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Archaeology of the Political Unconscious: Theater and Opera in East Berlin, 1967–1977 (ISSN)
by Jennifer WilliamsThis book investigates the aesthetic and political dialectics of East Berlin to argue how its theater and opera stages incited artists to act out, fuel, and resist the troubled construction of political legitimacy.This volume investigates three case studies of how leading East Berlin stages excavated fragmentary materials from Weimar dramatist Bertolt Brecht’s oeuvre and repurposed them for their post‑fascist society: Uta Birnbaum’s 1967 Man Equals Man at the Berliner Ensemble, Joachim Herz’s 1977 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Komische Oper, and Heiner Muller’s own productions of his trailblazing plays. In each instance, reused theatrical artifacts dialectically expressed the contradictions inherent in East German political legitimacy, at once amplifying and critiquing it. Illuminated by original archival research and translations of letters and artistic ephemera published in English for the first time, and engaging with alternative East German feminist epistemologies, this book’s critical investigation of culture and political legitimacy in the shadow of Germany’s fascist past resonates beyond the Iron Curtain into the twenty‑first century. Its final chapter examines how performative artifacts influence the process of political legitimation in more recent history, ranging from Checkpoint Charlie tourism to the January 6, 2021 US insurrection.This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater and performance studies, art history, musicology, German studies, anthropology, and political science.
Archaic Modernism: Queer Poetics in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Queer Screens)
by Daniel HumphreyIn Archaic Modernism, Daniel Humphrey offers the first book-length, English-language examination of three adaptations of Greek tragedy produced by the gay and Marxist Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini: Oedipus Rex (1967), Medea (1969), and Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970/1973). Considering Pasolini’s own theories of a "Cinema of Poetry" alongside Jacques Derrida’s concept of écriture, as well as more recent scholarship by queer theory scholars advocating for an antirelational and antisocial subjectivity, Humphrey maintains that Pasolini’s Greek tragedy films exemplify a paradoxical sense of "archaic modernism" that is at the very heart of the filmmaker’s project. More daringly, he contends that they ultimately reveal the queer roots of Western civilization’s formative texts. Archaic Modernism is comprised of three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on Oedipus Rex, assessing both the filmic language employed and the deeply queer mythological source material that haunts the tragedy even as it remains largely at a subtextual yet palpable level. Chapter 2 extends and deepens the concept of queer fate and queer negativity in a scene-by-scene analysis of Medea. Chapter 3 looks at the most obscure of Pasolini’s feature length films, Notes Towards an African Orestes, a film long misunderstood as an unwitting failure, but which could perhaps best be understood as a deliberate, sacrificial act on the filmmaker’s part. Considering the film as the third in an informal, maybe unconscious, trilogy, Humphrey concludes his monograph by arguing that this "trilogy of myth" can best be understood as a deconstruction, gradually more and more severe, of three of the most important origin tales of Western civilization. Archaic Modernism makes the case that these three films are as essential as those Pasolini films more often studied in the Anglophone world: Mamma Roma, The Gospel According to Matthew, Teorema, The Trilogy of Life, and Salò, and that they are of continuing, perhaps even increasing, value today. This book is of specific interest to scholars, students, and researchers of film and queer studies.
The Archers: An Unofficial Companion
by Rosie DillonIt’s been sixty years since the familiar dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum of ‘Barwick Green’ first brought The Archers to our airwaves, and in that time millions of listeners have followed the lives of folk in Ambridge. This new compendium brings together facts and trivia about characters, controversies and country customs in one handy volume.
The Archers: An Unofficial Companion
by Rosie DillonIt’s been sixty years since the familiar dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum of ‘Barwick Green’ first brought The Archers to our airwaves, and in that time millions of listeners have followed the lives of folk in Ambridge. This new compendium brings together facts and trivia about characters, controversies and country customs in one handy volume.
The Archers: Moments that made the nation's favourite radio drama
by Joanna Toye Karen FarringtonThe Archers, like life, is made of moments: marriages and births, loves and losses, triumphs and disasters. It has been the soundtrack of our lives for over six decades, from stooking corn with Dan Archer in the 1950s to the tragic death of Nigel Pargetter in 2011.We know the characters of Ambridge – from much-loved Phil and Jill Archer and the irrepressible Grundys to wayward Brian Aldridge – like we know close friends. This book is their tribute.The Ambridge Chronicles relives some of the defining moments in The Archers history, delving into the rich archive of its scripts, to celebrate the highs and lows that have made the world’s longest running radio serial so treasured.
