Unwind in Ablah (De-Stress Fest Event)

The first volume in J.R.R. Tolkien's epic adventure THE LORD OF THE RINGS nbsp; One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in The Hobbit. In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose. “A unique, wholly realized other world, evoked from deep in the well of Time, massively detailed, absorbingly entertaining, profound in meaning.” – New York Times

A Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020 A Most-Anticipated Book of the Year: O, The Oprah Magazine * The New York Times * The Washington Post *Vogue * Bustle * BuzzFeed * Ms. magazine * The Millions * Huffington Post * PopSugar * The Lily * Goodreads * Library Journal * LitHub * Electric Literature The first adult novel in almost fifteen years by the internationally bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents "A stunning work of art that reminds readers Alvarez is, and always has been, in a class of her own." --Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Poet X Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves--lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack--but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words. Afterlife is a compact, nimble, and sharply droll novel. Set in this political moment of tribalism and distrust, it asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including--maybe especially--members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?

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When seventeen-year-old Beatrice arrives in Purgatory and is chosen to help others reach Heaven, the last thing she expects is to fall in love with Caleb, with whom she shares a tragic history.-- Provided by Publisher.

From one of the most dazzling and essential voices in American fiction, a timely and compelling novel set in the near future about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of Covid-19. The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace. It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. Never have DeLillo's prescience, imagination, and language been more illuminating and essential. "Mysterious...Unexpectedly touching...[DeLillo offers] consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world." --Joshua Ferris, The New York Times Book Review "DeLillo [has] almost Dayglo powers as a writer." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Brilliant and astonishing...a masterpiece...manages to renew DeLillo's longstanding obsessions while also striking deeply and swiftly at the reader's emotions...The effect is transcendent." --Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune "Daring... provocative... exquisite...captures the swelling fears of our age." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post

A groundbreaking examination of how twentieth-century African American writers use queer characters to challenge and ultimately reject subjectivity  Black Queer Flesh reinterprets key African American novels from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Modernism to contemporary literature, showing how authors have imagined a new model of black queer selfhood. African American authors blame liberal humanism's model of subjectivity for double consciousness and find that liberal humanism's celebration of individual autonomy and agency is a way of disciplining Black queer lives. These authors thus reject subjectivity in search of a new mode of the self that Alvin J. Henry names "black queer flesh"--a model of selfhood that is collective, plural, fluctuating, and deeply connected to the black queer past.  Henry begins with early twentieth-century authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and James Weldon Johnson. These authors adapted the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-formation, to show African Americans gaining freedom and agency by becoming a liberal, autonomous subjects. These authors, however, discovered that the promise of liberal autonomy held out by the Bildungsroman was yet another tool of antiblack racism. As a result, they tentatively experimented with repurposing the Bildungsroman to throw off subjectivity and its attendant double consciousness. In contrast, Nella Larsen, Henry shows, was the first author to fully reject subjectivity. In Quicksand and Passing, Larsen invented a new genre showing her queer characters--characters whose queerness already positioned them on the margins of subjectivity--escaping subjectivity altogether. Using Ralph Ellison's archival drafts, Henry then powerfully rereads Invisible Man, revealing that the protagonist as a queer, disabled character taught by the novel's many other queer, disabled characters to likewise seek a selfhood beyond subjectivity. Although Larsen and Ellison sketch glimpses of this selfhood beyond subjectivity, only Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments shows a protagonist fully inhabiting black queer flesh--a new mode of selfhood that is collective, plural, always evolving, and no longer alienated from the black past. Black Queer Flesh is an original and necessary contribution to black literary studies, offering new ways to understand and appreciate the canonical texts and far more.

Told in alternating narratives that bridge centuries, the latest novel from bestselling author Samira Ahmed traces the lives of two young women fighting to write their own stories and escape the pressure of familial burdens and cultural expectations in worlds too long defined by men.

