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The Studio

Autor: John Gregory Dunne

Número de Páginas: 273

In 1967, John Gregory Dunne asked for unlimited access to the inner workings of Twentieth Century Fox. Miraculously, he got it. For one year Dunne went everywhere there was to go and talked to everyone worth talking to within the studio. He tracked every step of the creation of pictures like "Dr. Dolittle," "Planet of the Apes," and "The Boston Strangler." The result is a work of reportage that, thirty years later, may still be our most minutely observed and therefore most uproariously funny portrait of the motion picture business. Whether he is recounting a showdown between Fox's studio head and two suave shark-like agents, watching a producer's girlfriend steal a silver plate from a restaurant, or shielding his eyes against the glare of a Hollywood premiere where the guests include a chimp in a white tie and tails, Dunne captures his subject in all its showmanship, savvy, vulgarity, and hype. Not since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West has anyone done Hollywood better. "Reads as racily as a novel...(Dunne) has a novelist's ear for speech and eye for revealing detail...Anyone who has tiptoed along those corridors of power is bound to say that Dunne's impressionism rings...

The Red, White and Blue

Autor: John Gregory Dunne

Número de Páginas: 468

“Crackling dialogue, gritty characters, a fierce, unblinking stare at acts of brutality.”—Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review. A brilliantly panoramic novel spanning a quarter-century of American life, John Gregory Dunne’s The Red White and Blue tells the story of California's high-profile Broderick family, a tale beginning in the tumult of the 1960s. The clan includes a billionaire San Francisco patriarch, his sons the celebrity priest and Hollywood screenwriter, and his daughter, wife to the brother of the American president. Rounding out the front-line cast is Leah Kaye, a politically radical lawyer once married to the screenwriter Jack Broderick, an ex-newspaperman and the book's narrator. The influence of wealth in American politics. A California agricultural strike. A South American election. The black-power movement. Hollywood movers and shakers. All of this and more is deftly navigated as Dunne sets his main characters and big-canvas forces in motion. Jack himself is pulled into the swirl, his ironic detachment proving insufficient bulwark against dramas that grow darker, more dangerous and more personal as Dunne’s epic unfolds. A robust, bitterly comic...

John Gregory Dunne

Autor: Mark Royden Winchell

Número de Páginas: 62

Nothing Lost

Autor: John Gregory Dunne

Número de Páginas: 349

A grisly racial murder in what news commentators insist on calling “the heartland.” A feeding frenzy of mass media and seamy politics. An illicit love affair with the potential to wreck lives. In his grandly inventive last novel, John Gregory Dunne orchestrated these elements into a symphony of American violence, chicanery, and sadness.In the aftermath of Edgar Parlance’s killing, the small prairie town of Regent becomes a destination for everyone from a sociopathic teenaged supermodel to an enigmatic attorney with secret familial links to the worlds of Hollywood and organized crime. Out of their manifold convergences, their jockeying for power, publicity or love, Nothing Lost creates a drama of magnificent scope and acidity.

Regards

Autor: John Gregory Dunne

Número de Páginas: 403

A collection of key nonfiction works includes the writer's frank observations on the film industry, politics, sports, and other topics; his reflections on raising an adopted daughter; and depictions of Las Vegas and a Hollywood film studio. Original.

Vegas

Autor: John Gregory Dunne

Número de Páginas: 183

“The best book about Sin City ever written . . . [Dunne’s] grotesqueries aren’t drug-induced, they’re very real. His is the genuine Vegas.” (Esquire) “In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada.” So begins John Gregory Dunne’s neglected classic of first-person writing, a mordant, deadpan, grotesque tale that blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, confession and reportage. Panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his many failings as a writer and a man, Dunne leaves his wife, Joan Didion, and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. His plan: to write a book about the city he describes as a “prison of yesterdays.” In his desperation, he connects with a remarkable trio of characters: Artha, a student at cosmetology college by day, a sex worker by night; Buster Mano, a private detective whose specialty is tracking down errant husbands; and Jackie Kasey, a lounge comic who opens for Elvis at $10,000 a night and wonders why he is still only a “semi-name.” Pimps, bail bondsmen, parking-lot moguls, used-car tycoons, ex-jockeys, and women who look as if they ...