The Archers Archives
by Chris Arnot Simon FrithThe Archers Archives celebrates 60 years of the nation's favourite radio drama - looking back at the most dramatic events to happen over 16,000 episodes, complete with cast and crew interviews. Relive the defining moments in Archers history, from the devastating 1955 stables fire and the 1957 Tom Forrest manslaughter charge to the shocking imprisonment of Susan Carter in the early 1990s, the revelation of Brian Aldridge's affair with Siobhan Hathaway, and the Grundys' eviction from Grange Farm and exile to Meadow Rise.Script-writer Simon Frith and journalist Chris Arnot take you inside the creative life of the show, sharing how the series' storylines are planned and produced, and how the historical and cultural background of each period is interwoven into the everyday lives of the residents of Ambridge. Complete with original photos, some never-before-seen, The Archers Archives is an indispensable addition to every Archers fan's collection.
The Archers Miscellany
by Joanna ToyeThe first official trivia collection from Britain's best-loved radio drama.Have you ever wondered about the attractions at Ambridge fetes? Puzzled over who the winners were at the Flower and Produce Show? Been curious about details of past Bonfire Nights, or even menus at The Bull? Discover the whos, whats, wheres and whys of the show's past 60 years in The Archers Miscellany.Discover which resident has the most names and meet the animals of Ambridge; learn the order of illumination for the Christmas lights switch-on; ponder Great Ambridge Mysteries and remember Ambridge Wanderers football team fixtures from the glory days of the 1970s.Containing information gathered from the vast BBC Birmingham Archers archives and beautifully illustrated throughout, The Archers Miscellany is the ultimate trivia book for all things Ambridge.
The Archers Quizbook: Join Ambridge treasure Lynda Snell on a quiz quest around Britain's most loved village
by The Puzzle HouseWhich traditionally comes first in the Ambridge year, the Village Fete or the Flower and Produce Show?Which tool appears on the Pargetter coat of arms?Which member of the Archers clan has a first name where all the letters read in alphabetical order?Ambridge is a place many of us know almost as well as our own home towns. But while millions of people are invested in the goings-on in this picturesque village, few have had the privilege of walking its winding lanes. Now you can. Join Lynda Snell, a true pillar of this rural community, as she takes you on a guided tour of radio's most well-loved village.Starting at the summit of Lakey Hill, with its sweeping views of rural Borsetshire, Lynda will lead you around the village's landmarks and institutions imparting wisdom and gossip as she goes. Sun yourself in the beer garden of the Bull, watch the world go by from a bench on the village green and don your wellies for a wander around Brookfield. There are weddings to attend at St Stephen's, productions to enjoy at the Village Hall and deals to be done at the Dower House.Each chapter centres on key locations to challenge your knowledge in all manner of Ambridge affairs. Whether you're a lifelong listener of The Archers, have an ear for gossip, or are a relative newbie, you will be able to put your area of expertise to the test. With 70 years of rich rural history to explore, you might even learn something new.
The Archers Quizbook: Join Ambridge treasure Lynda Snell on a quiz quest around Britain's most loved village
by The Puzzle HouseWhich traditionally comes first in the Ambridge year, the Village Fete or the Flower and Produce Show?Which tool appears on the Pargetter coat of arms?Which member of the Archers clan has a first name where all the letters read in alphabetical order?Ambridge is a place many of us know almost as well as our own home towns. But while millions of people are invested in the goings-on in this picturesque village, few have had the privilege of walking its winding lanes. Now you can. Join Lynda Snell, a true pillar of this rural community, as she takes you on a guided tour of radio's most well-loved village.Starting at the summit of Lakey Hill, with its sweeping views of rural Borsetshire, Lynda will lead you around the village's landmarks and institutions imparting wisdom and gossip as she goes. Sun yourself in the beer garden of the Bull, watch the world go by from a bench on the village green and don your wellies for a wander around Brookfield. There are weddings to attend at St Stephen's, productions to enjoy at the Village Hall and deals to be done at the Dower House.Each chapter centres on key locations to challenge your knowledge in all manner of Ambridge affairs. Whether you're a lifelong listener of The Archers, have an ear for gossip, or are a relative newbie, you will be able to put your area of expertise to the test. With 70 years of rich rural history to explore, you might even learn something new.