A critique of attempts by conservative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors to appropriate the rhetoric of victimhood and appeals to "rights" to safeguard the status of the powerful. As revolution and popular unrest roiled the final decades of the eighteenth century, authors, activists, and philosophers across the British Empire hailed the rise of the liberal subject, valorizing the humanity of the marginalized and the rights of members of groups long considered inferior or subhuman. Yet at the same time, a group of conservative authors mounted a reactionary attempt to cultivate sympathy for the privileged. In Defending Privilege, Nicole Mansfield Wright examines works by Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, and others to show how conservatives used the rhetoric of victimhood in attempts to convince ordinary readers to regard a privileged person's loss of legal agency as a catastrophe greater than the calamities and legally sanctioned exclusion suffered by the poor and the enslaved. In promoting their agenda, these authors resuscitated literary modes regarded at the time as derivative or passé--including romance, the gothic, and epistolarity--or invented subgenres that are neglected today due to widespread revilement of their politics (the proslavery novel). Although these authors are not typically considered alongside one another in scholarship, they are united by their firsthand experience of legal conflict: each felt that their privilege was degraded through lengthy disputes. In examining the work of these eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors, Wright traces a broader reactionary framework in the Anglophone literary legacy. Each novel seeks to reshape and manipulate public perceptions of who merits legal agency: the right to initiate a lawsuit, serve as a witness, seek counsel from a lawyer, and take other legal actions. As a result, Defending Privilege offers a counterhistory to scholarship on the novel's capacity to motivate the promulgation of human rights and champion social ascendance through the upwardly mobile realist character.

Nominee for the 2021 Eisner Awards Best Academic/Scholarly Work In the twenty-first century, the field of comics studies has exploded. Scholarship on graphic novels, comic books, comic strips, webcomics, manga, and all forms of comic art has grown at a dizzying pace, with new publications, institutions, and courses springing up everywhere. The field crosses disciplinary and cultural borders and brings together myriad traditions. Comics Studies: A Guidebook offers a rich but concise introduction to this multifaceted field, authored by leading experts in multiple disciplines. It opens diverse entryways to comics studies, including history, form, audiences, genre, and cultural, industrial, and economic contexts. An invaluable one-stop resource for veteran and new comics scholars alike, this guidebook represents the state of the art in contemporary comics scholarship.  

Emma Nolan wants only one thing before she graduates: to dance with her girlfriend at the senior prom. But in her small town of Edgewater, Indiana, that's like asking for the moon. Alyssa Greene is her high school's "it" girl: popular, head of student council, and daughter of the PTA president. She also has a secret. She's been dating Emma for the last year and a half. When word gets out that Emma plans to bring a girl as her date, it stirs a community-wide uproar that spirals out of control. Enter Barry Glickman and Dee Dee Allen, two Broadway stars who decide to take up the cause and get a little publicity along the way. But when they arrive in Indiana to fight on Emma's behalf, their good intentions go quickly south. Between Emma facing the fray head-on, Alyssa wavering about coming out, and Barry and Dee Dee bask in all the attention, it's the perfect prom storm.

House of Salt and Sorrows is a spellbinding novel filled with magic and the rustle of gossamer skirts down long, dark hallways. Get ready to be swept away.

The debut novel by Sarah Blackman (award-winning author of Mother Box and Other Tales) Hex explores the ways one woman uses language and stories to rebuild her own shattered sense of self. Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace. Her response to this multiple abandonment is a lifelong obsession with her best friend Ingrid, or Thingy, as Alice calls her, and a sort of fantastic narcissism wherein she figures herself as the nexus of a supernatural world she understands through a blend of mountain lore, indigenous Cherokee legend, and the dangerous idiom of the fairy-tale girl who enters the forest despite being warned.   The novel is written in blended parts and is crafted as an address to Thingy's daughter, Ingrid the Second, who is now in Alice's care. Alice attempts to tell Ingrid the story of her life: her friendship with Thingy; her troubled relationships with her father, a small-town sexual troubadour; her stepmother, a hard-minded business woman who treats all interactions as commerce; her marriage to her husband Jacob, a silent figure of tremendous will; and her growing suspicion that Ingrid is another girl-child around whom disaster accumulates. Simultaneously, Alice tells the child the kind of bedtime stories she herself has used to make sense of her world. For Alice, and thus in Hex, the line between fantasy and reality is nonexistent, the mountain is older than its geology, and the world a limbo in which everything that has ever happened is coming around again.   Hex is a novel about violence--the violence of the fist, of the womb, of the story. It is also a novel about language and how we use it to build a world when the one we find around us is irretrievably broken.