The Last Love Song

Autor: Tracy Daugherty

Número de Páginas: 753

In The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty, the critically acclaimed author of Hiding Man (a New Yorker and New York Times Notable book) and Just One Catch, and subject of the hit documentary The Center Will Not Hold on Netflix delves deep into the life of distinguished American author and journalist Joan Didion in this, the first printed biography published about her life. Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and co-wrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well-known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and non-fiction. Some of her most-notable work includes Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Run River, and The Year of Magical Thinking, a National Book Award winner and shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. It dealt with the grief surrounding Didion after the loss of her husband and daughter. Daugherty takes readers on a journey back through time, following a young Didion in Sacramento through to her adult...

Monster

Autor: John Gregory Dunne

Número de Páginas: 219

Monster is John Gregory Dunne's mordant account of the eight years it took to get the 1996 Robert Redford/Michelle Pfeiffer film Up Close & Personal made. A bestselling novelist, Dunne has a cold eye, perfect pitch for the absurdities of Hollywood, and sharp elbows for the film industry's savage infighting. 192 pp. Author tour & national ads. 25,000 print.

The Man Who Invented Conservatism

Autor: Daniel J. Flynn

Número de Páginas: 310

Frank Meyer devised the blueprint for American conservatism—fusionism—championed by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and so many to this day. Yet long before and far away, Communists in London chanted “Free Frank Meyer!” to block the deportation of a comrade who was their cause célèbre. Those fervent Marxists could never have predicted that their hero would one day provide the intellectual energy necessary to propel conservatives to political power. The Man Who Invented Conservatism unveils one of the twentieth century’s great untold stories: a Communist turned conservative, an antiwar activist turned soldier, and a free-love enthusiast turned family man whose big idea captured the American Right. This intellectual migration coincided with a clandestine affair inside 10 Downing Street, service as a lieutenant to the man who later constructed the Berlin Wall, and neighborly chats with the pop-star and poet celebrity next door. Present at the creation of National Review, Meyer helped launch Joan Didion’s writing career. From H. G. Wells to Henry Kissinger to Milton Friedman, he rubbed shoulders with everyone who mattered. Having discovered Meyer’s previously...

Confesiones verdaderas

Autor: John Gregory Dunne

Número de Páginas: 353

Una nueva edición del clásico de John Gregory Dunne, que evoca el famoso asesinato de la Dalia negra y que fue llevado al cine con Robert de Niro y Robert Duvall como protagonistas. Los Ángeles, años cuarenta: en un solar se descubre el cadáver mutilado de una joven. La prensa bautiza el caso con el sugerente nombre de la «puta virgen» y, de repente, un asesinato que podría haber pasado desapercibido se convierte en el ojo de un huracán que adquiere cada vez mayores dimensiones. Dos hermanos, Tom, detective de homicidios, y Des Spellacy, sacerdote con ambiciones políticas dentro de la Iglesia, constituyen los ejes en torno a los cuales desfilan personajes comprometidos en sobornos y tráficos de influencias, que nos llevan de los aposentos de un cardenal a un sórdido prostíbulo de suburbio; de los campos de golf donde los notables juegan sus partidas y entretejen sus redes de poder y corrupción a la humilde feligresía de una parroquia californiana; de policías de moral ambigua que bordean la ilegalidad a la atormentada vida sentimental de Tom, cuya esposa entra en delirios místicos y cuya amante tiene la molesta virtud de despertar su mala conciencia.

Playland

Autor: John Gregory Dunne

Número de Páginas: 574

A critically acclaimed best-seller set in the glamorous, gangster-dominated Hollywood of the 1940s tells the story of Blue Tyler, a child star who disappears from Hollywood and becomes a bag lady in New York City.

Dutch Shea, Jr.