Architecture, Actor and Audience (Theatre Concepts)
by Iain MackintoshUnderstanding the theatre space on both the practical and theoretical level is becoming increasingly important to people working in drama, in whatever capacity. Theatre architecture is one of the most vital ingredients of the theatrical experience and one of the least discussed or understood. In Architecture, Actor and Audience Mackintosh explores the contribution the design of a theatre can make to the theatrical experience, and examines the failings of many modern theatres which despite vigorous defence from the architectural establishment remain unpopular with both audiences and theatre people. A fascinating and provocative book.
Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time
by Beth WeinsteinArchitecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time examines the field of archi-choreographic experiments—unique interdisciplinary encounters and performed events generated through collaborations between architects and choreographers.Forty case studies spanning four decades give evidence of the range of motivations for embarking on these creative endeavors and diverse conceptual underpinnings, generative methods, objects of inquiry, and outcomes. Architecture and Choreography builds histories and theories through which to examine these works, the contexts within, and processes through which the works emerged, and the critical questions they raise about ways to work together, sites and citations, ethics and equity, control and agency. Three themes frame pairs of chapters. The first addresses disciplinarity through works that critically reflect upon their discipline’s tools, techniques, and conventions juxtaposed against projects that cite or use other art forms and cultural phenomena as source material. The second interrogates space and the role of spatial dispositifs, institutions, and sites, and their hidden and not-so-hidden conditions, as conceptual drivers and structures to subvert, trouble, unsettle, remember. The third asks who and what dances, finding a spectrum from mobilized architectural bodies to more-than-human cybarcorps. Modes of collaboration and the temporalities and life cycles of projects inform bookending chapters.Architecture and Choreography offers vital lessons not only for architects and choreographers but also for students and practitioners across design and performance fields.
The Architecture of Suspense: The Built World in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Midcentury)
by Christine Madrid FrenchThe inimitable, haunting films of Alfred Hitchcock took place in settings, both exterior and interior, that deeply impacted our experiences of his most unforgettable works. From the enclosed spaces of Rope and Rear Window to the wide-open expanses of North by Northwest, the physical worlds inhabited by desperate characters are a crucial element in our perception of the Hitchcockian universe. As Christine Madrid French reveals in this original and indispensable book, Hitchcock’s relation to the built world was informed by an intense engagement with location and architectural form—in an era marked by modernism’s advance—fueled by some of the most creative midcentury designers in film.Hitchcock saw elements of the built world not just as scenic devices but as interactive areas to frame narrative exchanges. In his films, building forms also serve a sentient purpose—to capture and convey feelings, sensations, and moments that generate an emotive response from the viewer. Visualizing the contemporary built landscape allowed the director to illuminate Americans’ everyday experiences as well as their own uncertain relationship with their environment and with each other.French shares several untold stories, such as the real-life suicide outside the Hotel Empire in Vertigo (which foreshadowed uncannily that film’s tragic finale), and takes us to the actual buildings that served as the inspiration for Psycho’s infamous Bates Motel. Her analysis of North by Northwest uncovers the Frank Lloyd Wright underpinnings for Robert Boyle’s design of the modernist house from the film’s celebrated Mount Rushmore sequence and ingeniously establishes the Vandamm House as the prototype of the cinematic trope of the villain’s lair. She also shows how the widespread unemployment of the 1930s resulted in a surge of gifted architects transplanting their careers into the film industry. These practitioners created sets that drew from contemporary design schools of thought and referenced real structures, both modern and historic. The Architecture of Suspense is the first book to document how these great architectural minds found expression in Hitchcock’s films and how the director used their talents and his own unique vision to create an enduring and evocative cinematic world.Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund
Architecture's Pretexts: Spaces of Translation
by Aarati KanekarThe aim of this book is to expose readers to architecture’s pretexts that include literary narratives, film, theatre, painting, music, and ritual, as a bridge between diverse intellectual territories and architecture. It introduces a selection of seminal modern and contemporary architectural projects, their situation within the built environment, and their intellectual and formal situation/context as pretexts and design paradigms. Connections between diverse bodies of information will be cultivated along with the ability to posit consequential relationships for the production of architecture. Architecture’s Pretexts seeks to cultivate a vision for architecture that sponsors operative links between the discipline of architecture and those outside of architecture. Exploring the works of various architects including Guiseppe Terragni, Peter Eisenman, Peter Zumthor, Perry Kulper and Smout Allen, and Rem Koolhaas, this book provides the framework to understanding architecture through the lens of art. Key concepts discussed are: allegories, diagrams, form, material, montage, movement, musical ratios, narrative sequence and representation. A valuable tool, with over 75 black and white illustrations, for students and professionals interested in interdisciplinary methods of design thinking.
