The thriller is perhaps the most popular and widespread movie genre--and the most difficult to define. Thrillers can contain gangsters or ghosts, space helmets or fedoras. They charge our familiar world with a spirit of exotic, old-fashioned adventure...

Written originally for a special issue of The New Yorker and reissued here with a new forward by the author, Within the Context of No Context is George W. S. Trow's brilliant exposition on the state of American culture and twentieth-century life...

A lively narrative history of Hollywood's classical age. Over the last twenty-five years, the field of cinema studies has offered a dramatic reassessment of the history of film in general and of Hollywood in particular. Writers have drawn on the...

Patrice Petro challenges the conventional assessment of German film history, which sees classical films as responding solely to male anxieties and fears. Exploring the address made to women in melodramatic films and in popular illustrated magazines, she...

Breaking the Spell offers the first full-length study that charts the historical trajectory of anarchist-inflected video activism from the late 1960s to the present. Video plays an increasingly important role among activists in the growing global...

Absence has played a crucial role in the history of avant-garde aesthetics, from the blank canvases of Robert Rauschenberg to Yves Klein's invisible paintings, from the "silent" music of John Cage to Samuel Beckett's minimalist theater. Yet little...

A basic introduction to the life and career of this great American filmmaker.

Was Alfred Hitchcock a cynical trifler with his audience's emotions, as he liked to pretend? Or was he a profoundly humane artist? Most commentators leave Hitchcock's self-assessment unquestioned, but this book shows that his movies convey an...

How do people stay true to themselves in times of crisis? Where does anyone find the strength to stand up in the face of oppression? When will the worst side of human nature wither before the best?Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale has...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating portrait of journalism and the people who make it, told through pieces collected from the incomparable six-decade career of bestselling author and longtime New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin“The Lede contains...

A lush visual celebration of Pulp's sixth album, This Is Hardcore, featuring unseen photography, behind-the-scenes interviews and revealing visuals. From the mid- to late 1990s, Paul Burgess was invited by Jarvis Cocker to document the British band...

Vivid and racy, a deep-dive into tabloids from their sixteenth-century beginnings to the National Inquirer and beyond. The Newsmongers unfolds the seedy history of tabloid journalism, from the first printed “Strange Newes” sheets of the sixteenth...

How corporations used mass media to teach Americans that capitalism was natural and patriotic, exposing the porous line between propaganda and public service. Business as Usual reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of...

An indispensable guide to audio journalism grounded in NPR's journalistic values and practices, with tips and insights from its top reporters, hosts, editors, producers, and more. A lot has changed in media in recent years, but one thing that remains...