Autor: John Gregory Dunne

Número de Páginas: 355

“Dunne’s bravura plotting asserts an exhilarating mastery.” —The New York Times Book Review. In John Gregory Dunne’s celebrated third novel, Los Angeles-based criminal defense attorney Dutch Shea, Jr. struggles to keep from falling apart after an act of terrorist violence strikes his family, the loss pushing him towards a confrontation with his past and into a mystery involving the death of his father, a felon who died in prison. Set in L.A. and Dunne’s hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, the novel follows Shea into a labyrinth of deception, corruption, and criminal malice. Fighting to keep a host of disturbing memories tamped down, Shea plunges into his legal work, one embedding him in a world of scammers and burglars, pimps and prostitutes, corrupt cops and shady private eyes. With unrivaled detail and pitch-black humor, Dunne takes us into police precincts and criminal courtrooms, judge’s chambers and city morgues. The novel’s deft noir touches will remind readers of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, while Dunne’s command of legal dynamics and police procedures anticipates fiction by Scott Turow, John Grisham and Michael Connelly. Introducing a sweeping...

Quintana & Friends

Autor: John Gregory Dunne

Número de Páginas: 279

“Dunne has a wicked eye for the telling details, an uncanny ear for the revealing phrase.”—The New York Times. Quintana & Friends gathers thirty-three brilliant essays written by a pioneer of New Journalism between 1963 and 1978. John Gregory Dunne's gifts for keen reportage, subtle storytelling, and articulate opinion on full display, he covers topics ranging from the Hollywood machine to America’s last fight club to departure day for young soldiers shipping out to Viet Nam. In a celebrated baseball essay, he follows San Francisco Giant outfielder Willie Mays as the slugger seeks to break the National League career home-run record, his portrait capturing a prickly veteran not shy, in an age before PR handlers for athletes, of expressing his annoyance with reporters. In “Sneak,” Dunne brings us inside Twentieth-Century Fox’s Minneapolis advance screening of the movie Dr. Doolittle. In “Quebec Zero,” he spends 24 hours underground with a crew of four young men manning nuclear missiles aimed at the Soviet Union, Dunne’s goal “to see how it worked on the mind, to have World War III only an arm’s length away.” In the title essay, Dunne writes of raising his...

Monster

Autor: John Gregory Dunne

Número de Páginas: 236

In Hollywood, screenwriters are a curse to be borne, and beating up on them is an industry blood sport. But in this ferociously funny and accurate account of life on the Hollywood food chain, it's a screenwriter who gets the last murderous laugh. That may be because the writer is John Gregory Dunne, who has written screenplays, along with novels and non-fiction, for thirty years. In 1988 Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, were asked to write a screenplay about the dark and complicated life of the late TV anchorwoman Jessica Savitch. Eight years and twenty-seven drafts later, this script was made into the fairy tale "Up Close and Personal" starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. Detailing the meetings, rewrites, fights, firings, and distractions attendant to the making of a single picture, Monster illuminates the process with sagacity and raucous wit.

Blogging Towards Bethlehem

Autor: Dr Eugene Kennedy, Phd

Número de Páginas: 338

Reflections on the Church and society from a well-known Catholic writer.

Catholics in the Movies

Autor: Colleen Mcdannell

Número de Páginas: 362

The common admission that "everything I know about religion I learned from the movies" is true for believers as much as for unbelievers. And at the movies, Catholicism is the American religion. As an intensely visual faith with a well-defined ritual and authority structure, Catholicism lends itself to the drama and pageantry of film. Beginning with the silent era of film and ending with movies today, eleven prominent scholars explore how Catholic characters, spaces, and rituals are represented in cinema.

The Lede

Autor: Calvin Trillin

Número de Páginas: 337

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating portrait of journalism and the people who make it, told through pieces collected from the incomparable six-decade career of bestselling author and longtime New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin “The Lede contains profiles . . . that are acknowledged classics of the form and will be studied until A.I. makes hash out of all of us.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD I’ve been writing about the press almost as long as I’ve been in the game. At some point, it occurred to me that disparate pieces from various places in various styles amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer. Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker, covered the civil rights movement in the South for Time, and written comic verse for The Nation. But one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for his unique combination of reportage and humor—has been his own professional environment: the American press. In The Lede, Trillin gathers his incisive, often hilarious writing on...

Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century

Autor: David Pierce

Número de Páginas: 1380

With five Nobel Prize-winners, seven Pulitzer Prize-winners and two Booker Prize-winning novelists, modern Irish writing has contributed something special and permanent to our understanding of the twentieth century. Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century provides a useful, comprehensive and pleasurable introduction to modern Irish literature in a single volume. Organized chronologically by decade, this anthology provides the reader with a unique sense of the development and richness of Irish writing and of the society it reflected. It embraces all forms of writing, not only the major forms of drama, fiction and verse, but such material as travel writing, personal memoirs, journalism, interviews and radio plays, to offer the reader a complete and wonderfully varied sense of Ireland's contribution our literary heritage. David Pierce has selected major literary figures as well as neglected ones, and includes many writers from the Irish diaspora. The range of material is enormous, and ensures that work that is inaccessible or out of print is now easily available. The book is a delightful compilation, including many well known pieces and captivating "discoveries," which anyone...

The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery

Autor: B. Murphy

Número de Páginas: 553

Bruce Murphy's Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery is a comprehensive guide to the genre of the murder mystery that catalogues thousands of items in a broad range of categories: authors, titles, plots, characters, weapons, methods of killing, movie and theatrical adaptations. What distinguishes this encyclopedia from the others in the field is its critical stance.

The Grove Book of Hollywood

Autor: Christopher Silvester

Número de Páginas: 915

A “treasure trove” of insider accounts of the movie business from its earliest beginnings to the present day—“exceedingly savvy . . . astute and entertaining” (Variety). The Grove Book of Hollywood is a richly entertaining anthology of anecdotes and reminiscences from the people who helped make the City of Angels the storied place we know today. Movie moguls, embittered screenwriters, bemused outsiders such as P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, and others all have their say. Organized chronologically, the pieces form a history of Hollywood as only generations of insiders could tell it. We encounter the first people to move to Hollywood, when it was a dusty village on the outskirts of Los Angeles, as well as the key players during the heyday of the studio system in the 1930s. We hear from victims of the blacklist and from contemporary players in an industry dominated by agents. Coming from a wide variety of sources, the personal recollections range from the affectionate to the scathing, from the cynical to the grandiose. Here is John Huston on his drunken fistfight with Errol Flynn; Cecil B. DeMille on the challenges of filming The Ten Commandments; Frank Capra on working...

Latinx Literature Unbound

Autor: Ralph E. Rodriguez

Número de Páginas: 164

Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. Extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latinx and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category under which we group this literature. Latinx Literature Unbound, thus, begins with a fundamental question “What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literature Latinx?” From this question others emerge: What does Latinx allow or predispose us to see, and what does it preclude us from seeing? If the grouping—which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people under a seemingly homogeneous label—tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature? In answering these questions, Latinx Literature Unbound frees Latinx literature from taken-for-granted critical assumptions about identity and theme. It argues that there may be more salubrious taxonomies than Latinx for organizing and analyzing this literature. Privileging the act of...

Adult Attachment

Autor: Omri Gillath , Gery C. Karantzas , R. Chris Fraley

Número de Páginas: 348

Adult Attachment: A Concise Introduction to Theory and Research is an easy-to-read and highly accessible reference on attachment that deals with many of the key concepts and topics studied within attachment theory. This book is comprised of a series of chapters framed by common questions that are typically asked by novices entering the field of attachment. The content of each chapter focuses on answering this overarching question. Topics on the development of attachment are covered from different levels of analysis, including species, individual, and relationship levels, working models of attachment, attachment functions and hierarchies, attachment stability and change over time and across situations, relationship contexts, the cognitive underpinnings of attachment and its activation of enhancement via priming, the interplay between the attachment behavioral system and other behavioral systems, the effects of context on attachment, the contribution of physiology/neurology and genetics to attachment, the associations/differences between attachment and temperament, the conceptualization and measurement of attachment, and the association between attachment and...

