Since 1996, Alexander Payne (b. 1961) has made seven feature films and a short segment of an omnibus movie. Although his body of work is quantitatively small, it is qualitatively impressive. His movies ...

For fans of Peter Bagge (b. 1957) and his bracing satirical writing and drawing, this collection offers a perfect means to track how he describes his career choices, work habits, preoccupations, and comedic ...

Timothy E. Wise presents the first book to focus specifically on the musical content of yodeling in our culture. He shows that yodeling serves an aesthetic function in musical texts. A series of chronological ...

This unique book explores how the aesthetic and cultural movement “Steampunk” persuades audiences and wins new acolytes. Steampunk is an aesthetic style grounded in the Victorian era, in clothing ...

In the summer of 2000 X-Men surpassed all box office expectations and ushered in an era of unprecedented production of comic book film adaptations. This trend, now in its second decade, has blossomed into ...

“After reading Neuromancer for the first time,” literary scholar Larry McCaffery wrote, “I knew I had seen the future of [science fiction] (and maybe of literature in general), and its name was William ...

Best known for her Oscar-nominated roles in the smash hits Paper Moon and Blazing Saddles, Madeline Kahn (1942–1999) was one of the most popular comedians of her time—and one of the least understood. ...

A Thousand Cuts is a candid exploration of one of America's strangest and most quickly vanishing subcultures. It is about the death of physical film in the digital era and about a paranoid, secretive, ...

Bars, Blues, and Booze collects lively bar tales from the intersection of black and white musical cultures in the South. Many of these stories do not seem dignified, decent, or filled with uplifting euphoria, ...

Syndicated cartoonist and illustrator Tim Jackson offers an unprecedented look at the rich yet largely untold story of African American cartoon artists. This book provides a historical record of the people ...