Download or read book The MAD Files Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America s Brain written by David Mikics and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrate America's zaniest and most subversive magazine in 26 essays and comix from all-star contributors, including Roz Chast, Jonathan Lethem, and Grady Hendrix. Before SNL and the wise-guy sarcasm of Letterman and Colbert, before The Simpsons and online memes, there was . . . MAD. A mainstay of countless American childhoods, MAD magazine exploded onto the scene in the 1950s and gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties. MAD became the zaniest, most subversive satire magazine ever to be sold on America’s newsstands, anticipating the spirit of underground comix and ’zines and influencing humor writing in movies, television, and the internet to this day. Edited by David Mikics, The MAD Files celebrates the magazine’s impact and the legacy of the Usual Gang of Idiots who transformed puerile punchlines and merciless mockery into an art form. 26 essays and comics present a varied, perceptive, and often very funny account of MAD’s significance, ranging from the cultural to the aesthetic to the personal. Art Spiegelman reflects on how he “couldn’t learn much about America from my refugee immigrant parents—but I learned all about it from MAD” Roz Chast remembers how the magazine was “love at first sight. . . . It was one of my first inklings that there were other people out there who found the world as ridiculous as I did.” David Hajdu and Grady Hendrix zero in on MAD’s hilarious movie spoofs Liel Leibovitz delves into the Jewishness behind the magazine’s humor and Rachel Shteir amplifies the often unsung contributions of MAD’s women artists. Several essays are admiring profiles of the individual creators that made MAD what it was: Mort Drucker, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Antonio Prohias, and Will Elder. For longtime fans and new readers alike, The MAD Files is an indispensable guide to America’s greatest satire magazine.
Download or read book Everything and Less written by Mark McGurl and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Best Book of Fall (Esquire) and a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 (Lit Hub) What Has Happened to Fiction in the Age of Platform Capitalism? Since it was first launched in 1994, Amazon has changed the world of literature. The “Everything Store” has not just transformed how we buy books; it has affected what we buy, and even what we read. In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl explores this new world where writing is no longer categorized as high or lowbrow, literature or popular fiction. Charting a course spanning from Henry James to E. L. James, McGurl shows that contemporary writing has less to do with writing per se than with the manner of its distribution. This consumerist logic—if you like this, you might also like ...—has reorganized the fiction universe so that literary prize-winners sit alongside fantasy, romance, fan fiction, and the infinite list of hybrid genres and self-published works. This is an innovation to be cautiously celebrated. Amazon’s platform is not just a retail juggernaut but an aesthetic experiment driven by an unseen algorithm rivaling in the depths of its effects any major cultural shift in history. Here all fiction is genre fiction, and the niches range from the categories of crime and science fiction to the more refined interests of Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica. Everything and Less is a hilarious and insightful map of both the commanding heights and sordid depths of fiction, past and present, that opens up an arresting conversation about why it is we read and write fiction in the first place.
Download or read book Shadowhunters and Downworlders written by Cassandra Clare and published by BenBella Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore the world of the Mortal Instruments with Cassandra Clare and more Join Cassandra Clare and a Circle of more than a dozen top YA writers, including New York Times bestsellers Holly Black, Rachel Caine, and Kami Garcia, as they write about the Mortal Instruments series, its characters, and its world. Inside you'll read: • A cinematic tutorial on why the best friend (Simon) always loses out to the bad boy (Jace) • The unexpected benefits of the incest taboo • What we can read between the lines of Alec and Magnus' European vacation • The importance of friendship, art, humor, and rebellion • And more, from the virtues of Downworlders to the naughty side of Shadowhunting
Download or read book Twitter The Comic The Book written by Mike Rosenthal and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a simple, brilliant premise—to create comics from the weirdest and funniest tweets around—artist Mike Rosenthal (@VectorBelly) has crafted a hilariously surreal world that has attracted over a million followers to his blog Twitter: The Comic. Each carefully curated tweet delivers concentrated humor in the language of the Internet, reproduced in the comics with typos and all. As envisioned by Rosenthal, each comes to life through a bizarrely recognizable cast of bassoon-playing cops, sarcastic teens, bear MDs, clueless dads, potential insect overlords, and more. Featuring more than 120 of these comics, including dozens unique to this book, Twitter: The Comic (The Book) is a dementedly funny vision of our strange online age.