L'année de la pensée magique

Autor: Joan Didion

Número de Páginas: 137

Une soirée ordinaire, fin décembre à New York. Joan Didion s'apprête à dîner avec son mari, l'écrivain John Gregory Dunne - quand ce dernier s’écroule sur la table de la salle à manger, victime d'une crise cardiaque foudroyante. Pendant une année entière, Didion essaiera de se résoudre à la mort du compagnon de toute sa vie, tout en s'occupant de leur fille, plongée dans le coma suite à une grave pneumonie. La souffrance, l'incompréhension, l'incrédulité, la méditation obsessionnelle autour de cet événement si commun et pourtant inconcevable : dans un récit impressionnant de sobriété et d'implacable honnêteté, Didion raconte la folie du deuil et dissèque, entre sécheresse clinique et monologue intérieur, la plus indicible expérience - et sa rédemption par la littérature. « Quintessence du style, son écriture est la fusion du feu et de la glace. Laconique, tenue, sèche, cruelle et lyrique à la fois. (...) Disons que ce serait la version féminine de Samuel Beckett, en lunettes noires, qui siroterait un cocktail au bord d’une piscine californienne. Disons que s’il y avait des “premières dames” de la littérature américaine, Joan Didion ...

Princeton Alumni Weekly

Número de Páginas: 986

The Year of Magical Thinking (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

Autor: Sparknotes

Número de Páginas: 109

The Year of Magical Thinking (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Joan Didion Making the reading experience fun! Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster. Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides: *Chapter-by-chapter analysis *Explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols *A review quiz and essay topicsLively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers

New York in the '50s

Autor: Dan Wakefield

Número de Páginas: 390

The rhythms of jazz and beat poetry punctuate this sweeping, firsthand account of New York City's 1950s literary scene from the Bowery to Spanish Harlem National bestselling author Dan Wakefield first came to New York City in 1952 with the intention of receiving a proper literary education on the ivied campus of Columbia University. An equally enlightening experience, he quickly found, was hiding in the smoky bars and cafés of Greenwich Village frequented by the most talented writers of the fifties, including James Baldwin, Joan Didion, and Allen Ginsberg. Wakefield recounts drinking at the White Horse Tavern, Dylan Thomas's Village haunt, as well as the offices of Esquire and the Nation, capturing rare, intimate moments of spirited camaraderie between some of the most influential artists of their generation. Like Hemingway's recollections of 1920s Paris in A Moveable Feast, New York in the '50s showcases a city in its artistic heyday, replete with Wakefield's remembrances of brushing shoulders with literary icons such as Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer, and watching Thelonious Monk play jazz at the Five Spot Café. Wakefield's experience as a journalist and chronicler of...

Benjamin Lightbourne/Lightburn of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania and His Descendants

Autor: Robert C Lightburn

Número de Páginas: 793

I first became interested in genealogy when I was about twelve. It was then that my paternal grandmother first introduced me to a book entitled Genealogy of the Fell Family in America Descended from Joseph Fell. This book, which was published in 1891, included my grandfather, Charles McConnell Lightburn. I was struck by the time span covered by the book—nearly three hundred years—and was fascinated by the fact that all of the people in that book were related to one another and to me either by blood or marriage! My grandmother later gave me that book, and it became the first book in my genealogical library. My grandfather and my great-aunt Mary told me that their father had fought for the North during the Civil War by the side of his older brother, who was a brigadier general. This fascinated me. They also told me that there was a town in West Virginia called Lightburn. I couldn’t wait to find it on a map! My own genealogical research did not begin until the late 1970s when I requested the Civil War records of my great grandfather, Calvin Luther Lightburn, and his brothers from the National Archives. During the 1980s, I continued my research, albeit at a very low level of...

Contemporary American Memoirs in Action

Autor: Jane Danielewicz

Número de Páginas: 143

This book analyzes a collection of literary memoirs to demonstrate how this genre is an avenue for participation in public life. Writers are repurposing the memoir, a genre known for its personal and expressive function, to engage in debate and serve political goals. The chapters provide case studies for memoir as social action that effects change by looking at the writing of Joan Didion, John Edgar Wideman, James McBride, M. Elaine Mar, Janisse Ray, Lucy Grealy, and Ann Patchett. Drawing on theories of genre and agency, Danielewicz asserts how these writers are acting pragmatically. Memoirs contribute to democratic society by offering solutions, creating new knowledge, revealing social trends, bringing issues to light, creating empathy and connection, and changing public opinion.

