Explore the vast range of titles available.

From Sherlock Holmes to Sam Spade; Nick and Nora Charles to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin; Harry Lime to Gilda, Madeleine Elster, and other femmes fatales-crime and crime solving in fiction and film captivate us. Why do we keep returning to Agatha Christie's ingenious puzzles and Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled murder mysteries? What do spy thrillers teach us, and what accounts for the renewed popularity of morally ambiguous noirs? In The Mysterious Romance of Murder , the poet and critic David Lehman explores a wide variety of outstanding books and movies-some famous (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity), some known mainly to aficionados-with style, wit, and passion. Lehman revisits the smoke-filled jazz clubs from the classic noir films of the 1940s, the iconic set pieces that defined Hitchcock's America, the interwar intrigue of Eric Ambler's best fictions, and the intensity of attraction between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. He also considers the evocative elements of noir-cigarettes, cocktails, wisecracks, and jazz standards-and offers five original noir poems (including a pantoum inspired by the 1944 film Laura) and ironic astrological profiles of Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, and Graham Greene. Written by a connoisseur with an uncanny feel for the language and mood of mystery, espionage, and noir, The Mysterious Romance of Murder will delight fans of the genre and newcomers alike.

Blues on Stage presents a new history of the development of the \"Classic Blues\" of the 1920s, offering a comprehensive review of various Black singers who recorded and were influential in this era, including Bessie Smith, Trixie Smith, Butterbeans and Susie, and Ma Rainey. The business of music recording and publishing, including songwriting and touring theater circuits, is explored as part of the narrative of how and when these artists became nationally popular. The most highly regarded singers of this period were not folk or rural artists, but rather highly experienced stage professionals whose careers often extended two decades or more prior to their first recordings. These artists, some of the most famous acts on the Black vaudeville and tent show circuits, were preceded in the recording studio by many cabaret and nightclub singers with a different entertainment perspective and were followed by artists who came from a more rural, less professional background. For anyone interested in the roots of jazz and blues, Blues on Stage offers a new and comprehensive introduction to the development of this American musical style.

Presenting a social history of British crime film, this book focuses on the strategies used in order to address more radical notions surrounding class, politics, sex, delinquency, violence and censorship. Spanning post-war crime cinema to present-day \"Mockney\" productions, it contextualizes the films and identifies important and neglected works.

Philip Roth's 2004 alternative history novel, The Plot Against America, was his best-selling work in decades, firmly reestablishing his prominence among a general readership. The novel's popularity was due at least in part to its deliberately accessible prose style and exciting, cliffhanger-rich plot. Seizing upon this accessibility, this article examines the style of The Plot Against America as a literary version of film noir, the influential cycle of downbeat American crime films spanning roughly 1941-1958. To read the novel through this cinematic lens is to highlight certain pulp and Surrealist aspects not typically associated with Roth's fiction. Testing filmic understandings of noir themes and strategies against the novel's genre experiment, this article ultimately demonstrates how these conventions (including the femme fatale, narrative dislocation, and racial displacement) endure as vital expressions of American Modernism.

Leo Perutz's Mainacht in Wien is a novel fragment of three chapters written in 1938; it was abandoned when the author and his family managed to secure exile in Palestine. The unfinished novel is perhaps the most intriguing attempt at fictionalizing the immediate atmosphere of Nazi Vienna. Despite the time of its origin, Mainacht in Wien avoids direct political commentary and instead conveys a disaster in its strikingly visual literary style that approximates cinematic language. Tracing Perutz's attempted transformation from author of historical novels into writer of film scenarios allows for a glimpse into the politics and logistics of film production on the eve of Europe's Nazi cataclysm.

An authoritative companion that offers a wide-ranging thematic survey of this enduringly popular cultural form and includes scholarship from both established and emerging scholars as well as analysis of film noir's influence on other media including television and graphic novels. * Covers a wealth of new approaches to film noir and neo-noir that explore issues ranging from conceptualization to cross-media influences * Features chapters exploring the wider 'noir mediascape' of television, graphic novels and radio * Reflects the historical and geographical reach of film noir, from the 1920s to the present and in a variety of national cinemas * Includes contributions from both established and emerging scholars

Christina N. Baker's Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance is the first book-length analysis of representations of Black femaleness in the feature films of Black women filmmakers. These filmmakers resist dominant ideologies about Black womanhood, deliberately and creatively reconstructing meanings of Blackness that draw from their personal experiences and create new symbolic meaning of Black femaleness within mainstream culture. Addressing social issues such as the exploitation of Black women in the entertainment industry, the impact of mass incarceration on Black women, political activism, and violence, these films also engage with personal issues as complex as love, motherhood, and sexual identity. Baker argues that their counter-hegemonic representations have the potential to transform the narratives surrounding Black femaleness. At the intersection of Black feminism and womanism, Baker develops a \"womanist artistic standpoint\" theory, drawing from the work of Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Analyzing the cultural texts of filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay, Tanya Hamilton, Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Dee Rees-and including interviews she conducted with three of the filmmakers-Baker emphasizes the importance of applying an intersectional perspective that centers on the shared experiences of Black women and the role of film as a form of artistic expression and a tool of social resistance.

The Jazz Age. The phrase conjures images of Louis Armstrong holding court at the Sunset Cafe in Chicago, Duke Ellington dazzling crowds at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and star singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. But the Jazz Age was every bit as much of a Paris phenomenon as it was a Chicago and New York scene. In Paris Blues, Andy Fry provides an alternative history of African American music and musicians in France, one that looks beyond familiar personalities and well-rehearsed stories. He pinpoints key issues of race and nation in France's complicated jazz history from the 1920s through the 1950s. While he deals with many of the traditional icons—such as Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, and Sidney Bechet, among others—what he asks is how they came to be so iconic, and what their stories hide as well as what they preserve. Fry focuses throughout on early jazz and swing but includes its re-creation—reinvention—in the 1950s. Along the way, he pays tribute to forgotten traditions such as black musical theater, white show bands, and French wartime swing. Paris Blues provides a nuanced account of the French reception of African Americans and their music and contributes greatly to a growing literature on jazz, race, and nation in France.

Before hip-hop culture took over the world it was vividly captured by New York photographer Jamel Shabazz, who's impactful images defined not only the generation it captured, but all those that followed.

A visually exhilarating and aurally immersive record of one night in New Orleans. Three adolescent brothers journey through the lamplit streets encountering a kaleidoscope of dancers, musicians, hustlers, and revelers.