Download or read book Ardeur written by Laurell K. Hamilton and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10-08 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laurell K. Hamiltons Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series is a literary sensation, thanks to its strong female hero, well-fleshed (both literally and literarily) characters and unabashed attitude toward sex. The world Hamilton has created is powerfu...
Download or read book Blank Canvas My So Called Artist s Journey Vol 4 written by Akiko Higashimura and published by Seven Seas Entertainment. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Akiko has finally achieved her dream of becoming a manga artist! She's almost ready to fully immerse herself in the wonderful world of shoujo when Hidaka-sensei approaches her. Just what does he want?
Download or read book Science Fair Flop Ready Freddy 22 written by Abby Klein and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone's favorite first-grade shark expert is back! With more than 3 million copies sold, it's clear that kids are ready for Freddy!Now that Freddy's in first grade he needs a real science experiment for the school fair. But Freddy isn't a science whiz like his best friend, Robbie. When he finally comes up with a plan -- growing mold -- his mom accidentally throws it away! Can he recreate it in time? Or will the fair be a total flop?
Download or read book Writing in Society written by Raymond Williams and published by Verso. This book was released on 1983 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raymond Williams’s work was always concerned with the relation between culture and society. This book focuses on specific texts and authors, exploring the historical and cultural sources of their particular forms of writing. In it, Williams examines dramatic form and language in Racine and Shakespeare; the politics of fiction in the English Jacobin novel; David Hume and Charles Dickens and the changing characteristics of English prose; Robert Tressell, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, and the role of region and class in the English novel. Also included are Williams’s reflections on the rise of English studies, on their crisis as the literary traditions of Cambridge University were beset by the ‘structuralist controversy’, and on the wider implications of this redefinition of the critical field.
Download or read book The Tomb of Oedipus written by William Marx and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If Greek tragedies are meant to be so tragic, why do they so often end so well? Here starts the story of a long and incredible misunderstanding. Out of the hundreds of tragedies that were performed, only 32 were preserved in full. Who chose them and why? Why are the lost ones never taken into account? This extremely unusual scholarly book tells us an Umberto Eco-like story about the lost tragedies. By arguing that they would have given a radically different picture, William Marx makes us think in completely new ways about one of the major achievements of Western culture. In this very readable, stimulating, lively, and even sometimes funny book, he explores parallels with Japanese theatre, resolves the enigma of catharsis, sheds a new light on psychoanalysis. In so doing, he tells also the story of the misreadings of our modernity, which disconnected art from the body, the place, and gods. Two centuries ago philosophers transformed Greek tragedies into an ideal archetype, now they want to read them as self-help handbooks, but all are equally wrong: Greek tragedy is definitely not what you think, and we may never understand it, but this makes it matter all the more to us.
Download or read book Enemy of the People written by Rob Rogers and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After 25 years as a political cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rob Rogers was fired for drawing cartoons critical of President Trump. In Enemy of the People, Rogers writes, "Trump's open embrace of the darkest, ugliest corners of human nature has emboldened racists, neo-Nazis, criminals, thugs, despots, misogynists, and liars to come out from under their rocks and display their shameful behavior publicly. That includes publishers and editors who years ago may have been too ashamed to express their hateful views on the editorial page." From a cartoon killing spree to a social media buzz, all the way to an appearance on CNN to his final days at the paper, Rogers chronicles his unenviable journey with honesty, wit, and humor.
Download or read book Arab Comic Strips written by Allen Douglas and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The discipline of Middle Eastern studies in the West has often been resistant to incorporating new theoretical and conceptual paradigms. Arab Comic Strips provides at least one indicator that this trend has begun to change. The study reflects the influence of both political economy and post-modernism. The former's influence can be seen in the authors' focus on mass culture and "history from below," while the latter's manifests itself in the authors' use of semiotics and their eschewal of any linear model of social change or totalizing discourse. The strengths of Arab Comic Strips lie in its comprehensive treatment of the genre it scrutinizes. The authors present extensively detailed studies of comic strips that range from Iraq and the Gulf to North Africa and France. Further, the strips they select cover a wide thematic and ideological terrain. Pan-Arabist, Islamist, hybrid Western-Arab, and radical leftist strips all receive in-depth analysis. Through this analysis, the reader gains great insight into political and cultural debates specific to particular regions of the Arab world. The juxtaposition of strips representing different thematic, ideological, and geographical perspectives constitutes comparative analysis at its best. -- From http://www.jstor.org (Dec. 4, 2013).
