Alabama joins Mississippi as fertile Deep South soil for the Noir Series."Banish any boredom with a descent into Alabama Noir." — Southern Review of BooksAkashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct location within the geographic area of the book.Brand-new stories by: Ace Atkins, T...

The story of Rappin' Randy and The Pearls of Wisdom is a jungle adventure full of drama. Searching for a fallen star in an unexplored jungle paradise full of dangerous animals, Randy and his friends will let nothing stop them from reaching their goal.Rappin' Randy is a unique character who uses a nice blend of encouraging rap as communication to create positive influences. As they make friends with a suspected enemy and rescue another from certain death, it becomes apparent the jou...

Reimagining America Through the Blues, Jazz, and the Cultural Vision of Albert Murray.This collection consists of essays written by prominent African American literature, jazz, and Albert Murray scholars, reminiscences from Murray protégés and associates, and interviews with Murray himself. It illustrates Murray’s place as a central figure in African American arts and letters and as an American cultural pioneer.Born in Nokomis, Alabama, and raised ...

A vibrant tribute to Lewis Nordan’s unforgettable blend of Southern surrealism, dark humor, and deep humanity.Lewis Nordan: Humor, Heartbreak, and Hope is a rich collection of essays that examines the life and work of one of the South’s most distinctive literary voices. Edited by Barbara A. Baker, this volume brings together scholars and writers who explore Nordan’s use of magical realism, dark humor, and emotional vulnerability to portray the com...

One of the most distinguished filmmakers working today, David Lynch is a director whose vision of cinema is firmly rooted in fine art. He was motivated to make his first film as a student because he wanted a painting that “would really be able to move.” Most existing studies of Lynch, however, fail to engage fully with the complexities of his films’ relationship to other art forms. The Film Paintings of David Lynch fills this void, arguing that Lynch’s cinematic output needs to be...

From Charles Johnson—a National Book Award winner, Professor Emeritus at University of Washington, and one of America’s preeminent scholars on literature and race—comes an instructive, inspiring guide to the craft and art of writing.An award-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist, screenwriter, professor, and cartoonist, Charles Johnson has devoted his life to creative pursuit. His 1990 National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage is a modern classic,...

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and...

The fourth collection of poetry from the literary and cultural critic Fred Moten, B Jenkins is named after the poet’s mother, who passed away in 2000. It is both an elegy and an inquiry into many of the themes that Moten has explored throughout his career: language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical aesthetic and political tradition. In Moten’s verse, the arts, scholarship, and activism intertwine. Cadences echo from his mother’s Arkansas home through Africa...

The extent to which American poetry reinvented itself after World War II is a testament to the changing social, political and economic landscape of twentieth-century American life. Registering an important shift in the way scholars contextualize modern and contemporary American literature, this Companion explores how American poetry has documented and, at times, helped propel the literary and cultural revolutions of the past sixty-five years. This Companion sheds new light on the Beat, Bla...

Samuel L. Clemens lost the 1882 lawsuit declaring his exclusive right to use “Mark Twain” as a commercial trademark, but he succeeded in the marketplace, where synergy among his comic journalism, live performances, authorship, and entrepreneurship made “Mark Twain” the premier national and international brand of American humor in his day. And so it remains in ours, because Mark Twain's humor not only expressed views of self and society well ahead of its time, but also anticipated ways in w...

In this unique and engaging collection, twelve essays celebrate the legacy of one of America's most important playwrights and investigate Williams's enduring effect on America's cultural, theatrical, and literary heritage.Like Faulkner before him, Tennessee Williams gave universal appeal to southern characters and settings. His major plays, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie to A Streetcar Named Desire and Night of the Iguana, con...

These essays and reviews are mostly about literary fiction published in the last ten years and are written from the perspective of a fan of the McElroy/Coover/DeLillo axis or, more recently, the Powers/Vollmann/Wallace axis. The review-essays include pieces on all of the National Book Award fiction finalists of the last five years. Reviews selected here first appeared in Electronic Book Review, Barnes and Noble Review, New York Times Book Review, Atlantic, BookForum, The Nation, American B...