history and criticism

The 'New York Post' theater columnist draws on more than 150 insider interviews to celebrate the productions, artists, and movements that shaped Broadway in the years spanning 'Sunset Boulevard' through 'The Lion King'.

In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Eileen Hunt Botting puts Shelley and several classics of modern political science fiction into dialogue with contemporary political science and philosophy, in order to challenge some of the apocalyptic fears at the fore of twenty-first-century political thought on AI and genetic engineering. Focusing on the prevailing myths that artificial forms of life will end the world, destroy nature, and extinguish love, Botting shows how Shelley modeled ways to break down and transform the meanings of apocalypse, nature, and love in the face of widespread and deep-seated fear about the power of technology and artifice to undermine the possibility of humanity, community, and life itself.

"Examines the epochal and cultural event that is 1984 in all its aspects: its roots in the utopian and dystopian literature that preceded it; the personal experiences in wartime Great Britain that Orwell drew on as he struggled to finish his masterpiece in his dying days; and the political and cultural phenomena that the novel ignited at once upon publication and that far from subsiding, have only grown over the decades. It explains how fiction history informs fiction and how fiction explains history"--Amazon.

"With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides-Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev, among others-Sara Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news, traveling from rinsed northwestern beet fields and the Far Eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of nationalities, religions, and languages in the Caucasus. Bypassing major cities as much as possible, she goes instead to the places associated with the country's literary masters"--Jacket flap.

"In the 1930s, Warner Brothers studios introduced the world to the Looney Tunes. A witty rabbit named Bugs, a stuttering pig named Porky, and an erratic duck named Daffy are just some of the characters that have left audiences hysterically laughing for almost a century. The animated short films, starring some of the most iconic cartoon characters in history, went on to have a second, long life on television. In this book, author Steve Korte details how these toons were imagined, which talented folks were tasked with animating and voicing them, the success the shows and films have garnered over the years, and what lies ahead for Bugs and the gang"--Provided by publisher.

Find out how Dracula--a smooth-talking count with a dark secret--became the infamous creature we all know and fear.

". . . [the author] documents what was once called a "punk rock world"-the all-encompassing hardcore-indie culture that incubated his own talent. . . showing just how widespread the movement became, ranging across the nation, from Washington, D.C. through Ohio and Minnesota to Los Angeles, and how democratic it was due to its commitment to do-it-yourself tactics"--Adapted from publisher.

"[Presents a collection of] fifty selections from fifty writers covering approximately fifty years of American rock and pop writing"--Page xi.

A literary companion to the works of African-American playwright August Wilson that provides information on characters, dates, events, allusions, staging strategies, and themes from his plays.