Download or read book The Book written by Amaranth Borsuk and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book as object, as content, as idea, as interface. What is the book in a digital age? Is it a physical object containing pages encased in covers? Is it a portable device that gives us access to entire libraries? The codex, the book as bound paper sheets, emerged around 150 CE. It was preceded by clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. Are those books? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amaranth Borsuk considers the history of the book, the future of the book, and the idea of the book. Tracing the interrelationship of form and content in the book's development, she bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately. Contrary to the many reports of its death (which has been blamed at various times on newspapers, television, and e-readers), the book is alive. Despite nostalgic paeans to the codex and its printed pages, Borsuk reminds us, the term “book” commonly refers to both medium and content. And the medium has proved to be malleable. Rather than pinning our notion of the book to a single form, Borsuk argues, we should remember its long history of transformation. Considering the book as object, content, idea, and interface, she shows that the physical form of the book has always been the site of experimentation and play. Rather than creating a false dichotomy between print and digital media, we should appreciate their continuities.
Download or read book A Life in Words written by Paul Auster and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inside look into Paul Auster's art and craft, the inspirations and obsessions, mesmerizing and dramatic in turn. A remarkably candid, and often surprisingly dramatic, investigation into one writer's art, craft, and life, A Life in Words is rooted in three years of dialogue between Auster and Professor I. B. Siegumfeldt, starting in 2011, while Siegumfeldt was in the process of launching the Center for Paul Auster Studies at the University of Copenhagen. It includes a number of surprising disclosures, both concerning Auster's work and about the art of writing generally. It is a book that's full of surprises, unscripted yet amounting to a sharply focused portrait of the inner workings of one of America's most productive and successful writers, through all twenty-one of Auster's narrative works and the themes and obsessions that drive them.
Download or read book Completely Mad written by Maria Reidelbach and published by M J F Books. This book was released on 1997-10-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrated history of the most influential and unique humor magazine in post-war America.
Download or read book Mapping the World of the Sorcerer s Apprentice written by Mercedes Lackey and published by BenBella Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Dursleys as social commentary to a look at Snape's role in less than child-friendly fanfiction . . . from the parallels between Azkaban and Abu Ghraib to the role of religion at Hogwarts . . . from why Dumbledore had to die to why killing Harry never should have been part of Voldemort's plan to begin with . . . Mapping the World of the Sorcerer's Apprentice offers a comprehensive look at the Harry Potter series through the eyes of leading science fiction and fantasy writers and religion, psychology, and science experts. This book has not been authorized by J. K. Rowling, Warner Bros. or anyone associated with the Harry Potter books or films.
Download or read book Parenthesis written by Élodie Durand and published by IDW Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-10 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A triumph of graphic memoir, Parenthesis narrates the author’s experience with tumor-related epilepsy—losing herself, and finding herself again. Julie is barely out of her teens when a tumor begins pressing on her brain, ushering in a new world of seizures, memory gaps, and loss of self. Suddenly, the sentence of her normal life has been interrupted by the opening of a parenthesis that may never close. Based on the real experiences of cartoonist Élodie Durand, Parenthesis is a gripping testament of struggle, fragility, acceptance, and transformation which was deservedly awarded the Revelation Prize of the Angoulême International Comics Festival.
Download or read book Inked written by Joe Dator and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Joe Dator makes me laugh. Everybody loves to look behind the scenes and his new book shows the secrets, inspirations, heartaches, and triumphs of a life in cartoons. Christopher Guest and I have a collection of original cartoons, and we love our Joe Dator!" —Jamie Lee Curtis From inspiration to conception and all the trials in-between. Inked is a collection of cartoons from one of the New Yorker’s most beloved cartoonists. Filled with more than 150 of Dator’s single-panel cartoons, this lively, quick-witted book betrays a deadpan sense of humor. But Inked is more than a book of cartoons. Dator also dives into the creative process, offering bonus commentary on how ideas have come to fruition, how one idea has led to another, and the various attempts to get an idea right. Along the way, he shows how a spark of imagination has turned into a laugh-out-loud moment with only a single image and caption, and how other attempts have found themselves on the cutting-room floor.
