How has the Internet changed literary culture? 2nd Place, N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature by The Electronic Literature Organization Reports of the book’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Books are flourishing in the Internet era—widely discussed and reviewed in online readers’ forums and publicized through book trailers and author blog tours. But over the past twenty-five years, digital media platforms have undeniably transformed book culture. Since Amazon’s founding in 1994, the whole way in which books are created, marketed, publicized, sold, reviewed, showcased, consumed, and commented upon has changed dramatically. The digital literary sphere is no mere appendage to the world of print—it is where literary reputations are made, movements are born, and readers passionately engage with their favorite works and authors. In The Digital Literary Sphere, Simone Murray considers the contemporary book world from multiple viewpoints. By examining reader engagement with the online personas of Margaret Atwood, John Green, Gary Shteyngart, David Foster Wallace, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and even Jonathan Franzen, among others, Murray reveals the dynamic interrelationship of print and digital technologies. Drawing on approaches from literary studies, media and cultural studies, book history, cultural policy, and the digital humanities, this book asks: What is the significance of authors communicating directly to readers via social media? How does digital media reframe the “live” author-reader encounter? And does the growing army of reader-reviewers signal an overdue democratizing of literary culture or the atomizing of cultural authority? In exploring these questions, The Digital Literary Sphere takes stock of epochal changes in the book industry while probing books’ and digital media’s complex contemporary coexistence.
Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture examines the role of the book in the modern world. It considers the book’s deeply intertwined relationships with other media through ownership structures, copyright and adaptation, the constantly shifting roles of authors, publishers and readers in the digital ecosystem and the merging of print and digital technologies in contemporary understandings of the book object. Divided into three parts, the book first introduces students to various theories and methods for understanding print culture, demonstrating how the study of the book has grown out of longstanding academic disciplines. The second part surveys key sectors of the contemporary book world – from independent and alternative publishers to editors, booksellers, readers and libraries – focusing on topical debates. In the final part, digital technologies take centre stage as eBook regimes and mass-digitisation projects are examined for what they reveal about information power and access in the twenty-first century. This book provides a fascinating and informative introduction for students of all levels in publishing studies, book history, literature and English, media, communication and cultural studies, cultural sociology, librarianship and archival studies and digital humanities.
Adaptation constitutes the driving force of contemporary culture, with stories adapted across an array of media formats. However, adaptation studies has been concerned almost exclusively with textual analysis, in particular with compare-and-contrast studies of individual novel and film pairings. This has left almost completely unexamined crucial questions of how adaptations come to be made, what are the industries with the greatest stake in making them, and who the decision-makers are in the adaptation process. The Adaptation Industry re-imagines adaptation not as an abstract process, but as a material industry. It presents the adaptation industry as a cultural economy of six interlocking institutions, stakeholders and decision-makers all engaged in the actual business of adapting texts: authors; agents; publishers; book prize committees; scriptwriters; and screen producers and distributors. Through trading in intellectual property rights to cultural works, these six nodal points in the adaptation network are tightly interlinked, with success for one party potentially auguring for success in other spheres. But marked rivalries between these institutional forces also exist, with competition characterizing every aspect of the adaptation process. This book constructs an overdue sociology of contemporary literary adaptation, never losing sight of the material and institutional dimensions of this powerful process.
Simone C. Drake spent the first several decades of her life learning how to love and protect herself, a black woman, from the systems designed to facilitate her harm and marginalization. But when she gave birth to the first of her three sons, she quickly learned that black boys would need protection from these very same systems—systems dead set on the static, homogenous representations of black masculinity perpetuated in the media and our cultural discourse. In When We Imagine Grace, Drake borrows from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to bring imagination to the center of black masculinity studies—allowing individual black men to exempt themselves and their fates from a hateful, ignorant society and open themselves up as active agents at the center of their own stories. Against a backdrop of crisis, Drake brings forth the narratives of black men who have imagined grace for themselves. We meet African American cowboy, Nat Love, and Drake’s own grandfather, who served in the first black military unit to fight in World War II. Synthesizing black feminist and black masculinity studies, Drake analyzes black fathers and daughters, the valorization of black criminals, the black entrepreneurial pursuits of Marcus Garvey, Berry Gordy, and Jay-Z, and the denigration and celebration of gay black men: Cornelius Eady, Antoine Dodson, and Kehinde Wiley. With a powerful command of its subjects and a passionate dedication to hope, When We Imagine Grace gives us a new way of seeing and knowing black masculinity—sophisticated in concept and bracingly vivid in telling.