Dawn Jewell is fifteen. She is restless, curious, and wry. She listens to Black Flag, speaks her mind, and joins her grandmother's fight against mountaintop removal mining almost in spite of herself. "I write by ear," says Robert Gipe, and Dawn's voice is the essence of his debut novel, Trampoline. She lives in eastern Kentucky with her addict mother and her Mamaw, whose stance against the coal companies has earned her the community's ire. Jagged and honest, Trampoline is a powerful portrait of a place struggling with the economic and social forces that threaten and define it. Inspired by oral tradition and punctuated by Gipe's raw and whimsical drawings, it is above all about its heroine, Dawn, as she decides whether to save a mountain or save herself; be ruled by love or ruled by anger; remain in the land of her birth or run for her life.

Life is pretty sweet for Even Hyde. Despite his parents' divorce in 2001, he's doing just fine, having chosen to live with his richly successful father in Newport Beach, California. When not spending 'bonding' time with his partially absent father, he has his run of the house, where he more or less comes and goes as he pleases. Even's older brother Gabe continues to live in Cucamonga with their emotionally unstable mother. Though he feels discarded and left behind, Gabe visits Even and their father on the weekends. Even doesn't seem too worried about Gabe's quick-to-ignite temper or his evolving addiction to skipping school and smoking weed. But then Gabe commits a crime so unbelievably heinous that Even can't forgive his own flesh and blood for it. In his personal recounting for THE LITTLE BROTHER, Even shares the events immediately following his brother and two of his friends savagely gang raping (while videotaping) an unconscious girl. When Gabe somehow ends up losing the video tape (which ends up in Even's hand) it is up to Even to make the life-changing decision: does he do the right thing and turn his own brother in to the police or does family come first? This jaw-dropping novel, reminiscent of Louise Erdrich's The Round House and Herman Koch's The Dinner, shows how cruel the awfulness of human behavior can be and how sometimes even the right decisions feel wrong, no matter how you convince yourself otherwise.

Edward Darby has everything a man could hope for: meaningful work, a loving wife, and a beloved daughter. With a rising career as a partner at an esteemed gallery, he strives not to let ambition, money, power, and his dark past corrode the sanctuary of his domestic and private life. Influenced by his father, a brilliant Romantics scholar, Edward has always been more of a purist than an opportunist. But when a celebrated artist controlled by her insecurities betrays him, and another very different artist awakens his heart and stirs up secrets from his past, Edward will find himself unmoored from his marriage, his work, and the memory of his beloved father. And when the finalist of an important prize are announced, and the desperate artists maneuver to seek its validation, Edward soon learns that betrayal comes in many forms, and that he may be hurtling toward an act that challenges his own notions about what comprises a life worth living. A compelling odyssey of a man unhinged by his ideals, The Prize is also an unflinching portrait of a marriage struggling against the corroding tide of time and the proximity to the treacherous fault line between art and money.

Will Eisner (1917-2005) is universally considered the master of comics storytelling, best known for The Spirit, his iconic newspaper comic strip, and A Contract With God, the first significant graphic novel. This seminal work from 1978 ushered in a new era of personal stories in comics form that touched every adult topic from mortality to religion and sexuality, forever changing the way writers and artists approached comics storytelling. Noted historian Paul Levitz celebrates Eisner by showcasing his most famous work along­side unpublished and rare materials from the family archives. Also included are original interviews with creators such as Jules Feiffer, Art Spiegelman, Scott McCloud, Jeff Smith, Denis Kitchen, and Neil Gaiman--all of whom knew Eisner and were inspired by his work to create their own graphic novels for a new generation of readers. NOTE: The cover is a high-quality photographic reproduction of Eisner's original art. The design intentionally reveals tape and other stray markings that are part of the artist's process and reflect the age of the artifact that was photographed.