Archival Storytelling: A Filmmaker's Guide To Finding, Using, And Licensing Third-party Visuals And Music
by Sheila Curran Bernard Kenn RabinArchival Storytelling is an essential, pragmatic guide to one of the most challenging issues facing filmmakers today: the use of images and music that belong to someone else. Where do producers go for affordable stills and footage? How do filmmakers evaluate the historical value of archival materials? What do vérité producers need to know when documenting a world filled with rights-protected images and sounds? How do filmmakers protect their own creative efforts from infringement?Filled with advice and insight from filmmakers, archivists, film researchers, music supervisors, intellectual property experts, insurance executives and others, Archival Storytelling defines key terms-copyright, fair use, public domain, orphan works and more-and challenges filmmakers to become not only archival users but also archival and copyright activists, ensuring their ongoing ability as creators to draw on the cultural materials that surround them.Features conversations with industry leaders including Patricia Aufderheide, Hubert Best, Peter Jaszi, Jan Krawitz, Lawrence Lessig, Stanley Nelson, Rick Prelinger, Geoffrey C. Ward and many others.
Archival Storytelling: A Filmmaker’s Guide to Finding, Using, and Licensing Third-Party Visuals and Music
by Sheila Curran Bernard Kenn RabinFully revised and updated, Archival Storytelling second edition is a timely, pragmatic look at the use of audiovisual materials available to filmmakers and scholars, from the earliest photographs of the 19th century to the work of media makers today. Whether you’re a top Hollywood filmmaker or a first-time documentarian, at some point you are going to want to find, use, and license third-party materials—images, audio, or music that you yourself did not create—to use them in your work. This book explains what’s involved in researching and licensing visuals and music, and exactly what media makers need to know when filming in a world crowded with rights-protected images and sounds. Filled with insights from filmmakers, archivists, and intellectual property experts, this second edition defines key terms such as copyright, fair use, public domain, and orphan works. It guides readers through the complex archival process and challenges them to become not only archival users but also archival and copyright activists. This book is an essential resource for both students and professionals, from seasoned filmmakers to those creating their first projects, offering practical advice for how to effectively and ethically draw on the wealth of cultural materials that surround us.
The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History
by Jaimie BaronThe Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History examines the problems of representation inherent in the appropriation of archival film and video footage for historical purposes. Baron analyses the way in which the meanings of archival documents are modified when they are placed in new texts and contexts, constructing the viewer’s experience of and relationship to the past they portray. Rethinking the notion of the archival document in terms of its reception and the spectatorial experiences it generates, she explores the ‘archive effect’ as it is produced across the genres of documentary, mockumentary, experimental, and fiction films. This engaging work discusses how, for better or for worse, the archive effect is mobilized to create new histories, alternative histories, and misreadings of history.The book covers a multitude of contemporary cultural artefacts including fiction films like Zelig, Forrest Gump and JFK, mockumentaries such as The Blair Witch Project and Forgotten Silver, documentaries like Standard Operating Procedure and Grizzly Man, and videogames like Call of Duty: World at War. In addition, she examines the works of many experimental filmmakers including those of Péter Forgács, Adele Horne, Bill Morrison, Cheryl Dunye, and Natalie Bookchin.