Rhetorical Exposures

Autor: Christopher Carter

Número de Páginas: 216

In Rhetorical Exposures, Christopher Carter explores social documentary photography from the nineteenth century to the present in order to illuminate the political dimensions and consequences of photographs taken and selected to highlight social injustice.

Frog Hollow

Autor: Susan Campbell

Número de Páginas: 249

Portraits of a gritty New England neighborhood and its people, with accompanying photos, reflecting waves of immigrants and tides of American history. Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood is a collection of colorful historical vignettes of an ethnically diverse neighborhood just west of the Connecticut State Capitol in Hartford. Its 1850s row houses have been home to a wide variety of immigrants. During the Revolutionary War, Frog Hollow was a progressive hub, and later, in the mid-late nineteenth century, it was a hotbed of industry. Reporter Susan Campbell tells the true stories of Frog Hollow with a primary focus on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the inventors, entrepreneurs and workers, as well as the impact of African American migration to Hartford, the impact of the Civil Rights movement and the continuing fight for housing. Frog Hollow was also one of the first neighborhoods in the country to experiment with successful urban planning models, including public parks and free education. From European colonists to Irish and Haitian immigrants to Puerto Ricans, these stories of Frog Hollow show the multiple realities that make up a dynamic urban...

The Last Supper

Autor: Paul Elie

Número de Páginas: 310

This enthralling group portrait brings to life a moment when popular culture became the site of religious strife—strife that set the stage for some of the most salient political and cultural clashes of our day. Circa 1980, tradition and authority are in the ascendant, both in Catholicism (via Pope John Paul II) and in American civic life (through the Moral Majority and the so-called televangelists). But the public is deeply divided on issues of body and soul, devotion and desire. Enter the figures Paul Elie calls “cryptoreligious.” Here is Leonard Cohen writing “Hallelujah” on his knees in a Times Square hotel room; Andy Warhol adapting Leonardo’s The Last Supper in response to the AIDS pandemic; Prince making the cross and altar into “signs o’ the times.” Through Toni Morrison, spirits speak from the grave; Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen deepen the tent-revival intensity of their work; Wim Wenders offers an angel’s-eye view of Berlin; U2, the Neville Brothers, and Sinéad O’Connor reckon with their Christian roots in music of mystic yearning. And Martin Scorsese overcomes fundamentalist ire to make The Last Temptation of Christ—a struggle that...

Coast of Dreams

Autor: Kevin Starr

Número de Páginas: 802

In this extraordinary book, Kevin Starr–widely acknowledged as the premier historian of California, the scope of whose scholarship the Atlantic Monthly has called “breathtaking”–probes the possible collapse of the California dream in the years 1990—2003. In a series of compelling chapters, Coast of Dreams moves through a variety of topics that show the California of the last decade, when the state was sometimes stumbling, sometimes humbled, but, more often, flourishing with its usual panache. From gang violence in Los Angeles to the spectacular rise–and equally spectacular fall–of Silicon Valley, from the Northridge earthquake to the recall of Governor Gray Davis, Starr ranges over myriad facts, anecdotes, news stories, personal impressions, and analyses to explore a time of unprecedented upheaval in California. Coast of Dreams describes an exceptional diversity of people, cultures, and values; an economy that mirrors the economic state of the nation; a battlefield where industry and the necessities of infrastructure collide with the inherent demands of a unique and stunning natural environment. It explores California politics (including Arnold Schwarzenegger’s...

Spy

Número de Páginas: 64

Smart. Funny. Fearless."It's pretty safe to say that Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. It might have remade New York's cultural landscape; it definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There's no magazine I know of that's so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark, and whose demise is so lamented" --Dave Eggers. "It's a piece of garbage" --Donald Trump.

James Ellroy

Autor: Steven Powell

Número de Páginas: 209

James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction is a study of all of Ellroy's key works, from his debut novel Brown's Requiem to the epic Underworld USA trilogy. This book traces the development of Ellroy's writing style and the importance of his Demon Dog persona to carving out his unique place in American crime fiction.

