A startlingly frank take on modern femininity, Michele Seminara's Suburban Fantasy combines finely crafted narratives with lyrical artistry and sure-footed eloquence. This is raw, fiery, firebrand feminist writing that manages to artfully co-exist with giddying intimacy and poignant soul-bearing.

"In Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila offers a unique argument about the restructuring of urban space in the two decades following World War II and the role played by new suburban spaces in dramatically transforming the political culture of the United States. Avila's work helps us see how and why the postwar suburb produced the political culture of 'balanced budget conservatism' that is now the dominant force in politics, how the eclipse of the New Deal since the 1970s represents not only a change of views but also an alteration of spaces."—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

Suburban Fantastic Cinema is a study of American movies in which preteen and teenage boys living in the suburbs are called upon to combat a disruptive force that takes the form of popular cultural figures of the fantastic—aliens, ghosts, vampires, demons, and more. Beginning in the 1980s with Poltergeist and E.T. (both 1982) and a cycle of films made by Amblin Entertainment, the suburban fantastic established itself as a popular commercial model combining coming-of-age melodramas with elements drawn from science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The films that exemplify the subgenre generally focus on a young male protagonist who, at the outset, chafes at his stifling suburban milieu, wherein power is invested in whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality. A fantastic occurrence intervenes - the arrival of an alien, a ghost, or some other magical or otherworldly force - threatening this familiar order, thrusting the young man - at first unwittingly - into the role of defender and upholder of the social order. He is able to rescue the suburban social order, and in doing so normalizes (for himself and for the primarily white, male, adolescent audience) its values. This study discusses some of the key instances of this subgenre, such as Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985), Jumanji (1995), and Small Soldiers (1998), as well as its more recent resurgence in Stranger Things (2016–) and IT (2017). Exploring the importance of suburbia as a setting and the questionable ideological blindness of its heroes, this book reveals these underappreciated Hollywood films as the primary cinematic representation of late-twentieth-century American childhood.

First in the military science fiction series that does “an excellent job of transferring Hornblower to interstellar space. A thoroughly enjoyable read” (David Drake). In the year 2194, seventeen-year-old Nicholas Seafort is assigned to the Hibernia as a lowly midshipman. Destination: the thriving colony of Hope Nation. But when a rescue attempt goes devastatingly wrong, Seafort is thrust into a leadership role he never anticipated. The other officers resent him, but Seafort must handle more dangerous problems, from a corrupted navigation computer to a deadly epidemic. Even Hope Nation has a nasty surprise in store. Seafort might be the crew’s only hope . . . This page-turning science fiction in the vein of Robert Heinlein and Orson Scott Card—with a dash of Horatio Hornblower—marks the captivating debut adventure in Feintuch’s hugely popular Seafort Saga.

A supernatural coming-of-age novelNthe first book in a dynamic and dramatic new seriesNabout the shy Celia Balaustine and a mysterious group of misfits at her new high school, Suburban High.

During the last few decades suburbia has grown enormously and become a phenomenon attracting the attention of scholars as well as practitioners by whom it is seen as an increasingly significant and complex area of modern life. The essays in this volume consider a range of representations of suburban life from the late nineteenth century to the present day, including fiction, film, and popular music, drawn from America and Australia as well as Britain. They explore and challenge traditional views of suburbia so that, rather than a location of conformity and stereotypicality, it can be viewed as a site of social conflict, division, and ambiguity as well as a source of significant creativity across a range of cultural texts. The volume takes a thematic approach, considering the rise of suburbia, imagined and real suburbias, alternative suburbias: all of the essays have a strong historical dimension and the overall approach is characterized by interdisciplinarity.

A master poisoner works beside his sister to defend their city-state when the chancellor he worked undercover to protect is assassinated with an unknown poison at the same time an army lay siege to the city.