An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture)
by Jennifer CazenaveHonorable Mention, 2020 Best First Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema and Media StudiesClaude Lanzmann's 1985 magnum opus, Shoah, is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust—and in film history. Over the course of twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a 9½-hour film. The unused footage was scattered and inaccessible for years before it was restored and digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In An Archive of the Catastrophe, Jennifer Cazenave presents the first comprehensive study of this collection. She argues that the outtakes pose a major challenge to the representational and theoretical paradigms produced by the documentary, while offering new meanings of Shoah and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend fresh insight into issues raised by the film, including questions of resistance, rescue, refugees, and, above all, gender—Lanzmann's twenty hours of interviews with women make up a mere ten minutes of the finished documentary. As a rare instance of outtakes preserved during the predigital era of cinema, this unused footage challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film.To view the book trailer on YouTube, please go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBjUWyAn55g
Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices (a Camera Obscura Book)
by Catherine RussellIn Archiveology Catherine Russell uses the work of Walter Benjamin to explore how the practice of archiveology—the reuse, recycling, appropriation, and borrowing of archival sounds and images by filmmakers—provides ways to imagine the past and the future. Noting how the film archive does not function simply as a place where moving images are preserved, Russell examines a range of films alongside Benjamin's conceptions of memory, document, excavation, and historiography. She shows how city films such as Nicole Védrès's Paris 1900 (1947) and Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) reconstruct notions of urban life and uses Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010) to draw parallels between critical cinephilia and Benjamin's theory of the phantasmagoria. Russell also discusses practices of collecting in archiveological film and rereads films by Joseph Cornell and Rania Stephan to explore an archival practice that dislocates and relocates the female image in film. In so doing, she not only shows how Benjamin's work is as relevant to film theory as ever; she shows how archiveology can awaken artists and audiences to critical forms of history and memory.
Archives of the Insensible
by Allen FeldmanIn this jarring look at contemporary warfare and political visuality, renowned anthropologist of violence Allen Feldman provocatively argues that contemporary sovereign power mobilizes asymmetric, clandestine, and ultimately unending war as a will to truth. Whether responding to the fantasy of weapons of mass destruction or an existential threat to civilization, Western political sovereignty seeks to align justice, humanitarian right, and democracy with technocratic violence and visual dominance. Connecting Guantánamo tribunals to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, American counterfeit killings in Afghanistan to the Baader-Meinhof paintings of Gerhard Richter, and the video erasure of Rodney King to lynching photography and political animality, among other scenes of terror, Feldman contests sovereignty's claims to transcendental right --whether humanitarian, neoliberal, or democratic--by showing how dogmatic truth is crafted and terror indemnified by the prosecutorial media and materiality of war. Excavating a scenography of trials--formal or covert, orchestrated or improvised, criminalizing or criminal--Feldman shows how the will to truth disappears into the very violence it interrogates. He maps the sensory inscriptions and erasures of war, highlighting war as a media that severs factuality from actuality to render violence just. He proposes that war promotes an anesthesiology that interdicts the witness of a sensory and affective commons that has the capacity to speak truth to war. Feldman uses layered deconstructive description to decelerate the ballistical tempo of war to salvage the embodied actualities and material histories that war reduces to the ashes of collateral damage, the automatism of drones, and the opacities of black sites. The result is a penetrating work that marries critical visual theory, political philosophy, anthropology, and media archeology into a trenchant dissection of emerging forms of sovereignty and state power that war now makes possible.
Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos
by Anna Westerstahl StenportA collection of essays analyzing the representation of the Arctic region in documentary films.Beginning with Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), the majority of films that have been made in, about, and by filmmakers from the Arctic region have been documentary cinema. Focused on a hostile environment that few people visit, these documentaries have heavily shaped ideas about the contemporary global Far North. In Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos, contributors from a variety of scholarly and artistic backgrounds come together to provide a comprehensive study of Arctic documentary cinemas from a transnational perspective. This book offers a thorough analysis of the concept of the Arctic as it is represented in documentary filmmaking, while challenging the notion of “The Arctic” as a homogenous entity that obscures the environmental, historical, geographic, political, and cultural differences that characterize the region. By examining how the Arctic is imagined, understood, and appropriated in documentary work, the contributors argue that such films are key in contextualizing environmental, indigenous, political, cultural, sociological, and ethnographic understandings of the Arctic, from early cinema to the present. Understanding the role of these films becomes all the more urgent in the present day, as conversations around resource extraction, climate change, and sovereignty take center stage in the Arctic’s representation.“Highly recommended.” —Choice“A thorough exploration of the inexorable links between the circumpolar regions and historic and contemporary documentary filmmaking. It will b valuable to Arctic humanities specialists, particularly as a welcome addition to scholarship on visual depictions of the Arctic by authors such as Ann Fienup-Riordan, Richard Condon, Russell Potter, and Peter Geller, as well as Mackenzie and Westerstahl Steport’s earlier co-edited volume, Films on Ice. It will also be of use to anyone interested in ways of studying linkages between filmmaking, environments, and local and outsider communities.” —Sarah Pickman, Yale University, H-Environment, January 2020
Are We Pears Yet?