Hunter S. Thompson

Autor: Kevin T. Mceneaney

Número de Páginas: 307

A decade after Hunter S. Thompson’s death, his books—including Hell’s Angels, The Curse of Lono, The Great Shark Hunt, and Rum Diary—continue to sell thousands of copies each year, and previously unpublished manuscripts of his still surface for publication. While Thompson never claimed to be a great writer, he did invent a new literary style—“gonzo”—that has been widely influential on both literature and journalism. Though Thompson and his work engendered a significant—even rabid—following, relatively little analysis has been published about his writing. In Hunter S. Thompson: Fear, Loathing, and the Birth of Gonzo, Kevin T. McEneaney examines the intellectual background of this American original, providing biographical details and placing Thompson within a larger social and historical context. A significant portion of this book is devoted to the creation, reception, and legacy of his most important works, particularly Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In addition to discussing influences on Thompson's work—including Homer, Nietzsche, Spengler, Melville, Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and others—as well as the writers Thompson influenced, McEneaney...

Other Hollywood Renaissance

Autor: Dominic Lennard

Número de Páginas: 412

In the late 1960s, the collapse of the classic Hollywood studio system led in part, and for less than a decade, to a production trend heavily influenced by the international art cinema. Reflecting a new self-consciousness in the US about the national film patrimony, this period is known as the Hollywood Renaissance. However, critical study of the period is generally associated with its so-called principal auteurs, slighting a number of established and emerging directors who were responsible for many of the era's most innovative and artistically successful releases.With contributions from leading film scholars, this book provides a revisionist account of this creative resurgence by discussing and memorializing twenty-four directors of note who have not yet been given a proper place in the larger history of the period. Including filmmakers such as Hal Ashby, John Frankenheimer, Mike Nichols, and Joan Micklin Silver, this more expansive approach to the auteurism of the late 1960s and 1970s seems not only appropriate but pressing - a necessary element of the re-evaluation of 'Hollywood' with which cinema studies has been preoccupied under the challenges posed by the emergence and...

We Tell Ourselves Stories

Autor: Alissa Wilkinson

Número de Páginas: 186

Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, W Magazine, The Millions Best Books of Spring 2025 • Oprah Daily, Town & Country “Sharp, elegant and eye-opening . . . a crucial toolbox for understanding both Joan Didion and Hollywood.” —Emily Nussbaum Joan Didion opened The White Album (1979) with what would become one of the most iconic lines in American literature: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Today, this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T-shirts and posters, used as a battle cry for artists and writers. In truth, Didion was describing something much less rosy: our human tendency to manufacture delusions that might ward away our anxieties when society seems to spin off its axis. Nowhere was this collective hallucination more effectively crafted than in Hollywood. In this riveting cultural biography, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion’s influence through the lens of American mythmaking. As a young girl, Didion was infatuated with John Wayne and his on-screen bravado, and was fascinated by her California pioneer ancestry and the infamous Donner Party. The mythos that preoccupied her...

L'année de la pensée magique

Autor: Joan Didion

Número de Páginas: 281

Une soirée ordinaire, fin décembre à New York. Joan Didion s'apprête à dîner avec son mari, l'écrivain John Gregory Dunne - quand ce dernier s'écroule sur la table de la salle à manger, victime d'une crise cardiaque foudroyante. Pendant une année entière, elle essaiera de se résoudre à la mort du compagnon de toute sa vie et de s'occuper de leur fille, plongée dans le coma à la suite d'une grave pneumonie. La souffrance, l'incompréhension, l'incrédulité, la méditation obsessionnelle autour de cet événement si commun et pourtant inconcevable : dans un récit impressionnant de sobriété et d'implacable honnêteté, Didion raconte la folie du deuil et dissèque, entre sécheresse clinique et monologue intérieur, la plus indicible expérience - et sa rédemption par la littérature. L'année de la pensée magique a été consacré " livre de l'année 2006 " aux Etats-Unis. Best-seller encensé par la critique, déjà considéré comme un classique de la littérature sur le deuil, ce témoignage bouleversant a été couronné par le National Book Award et vient d'être adapté pour la scène à Broadway, par l'auteur elle-même, dans une mise en scène de David...