In this extraordinary collection, the award-winning poet Crystal Simone Smith gives voice to the mournful dead, their lives unjustly lost to violence, and to the grieving chorus of protestors in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, in search of resilience and hope. With poems found within the text of George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, Crystal Simone Smith embarks on an uncompromising exploration of collective mourning and crafts a masterwork that resonates far beyond the page. These poems are visually stark, a gathering of gripping verses that unmasks a dialogue of tragic truths—the stories of lives taken unjustly and too soon. Bold and deeply affecting, Dark Testament is a remarkable reckoning with our present moment, a call to action, and a plea for a more just future. Along with the poems, Dark Testament includes a stirring introduction by the author that speaks to the content of the poetry, a Q&A with George Saunders, and a full-color photo-insert that commemorates victims of unlawful killings with photographs of memorials that have been created in their honor. "I love this tremendously skillful, timely, and dazzling repurposing of passages of my novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. Crystal Simone Smith has, with her amazing ear and heart, found, in that earlier grief, a beautiful echo for our time." —George Saunders, New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December "Written in response to the murder of George Floyd...this touching memorial to the Black lives lost to systemic racism is a rousing homage to those protesting in their honor, who refuse to let these deaths be in vain." - Publisher's Weekly
Beyond Bullying offers guidance and advice on conducting practitioner research into bullying and provides resources to assist practitioners and researchers in doing so. It draws on a case study of almost 1,000 secondary school students over a period of 5 academic years to explore student perception of traditional bullying and cyber bullying, and how recommended approaches to bullying research can be applied to practice. The book provides an overview of bullying and cyber bullying literature, considering recent research in the field, how this was conducted, and what the findings were. In addition, the case study illustrates how a positive anti-bullying school ethos can be established through practitioner research. Each chapter will impart both practical and academic knowledge enabling the reader to: - conduct bullying research with secondary school students - complete research activities with bullies and victims - help students to raise awareness of bullying in school - inform school staff of problems occurring at class level. Beyond Bullying discusses how bullying research can be used to construct a model of bullying behaviour in the school environment and establishes suitable approaches to bullying intervention. The book will appeal to practitioner researchers in the area of school bullying, as well as practitioners, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, sociology and related disciplines.
Three amazing stories about the magic of Christmas and discovering what really matters when it comes to celebrating the season! Operation: Santa is RealMax and Mickey are twins who share everything! A love of sno cones, video games, and Christmas...especially Santa Claus. But Max no longer believes in Santa and Mickey is on a mission to convince her brother that Santa is real. But when her plan backfires, Mickey may find herself on Santa’s naughty list. And when all is said and done, the M and M twins will learn what really matters when it comes to celebrating the season. Friending the GrinchJasmine can’t seem to find her Christmas spirit. A new girl named Jayla has stolen her joy, and some of her friends. Between her conniving and lying, Jayla is ruining Jasmine’s life. But Jasmine is the only one that can see Jayla for the Grinch that she is. Everyone else is fooled by her sob story of a tough life. Can Jasmine get her family and friends to see the truth? Or will Jayla help her discover a few things about herself?Kylie: The Smallest ElfKylie is small. The tiniest elf in Santa’s workshop and she can’t seem to do anything right. After nearly ruining Christmas, she finds herself wondering if she will ever be good enough to work for Santa. Following a worldwind adventure, she finds that she was closer to the answer than she thought. Join Kylie as she discovers the real meaning of Christmas! P3
This book examines the phenomenon of urban fear – the increasing anxiety over crime and violence in Western cities despite their high safety – with a view to developing a comprehensive, critical, exploratory theory of fear, space, and urban planning that unravels the paradoxes of their mutual relations. By focusing especially on the southern European cities of Palermo and Lisbon, the book also aims to expand upon recent studies on urban geopolitics, enriching them from the perspective of ordinary, as opposed to global, cities. Readers will find enlightening analysis of the ways in which urban fear is (re)produced, including by misinformative discourses on security and fear and the political construction of otherness as a means of exclusion. The spatialization of fear, e.g., through fortification, privatization, and fragmentation, is explored, and the ways in which urban planning is informed by and has in turn been shaping urban fear are investigated. A concluding chapter considers divergent potential futures and makes a call for action. The book will appeal to all with an interest in whether, and to what extent, the production of ‘fearscapes’, the contemporary landscapes of fear, constitutes an emergent urban political economy.