by Miranda PaulTwo seeds can't wait to be pears, but growing takes time and patience in this funny and informative picture book from Miranda Paul, the author of Water is Water."When will we be pears?" —"After we find soil." "Hooray! We are going to be pears! Are we pears yet?" —"No! Just be patient and wait."Written entirely in dialogue and staged as a play, Are We Pears Yet? is a clever and hilarious informational picture book that will make you look at growth cycles and fruit trees in a whole new way. Carin Berger's artfully composed collaged stage sets will delight and amaze you.
Are You Anybody?: A Memoir
by Jeffrey TamborYou know him from his breakout role as Hank Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show, his outrageous turn as George and Oscar Bluth on Arrested Development, and his Emmy Award-winning performance as Maura Pfefferman on Transparent. A Broadway star, a television legend, an accomplished screen actor whose singular wit and heartrending performances have been entertaining audiences for more than four decades, but the question remains: Who the hell is Jeffrey Tambor?In his illuminating, often hilarious, and always honest memoir, Tambor looks back at the key moments in his life that taught him about creativity and play and pain and fear. The son of what you might call "eccentric" Russian and Hungarian Jewish parents, Tambor grew up in San Francisco a husy kid with a lisp, who suffered in his "otherness" and found salvation in the theater.While he learned his art from the best of the best—Al Pacino, George C. Scott, Garry Shandling, Mitch Hurwitz, Jill Soloway—he also introduces his many unexpected teachers, from the nameless man in a Detroit bookstore who gave him the love of reading, to his young children who (at this ridiculously late stage in his life) have reintroduced him to play, bravery, and the simple joy of not giving a shit.Tambor shares the triumph of landing his first Broadway role, but not before experiencing the humbling that is commercial work (and how even saying "my socks don't cling" can prove a challenge). He invites you behind the scenes of his wildly successful television shows, but he doesn't leave out the pit stops he made at addiction, Scientology, and what it feels like to get fourth billing after Sylvia the Seal on The Love Boat. At last, Tambor answers the question "Are you anybody?" with a promise that success doesn't mean perfection and failure most definitely is an option.
Are You Going to Kiss Me Now?
by Sloane TanenHigh school junior Francesca Manning is an outsider, an aspiring writer and secret devourer of celebrity gossip mags. A fake essay to Seventeen wins her the celeb-schmoozing opportunity of a lifetime, but after the plane crashes, she's stranded on a desert island with five of the most clueless, self-involved headcases to escape Hollywood. Happily skewering their foibles in witty observations on her iPhone proves surprisingly educational for Francesca. The group must work together to survive-if they don't insult each other to death first.
Are You My Uber?: A Parody
by Sarah Amelia DooleyWe've all been there. You call an Uber. The app says it has arrived, but . . . where is it? Where is your Uber?Are You My Uber? is a 21st Century parody of the 1960 P.D. Eastman children's book Are You My Mother? A man steps off the midnight bus at Port Authority. His name? Unknown. His goal? To find his Uber, an elusive Ford Taurus. Lost and alone in a new city, he steels himself and begins by passing right by the very object of his search. Hilarity ensues: the man proceeds to knock at the doors of an off-duty cab, a helicopter, a halal cart, and other vehicles increasing in their absurdity, willing to try anything to find his Uber.Paired with illustrations by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, co-illustrator of Feminist Fight Club, Sarah Dooley's hilarious imagined story is as ridiculous as it is relatable.
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
by Lisa L. Ryan-HerndonARE YOU SMARTER THAN A 5TH GRADER? TEST YOUR SMARTS! Ready for a challenge? It's time to join the class of today's biggest TV show hit! Go behind the scenes with the producers and read about the making of a hit game show. Meet the classmates and the host, Jeff Foxworthy. Test your I.Q. with brain-bending Q&A's! Will you have to peek, copy, or hope one of the students will save you? Time to put your smarts to the test!