In the summer of 1941, the area around Kemmerer, Wyoming, is still in the grip of the Great Depression. World War II rages overseas in Europe and Asia but is not yet a reality in the United States. This is the story of eight young men, newly graduated from Kemmerer High School, as they make their journey from boyhood to manhood in a summer filled with new challenges, new opportunities, and new dangers. Some will succeed. Some will fail. This is their story.

In 1984 Joel and Ethan Coen burst onto the art-house film scene with their neo-noir Blood Simple and ever since then they have sharpened the cutting edge of independent film. Blending black humor and violence with unconventional narrative twists, their acclaimed movies evoke highly charged worlds of passion, absurdity, nightmare realms, and petty human failures, all the while revealing the filmmakers' penchant for visual jokes and bravura technical strokes. Their central characters may be blind to reality and individual flaws, but their illusions, dreams, fears, and desires map the boundaries of their worlds—worlds made stunningly memorable by the Coens. In The Brothers Grim: The Films of Ethan and Joel Coen, Erica Rowell unmasks the filmmakers as prankster mythmakers exploiting and subverting universal storytelling modes to further what seems to be their artistic agenda: to elicit laughs. Often employing satire and allegory, the Coens' movies hold a mirror up to American society, allowing viewers to both chuckle and gasp at its absurdities, hypocrisies, and foibles. From business partnerships (Blood Simple, The Ladykillers) to marriage (Intolerable Cruelty) to friendship and ethics (Miller's Crossing), the breakdowns of relationships are a steady focus in their work. Often the Coens' satires put broken social institutions in their cinematic crosshairs, exposing cracks in ineffective penal systems (Raising Arizona; O Brother, Where Art Thou?), unjust justice systems (The Man Who Wasn't There), a crooked corporate America (The Hudsucker Proxy), unnecessary wars (The Big Lebowski), a tyrannical Hollywood (Barton Fink), and the unbridled, fatuous pursuit of the American Dream (Fargo). While audiences may be excused for missing the duo's social commentary, the depth and breadth of the brothers' films bespeak an intelligence and cultural acuity that is rich, highly topical, and hard to pigeonhole.

Offers a selection of eighty entertaining cryptic challenges from the pages of the Daily Telegraph.

Kit is hired by an older woman to find her daughter, whom she gave up for adoption at birth almost forty-five years ago. The daughter had served twenty years in the U.S. Air Force, but when she retired, she disappeared. Her last known location was Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The mother had hired a private investigator to search for her daughter, but he came up empty in Cheyenne and recommended she hire Kit, whose company specializes in finding lost people and things. The search for the missing daughter goes from complicated to deadly.

In suburban Wells Port, things are not what they seem: wild animals appear unexpectedly in backyards, raised garden beds produce fruit in days, not weeks, and a mysterious figure lurks across sidewalks late at night. The stories in Starman After Midnight weave an often hilarious and sometimes melancholy spell. Four young boys are terrorized by a wiener dog on their walk to school, but strategize for a safer route. A beer-loving man befriends a likeminded neighbor, only to discover his jovial new acquaintance is a registered sex offender. An elderly Uber driver suspects a young rider is being lured by a night stalker and debates whether he should help her or mind his own business. Connecting these stories are two next-door neighbors—Seff and Big Dave—who couldn't be more different: one a progressive-minded writer, the other a conservative plumber. Their love of beer drinking, backyard philosophizing, and gossiping brings them together. When several pets in the neighborhood wind up missing or worse—dead—Seff and Big Dave monitor their security cameras for the culprit. When they discover a naked man roaming their street late at night, suspicions are raised while hysteria spreads through the neighborhood social media app. What is the connection between the missing pets and this naked man? Seff and Big Dave form a posse of neighbors to find out. Moving between humor and surrealism, friendship and grief, Starman After Midnight is a novel told in stories, a collection that adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. From the quirky imagination of Scott Semegran, Starman After Midnight packs a comedic punch and uncovers the magic that seems possible in ordinary places.

For ten years, he laboured to construct his ultralight airplane, then, on a whim, he doused it with gasoline and set fire to it. When the rat invades his home, Gerry goes to drastic lengths to rid himself of the vermin, but ... Dying of mesothelioma, but living with zest. A bachelor shoots himself in the back with a shotgun. A meal of moose testicles. More than forty true, but unbelievable stories of the bizarre lives of an endangered species: the bachelor. No single man worth his salt is married. The thought could have come straight from Yogi Berra’s vault of butchered expressions. However, many married men – the wannabes - in spite of wanting to remain married, idolize and envy the bachelor. Few bachelors return the favour. But the bachelor is a unique breed. Always threatened with extinction, bachelors have survived, and thrived, by doing things and thinking their own way. They are Robert Frost’s travellers in the yellow wood. It is true. No single man worth his salt is married. All the good ones are not taken; they are recalled from the market

This examination of the distinctive cinema of Joel and Ethan Coen explores the theme of violence in their wide-ranging body of work. The Brothers Coen: Unique Characters of Violence spans the career of the two-time Oscar-winning producer/director team, exploring the theme of violence that runs through a genre-spanning body of work, from the neo-noir of Blood Simple to the brutal comedy Burn After Reading (2008). In chapters focusing on major characters, Ryan Doom looks at the chaotic cinematic universe of the Coens, where violent acts inevitably have devastating, unintended consequences. The remarkable gallery of Coen characters are all here: hardboiled gangster Tom Regan from Miller's Crossing (1990), overmatched amateur kidnapper Jerry Lundergaard from Fargo (1996), accidental private eye "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski (1998), psychopathic assassin-for-hire Anton Chigurh from the 2007 Academy Award winner No Country for Old Men, and more.