The talented trio that brought you The Perfect Present is back...with summer stories that will brighten your day, warm your heart, and prove that life is one of the greatest teachers there is. In Too Big for Teacups, Gabrielle Simone introduces us to the Fernandez family, who is on their way to Disney for a vacation. Marlena, the oldest, would rather stay home and practice with her dance team. But her parents make her go, and Marlena trudges through a miserable week of what was supposed to be a family bonding experience. In the midst of her complaining, her best friend, Jennifer, helps her learn a valuable life lesson and a new outlook on family time. In Jackie Lee’s A Lesson for Summer, 14-year-old twins, Vanessa and Teresa, had planned their ideal summer vacation. But when their father announces that he’s taking over a new church in a new city, the girls find their summer ruined! Instead of spending their days shopping, talking about boys, and going to the movies, they were going to be moving and volunteering to mentor a bunch of snotty-nosed seven-year-olds. The twins do everything in their power to sabotage their parents’ plans for them. However, in the end, they learn life lessons that truly make this the perfect summer for both of them. Morgan Billingsley is back with twins, Max and Mickey in A Country Summer. And this time, the suburban duo is unplugging from their iPads, Wi-Fi, and Netflix, to spend the summer with their extended family in a small Arkansas town. This was not at all Mickey’s idea of fun. In fact, she hates the boring country and her “classless” relatives. While Max fits right in with his cousins, Mickey soon feels left out and learns a valuable lesson about life - it doesn’t matter what you have...what matters is who you have. These three young writers will inspire and entertain...and leave you with a lesson or two yourself.
The inside story—from the organizer himself--of the largest unrecovered cash haul in history. This full account brings readers behind the heist memorialized in Goodfellas, a crime that has baffled law enforcement for decades. From Henry Hill himself, The Lufthansa Heist is the last book he worked on before his 2012 death. On December 11, 1978, a daring armed robbery rocked Kennedy Airport, resulting in the largest unrecovered cash haul in world history, totaling six million dollars. The perpetrators were never apprehended and thirteen people connected to the crime were murdered in homicides that, like the crime itself, remain unsolved to this day. The burglary has fascinated the public for years, dominating headlines around the globe due to the story’s unending ravel of mysteries that baffled the authorities.One of the organizers of the sensational burglary, Henry Hill, who passed away in 2012, in collaboration with Daniel Simone, has penned an unprecedented “tell-all” about the robbery with never-before-unveiled details, particulars only known to an insider. In 2013, this infamous criminal act again flared up in the national news when five reputed gangsters were charged in connection to the robbery. This latest twist lends the project an extraordinary sense of timing, and the legal proceedings of the newly arrested suspects will unfold over the next year, continuing to keep the Lufthansa topic in the news.