A groundbreaking examination of how twentieth-century African American writers use queer characters to challenge and ultimately reject subjectivity  Black Queer Flesh reinterprets key African American novels from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Modernism to contemporary literature, showing how authors have imagined a new model of black queer selfhood. African American authors blame liberal humanism's model of subjectivity for double consciousness and find that liberal humanism's celebration of individual autonomy and agency is a way of disciplining Black queer lives. These authors thus reject subjectivity in search of a new mode of the self that Alvin J. Henry names "black queer flesh"--a model of selfhood that is collective, plural, fluctuating, and deeply connected to the black queer past.  Henry begins with early twentieth-century authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and James Weldon Johnson. These authors adapted the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-formation, to show African Americans gaining freedom and agency by becoming a liberal, autonomous subjects. These authors, however, discovered that the promise of liberal autonomy held out by the Bildungsroman was yet another tool of antiblack racism. As a result, they tentatively experimented with repurposing the Bildungsroman to throw off subjectivity and its attendant double consciousness. In contrast, Nella Larsen, Henry shows, was the first author to fully reject subjectivity. In Quicksand and Passing, Larsen invented a new genre showing her queer characters--characters whose queerness already positioned them on the margins of subjectivity--escaping subjectivity altogether. Using Ralph Ellison's archival drafts, Henry then powerfully rereads Invisible Man, revealing that the protagonist as a queer, disabled character taught by the novel's many other queer, disabled characters to likewise seek a selfhood beyond subjectivity. Although Larsen and Ellison sketch glimpses of this selfhood beyond subjectivity, only Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments shows a protagonist fully inhabiting black queer flesh--a new mode of selfhood that is collective, plural, always evolving, and no longer alienated from the black past. Black Queer Flesh is an original and necessary contribution to black literary studies, offering new ways to understand and appreciate the canonical texts and far more.

Graffiti and street art images are ubiquitous, and they enjoy a very special place in collective imaginary due to their ambiguous nature. Sometimes enigmatic in meaning, often stylistically crude and aesthetically aggressive, yet always visually arresting, they fill our field of vision with texts and images that no one can escape. As they take place on surfaces and travel through various channels, they provide viewers an entry point to the subtext of the cities we live in, while questioning how we read, write and represent them. This book is structured around these three distinct, albeit by definition interwoven, key frames. The contributors of this volume critically investigate underexplored urban contexts in which graffiti and street art appear, shed light on previously unexamined aspects of these practices, and introduce innovative methodologies regarding the treatment of these images. Throughout, the focus is on the relationship of graffiti and street art with urban space, and the various manifestations of these idiosyncratic meetings. In this book, the emphasis is shifted from what the physical texts say to what these practices and their produced images do in different contexts. All chapters are original and come from experts in various fields, such as Architecture, Urban Studies, Sociology, Criminology, Anthropology and Visual Cultures, as well as scholars that transcend traditional disciplinary frameworks. This exciting new collection is essential reading for advanced undergraduates as well as postgraduates and academics interested in the subject matter. It is also accessible to a non-academic audience, such as art practitioners and policymakers alike, or anyone keen on deepening their knowledge on how graffiti and street art affect the ways urban environments are experienced, understood and envisioned.

This volume can rightfully be called "a film school in a single book." Investigating and analyzing the elements and concepts of motion picture creation, this book looks closely at 25 films that represent a wide range of styles and subjects. Although most motion picture viewers have seen numerous movies in their lifetime, few in the general public have a firm and deep understanding of how motion pictures are created, or a grasp of the intricacies of cinematic storytelling and content. By presenting 25 films, American and international, Hollywood and independent, this book educates and enlightens readers about the details of the motion picture creation process. Some readers will have viewed certain films in the volume, but many will be introduced to major cinematic works within the canon of great and essential films for the very first time. Topics explored include animation, period films, editing, directorial style, and non-linear cinematic structure. Readers will learn about the origin of the jump cut in Breathless, time and space in Hiroshima Mon Amour, and the editing in Orson Welles's essay film F is for Fake. The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures: 25 Movies to Make You Film Literate will educate the novice and avid moviegoer alike about the inner workings of this dynamic, popular, and culturally significant art form. Examines films for both content and aesthetics, showing readers how to analyze film with a critical eye Arms readers with an understanding of how films interact with other aspects of cinema and related disciplines and fields Shows how filmmaking techniques are used to both tell stories and invoke reactions from viewers Explains how great directors have revolutionized the art of filmmaking

It's often said that we are what we wear. Tracing an American trajectory in fashion, Lauren Cardon shows how we become what we wear. Over the twentieth century, the American fashion industry diverged from its roots in Paris, expanding and attempting to reach as many consumers as possible. Fashion became a tool for social mobility. During the late twentieth century, the fashion industry offered something even more valuable to its consumers: the opportunity to explore and perform. The works Cardon examines--by Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison, Sherman Alexie, and Aleshia Brevard, among others--illustrate how American fashion, with its array of possibilities, has offered a vehicle for curating public personas. Characters explore a host of identities as fashion allows them to deepen their relationships with ethnic or cultural identity, to reject the social codes associated with economic privilege, or to forge connections with family and community. These temporary transformations, or performances, show that identity is a process constantly negotiated and questioned, never completely fixed.

