers Ferry, fire-eating secessionists, and the rise of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. No other single work covers this topic as comprehensively and accessibly.
A smart and hilarious memoir of privilege and excess told by the son of a powerful, seductive member of the New York elite. Ben Sonnenberg grew up in the great house on Gramercy Park in New York City that his father, the inventor of modern public relations and the owner of a fine collection of art, built to celebrate his rise from the poverty of the Jewish Lower East Side to a life of riches and power. His son could have what he wanted, except perhaps what he wanted most: to get away. Lost Property, a book of memoirs and confessions, is a tale of youthful riot and rebellion. Sonnenberg recounts his aesthetic, sexual, and political education, and a sometimes absurd flight into “anarchy and sabotage,” in which he reports to both the CIA and East German intelligence during the Cold War and, cultivating a dandy’s nonchalance, pursues a life of sexual adventure in 1960s London and New York. The cast of characters includes Orson Welles, Glenn Gould, and Sylvia Plath; among the subjects are marriage, children, infidelity, debt, divorce, literature, and multiple sclerosis. The end is surprisingly happy.
This book examines the relationship between narrative film and reality, as seen through the lens of on-screen classical concert performance. By investigating these scenes, wherein the performance of music is foregrounded in the narrative, Winters uncovers how concert performance reflexively articulates music's importance to the ontology of film. The book asserts that narrative film of a variety of aesthetic approaches and traditions is no mere copy of everyday reality, but constitutes its own filmic reality, and that the music heard in a film's underscore plays an important role in distinguishing film reality from the everyday. As a result, concert scenes are examined as sites for provocative interactions between these two realities, in which real-world musicians appear in fictional narratives, and an audience’s suspension of disbelief is problematised. In blurring the musical experiences of onscreen observers and participants, these concert scenes also allegorize music’s role in creating a shared subjectivity between film audience and character, and prompt Winters to propose a radically new vision of music’s role in narrative cinema wherein musical underscore becomes part of a shared audio-visual space that may be just as accessible to the characters as the music they encounter in scenes of concert performance.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) remains one of the most enigmatic works of twentieth century thought. In this bold and original new study, Ben Ware argues that Wittgenstein's early masterpiece is neither an analytic treatise on language and logic, nor a quasi-mystical work seeking to communicate 'ineffable' truths. Instead, we come to understand the Tractatus by grasping it in a twofold sense: first, as a dialectical work which invites the reader to overcome certain 'illusions of thought'; and second as a modernist work whose anti-philosophical ambition is intimately tied to its radical aesthetic character. By placing the Tractatus in the force field of modernism, Dialectic of the Ladder clears the ground for a new and challenging exploration of the work's ethical dimension. It also casts new light upon the cultural, aesthetic and political significances of Wittgenstein's writing, revealing hitherto unacknowledged affinities with a host of philosophical and literary authors, including Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, and Kafka.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.