Watching my sister slip away into an eternal place and hearing the gratification in her voice as she transformed to the other side is what gives me peace. We walked together in that tunnel. I can’t help but wonder what if I would have remained there too. Would I have experienced the same overwhelming joy my sister felt, instead of letting the paralyzing fear take over me causing me to be left behind? What I experienced would make any individual wish that they were dead. Still I continue to hear how blessed I am to be alive. If I knew what I would be faced with when I awakened, I wonder if I would have rather remained asleep... I stopped trying to figure out why I survived and have learned to embrace the encounter I had with The God of Elijah. If you have picked up this book, The God of Elijah desires to have an encounter with you. Jesus said that no man comes to Him, except God draws them. So relax, quiet your soul, and come with me on my journey, as I reveal what happens when the miraculous shows up. Death stared me in the face; hell was hard on my heels. Up against it, I didn't know which way to turn; then I called out to GOD for help: "Please, GOD!" I cried out. "Save my life!" GOD is gracious it is he who makes things right, our most compassionate God. GOD takes the side of the helpless; when I was at the end of my rope, he saved me. I said to myself, "Relax and rest. GOD has showered you with blessings. Soul, you've been rescued from death; Eye, you've been rescued from tears; and you, Foot, were kept from stumbling." (MSG) Psalm 116: 3-8
This book focuses on the transmission of ethnic identity across three generations of Italian-Australians, specifically Italian-Australians of Calabrian descent in the Adelaide region of Australia. Simone Marino analyzes ethnographic data collected over a three-year period to consider individual, familial and community cultural practices, as well as societal influences on ethnic identity transmission, in order to present generational differences in the understandings of Italian-Australian identity. Among other factors, the role of community events, community networks, and cultural practices associated with being Italian-Australian are examined. The transmission of ethnic identity is analysed through the lens of sociological theories, including Sayad's concept of double absence and Bourdieu's ideas of habitus and cultural capital, and is considered at the macro, meso, and micro spheres of social life. Ultimately, Marino’s study reveals clear generational differences amongst Italian-Australians: the first generation, those who arrived from Italy, manifest a condition of feeling absent, the second generation present a condition of ‘in-between-ness’, between the world of their immigrant parents and that of Australians, and the third generation experience a sense of ethnic revival.
In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.
Please Don't Take Me Home is the emotional tale of Italian immigrant Simone Abitante's 20-year love affair with Fulham Football Club. After leaving his native country, Simone falls in love with London and its oldest club, embarking on a personal mission to spread the word and get Fulham recognised beyond Britain by as many people as possible. Following the Cottagers through the most successful spell in their modern history, Simone takes his nephews to Craven Cottage where - together with new friends and Whites addicts Jeff, Mark and Ben - they experience unforgettable wins, exhilarating highs and devastating lows, amid rivers of beer, true friendship and an unquenchable passion for the beautiful game. Even after leaving London for Mallorca, Simone keeps following his beloved Fulham, with that famous white jersey serving as a second skin. Played out against a backdrop of heartbreaks, departures and life-changing decisions, Please Don't Take Me Home is a footballing story every fan can relate to.
In her most famous novel, The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir takes an unflinching look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of World War II. In fictionally relating the stories of those around her -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, Nelson Algren -- de Beauvoir dissects the emotional and philosophical currents of her time. At once an engrossing drama and an intriguing political tale, The Mandarins is the emotional odyssey of a woman torn between her inner desires and her public life. "Much more than a roman a clef . . . a moving and engrossing novel." -- New York Times
Socrates, Or On Human Knowledge, published in Venice in 1651, is the only work written by a Jew that contains so far the promise of a genuinely sceptical investigation into the validity of human certainties. Simone Luzzatto masterly developed this book as a pièce of theatre where Socrates, as main actor, has the task to demonstrate the limits and weaknesses of the human capacity to acquire knowledge without being guided by revelation. He achieved this goal by offering an overview of the various and contradictory gnosiological opinions disseminated since ancient times: the divergence of views, to which he addressed the most attention, prevented him from giving a fixed definition of the nature of the cognitive process. This obliged him to come to the audacious conclusion of neither affirming nor denying anything concerning human knowledge, and finally of suspending his judgement altogether. This work unfortunately had little success in Luzzatto’s lifetime, and was subsequently almost forgotten. The absence of substantial evidence from his contemporaries and that of his epistolary have thus increased the difficulty of tracing not only its legacy in the history of philosophical though, but also of understanding the circumstances surrounding the writing of his Socrates. The present edition will be a preliminary study aiming to shed some light on the philosophical and historical value of this work’s translation, indeed it will provide a broader readership with the opportunity to access this immensely complicated work and also to grasp some aspects of the composite intellectual framework and admirable modernity of Venetian Jewish culture in the ghetto.