A shy Parisian waitress (Audrey Tautou) secretly does good deeds for others. Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Yolande Moreau.

A high-schooler is accidentally transported in a time machine back to the 1950s, where he inadvertently interferes with his future parents' budding romance. Now, the boy must figure out how to set things right, or risk changing the future.

Four unorthodox moneymen predict the 2008 financial crisis in this comedy, which explores the fraudulent mortgage-lending practices of large banks on Wall Street.

A reclusive CEO and a brilliant computer programmer evaluate a highly advanced android named Ava.

Best Picture chronicles the epic tale of a 1940's mobster family in New York City, where the father builds an organized-crime empire and his three sons, to varying degrees, follow in his footsteps.

In this third installment, Indy and his dad seek the fabled Holy Grail while contending with an alluring undercover Nazi agent.

A struggling actress and an aspiring pianist fall in love as they both pursue their dreams in L.A. However, their blossoming relationship is challenged when their careers pull them in different directions.

Ditzy blonde decides to attend Harvard Law School when her snobby boyfriend dumps her for a more "appropriate" woman. Despite her penchant for malls, makeup, and tanning, she shows the elite Ivy League set a thing or two about class and self-confidence.

Loner Max gets caught up in the plight of a group of warrior women as they flee from an evil despot across a desert wasteland.

A hacker learns his world is a virtual-reality simulation run by malevolent machines, and joins a group of superpowered revolutionaries aiming to tear down the system.

MOONLIGHT is the tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.

A young girl escapes war-torn surroundings to a fantasy world in 1944 fascist Spain.

A successful gay lawyer is fired from his prestigious law firm due to the fact that he has AIDS. To fight back, he teams up with an attorney to sue the partners for discrimination.

A feisty college student gives her school's a cappella group a much-needed makeover by adding some modern hits into the mix in the run-up to a big competition.

This acclaimed adaptation of Jane Austen's most famous novel stars the great Laurence Olivier as Darcy, who first scorns and then falls in love with the charming Elizabeth Bennet, played by Greer Garson. The New York Times called the production "a crisp and crackling satire".

A laid-up magazine photographer witnesses a possible murder from his apartment window.

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A love letter to a unique and irrepressible comic talent, who left us far too soon, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind takes viewers through the one-of-a-kind actor and comedian’s extraordinary life and career, revealing what drove him to give voice to the incredible characters he created in his mind. Told largely through Williams’ own voice, captured in interviews and audio recordings, and with a wealth of never-before-seen footage, including home movies and film/TV outtakes, the film showcases Williams’ boundless energy, lightning wit and knack for creating memorable characters on stage and screen. The documentary also features personal archival material and new interviews with those who loved and knew Williams best, including Billy Crystal, Pam Dawber, David Letterman, Steve Martin and many more. Directed by Marina Zenovich, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind delves into the intricacies of a man who needed an audience just as much as audiences needed someone like him.

An innocent banker is sentenced to life in a state prison for the murder of his wife and her lover; he is abused by other inmates until he is befriended by a cynical lifer.

An FBI trainee, with a knack for analyzing serial killers, enlists the aid of a jailed sociopath in tracking a sadistic murderer.

Chronicle of the seminal rap group N.W.A. and their 'hood-to-riches success, tracing their story from the mean streets of mid-'80s Compton to their triumphant battles against censorship.

A widowed, morally upright lawyer defends a black man accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama. Meanwhile, his two young children become involved in a mystery involving the town pariah.

A tornado whisks young Kansas native Dorothy and her dog Toto away to the magical land of Oz, where they befriend a Scarecrow, a Tin Man and a Cowardly Lion on their journey to confront the Wicked Witch of the West and visit the wonderful Wizard of Oz.

This documentary paints a portrait of the life and work of children's entertainer Fred Rogers, star of “Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.” A former minister, Mister Rogers creatively communicated themes of empathy and acceptance.