A growing number of deaf and hard-of-hearing students attend regular classrooms where they face specific opportunities and challenges concerning their participation. This book focuses on plurilingual (spoken and sign language) adolescents in partial integration, who are supported by a teaching assistant in the spoken language classrooms. How does the presence of an assistant shape the students’ participation and the overall classroom interaction? How do the students design their engagement in classroom activities and how do they negotiate their hearing and understanding, which are particularly at risk for them? Managing these tasks calls for the participants’ interactional competence, which is observed on the basis of their multimodal practices including verbal and non-verbal resources.
Philosophy and theology have long harboured contradictory views on spiritual practice. While philosophy advocates the therapeutic benefits of daily meditation, the theology of grace promotes an ideal of happiness bestowed with little effort. As such, the historical juxtaposition of effort and grace grounding modern spiritual exercise can be seen as the essential tension between the secular and sacred. In Effort and Grace, Simone Kotva explores an exciting new theory of spiritual endeavour from the tradition of French spiritualist philosophy. Spiritual exercise has largely been studied in relation to ancient philosophy and the Ignatian tradition, yet Kotva's new engagement with its more recent forms has alerted her to an understanding of contemplative practice as rife with critical potential. Here, she offers an interdisciplinary text tracing the narrative of spiritual exertion through the work of seminal French thinkers such as Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, Alain (Émile Chartier), Simone Weil and Gilles Deleuze. Her findings allow both secular philosophers and theologians to understand how the spiritual life can participate in the contemporary philosophical conversation.
Mentored to Perfection: The Masculine Terms of Success in Academia examines how mentoring programs between women tend to replicate the hierarchical relations of patriarchy that they are meant to dismantle. Simone Dennis and Alison Behie argue that, while paradigmatic mentoring programs look like networking support services for neophytes, these mentorships nevertheless replicate the very institutional structures they seek to uproot. The generosity that senior women show to junior women as they share their tips and offer their support ironically obscures participants’ involvement in debt relations and the biases of replicating a particular type of success. This book considers the possibilities for disrupting our tendency to reproduce ourselves in the masculine terms of success.
This book offers a long overdue, extensive study of one of the most beloved television shows: Friends. Why has this sitcom become the seminal success that it is? And how does it continue to engage viewers around the world a quarter century after its first broadcast? Featuring original interviews with key creative personnel (including co-creator Marta Kauffman and executive producer Kevin S. Bright), the book provides answers by identifying a strategy of intimacy that informs Friends’ use of humour, performance, style and set design. The authors provide fascinating analyses of some of the most well-remembered scenes—the one where Ross can’t get his leather pants back on, and Ross and Rachel’s break-up, to name just a couple—and reflect on how and why A-list guest performances sometimes fell short of the standards set by the ensemble cast. Also considered are the iconic look of Monica’s apartment as well as the programme’s much discussed politics of representation and the critical backlash it has received in recent years. An exploration of Joey, the infamous spin-off, and several attempts to adapt Friends’ successful formula across the globe, round out the discussion, with insights into mistranslated jokes and much more. For students, scholars, creative industry practitioners and fans alike, this is a compelling read that lets us glimpse behind the scenes of what has become a cultural phenomenon and semi-permanent fixture in many of our homes.
In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.
In the fall of 1950, newspapers around the world reported that the Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his family had mysteriously disappeared while returning to Britain from a holiday trip. Because Pontecorvo was known to be an expert working for the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, this raised immediate concern for the safety of atomic secrets, especially when it became known in the following months that he had defected to the Soviet Union. Was Pontecorvo a spy? Did he know and pass sensitive information about the bomb to Soviet experts? At the time, nuclear scientists, security personnel, Western government officials, and journalists assessed the case, but their efforts were inconclusive and speculations quickly turned to silence. In the years since, some have downplayed Pontecorvo’s knowledge of atomic weaponry, while others have claimed him as part of a spy ring that infiltrated the Manhattan Project. The Pontecorvo Affair draws from newly disclosed sources to challenge previous attempts to solve the case, offering a balanced and well-documented account of Pontecorvo, his activities, and his possible motivations for defecting. Along the way, Simone Turchetti reconsiders the place of nuclear physics and nuclear physicists in the twentieth century and reveals that as the discipline’s promise of military and industrial uses came to the fore, so did the enforcement of new secrecy provisions on the few experts in the world specializing in its application.
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