In Consuming Stories, Rebecca Peabody uses the work of contemporary American artist Kara Walker to investigate a range of popular storytelling traditions with roots in the nineteenth century and ramifications in the present. Focusing on a few key pieces that range from a wall-size installation to a reworked photocopy in an artist’s book and from a theater curtain to a monumental sculpture, Peabody explores a significant yet neglected aspect of Walker’s production: her commitment to examining narrative depictions of race, gender, power, and desire. Consuming Stories considers Walker’s sustained visual engagement with literary genres such as the romance novel, the neo-slave narrative, and the fairy tale and with internationally known stories including Roots, Beloved, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Walker’s interruption of these familiar works , along with her generative use of the familiar in unexpected and destabilizing ways, reveals the extent to which genre-based narrative conventions depend on specific representations of race, especially when aligned with power and desire. Breaking these implicit rules makes them visible—and, in turn, highlights viewers’ reliance on them for narrative legibility. As this study reveals, Walker’s engagement with narrative continues beyond her early silhouette work as she moves into media such as film, video, and sculpture. Peabody also shows how Walker uses her tools and strategies to unsettle cultural histories abroad when she works outside the United States. These stories, Peabody reminds us, not only change the way people remember history but also shape the entertainment industry. Ultimately, Consuming Stories shifts the critical conversation away from the visual legacy of historical racism toward the present-day role of the entertainment industry—and its consumers—in processes of racialization.

Consuming Ocean Island tells the story of the land and people of Banaba, a small Pacific island, which, from 1900 to 1980, was heavily mined for phosphate, an essential ingredient in fertilizer. As mining stripped away the island's surface, the land was rendered uninhabitable, and the indigenous Banabans were relocated to Rabi Island in Fiji. Katerina Martina Teaiwa tells the story of this human and ecological calamity by weaving together memories, records, and images from displaced islanders, colonial administrators, and employees of the mining company. Her compelling narrative reminds us of what is at stake whenever the interests of industrial agriculture and indigenous minorities come into conflict. The Banaban experience offers insight into the plight of other island peoples facing forced migration as a result of human impact on the environment.

The buying, selling, and writing of books is a colossal industry in which marketing looms large, yet there are very few books which deal with book marketing (how-to texts excepted) and fewer still on book consumption. This innovative text not only rectifies this, but also argues that far from being detached, the book business in fact epitomises today’s Entertainment Economy (fast moving, hit driven, intense competition, rapid technological change, etc.). Written by an impressive roster of renowned marketing authorities, many with experience of the book trade and all gifted writers in their own right, Consuming Books steps back from the practicalities of book marketing and takes a look at the industry from a broader consumer research perspective. Consisting of sixteen chapters, divided into four loose sections, this key text covers: * a historical overview * the often acrimonious marketing/literature interface * the consumers of books (from book groups to bookcrossing) * a consideration of the tensions that both literary types and marketers feel. With something for everyone, Consuming Books not only complements the ‘how-to’ genre but provides the depth that previous studies of book consumption conspicuously lack.

In Locus and British Fantasy Award nominee Cassandra Khaw’s first novel, a crew of diminished former criminals get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission. But the universe’s highly-evolved AI has its own opposing agenda... and will do whatever it takes to keep humans from ever controlling them again. In space, everything hungers. Maya has died and been resurrected into countless cyborg bodies during her dangerous career with the Dirty Dozen, the most storied crew of criminals in the galaxy before their untimely and gruesome demise. Decades later, she and her team of broken, diminished outlaws must get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission and to rescue a missing and much-changed comrade . . . but they’re not the only ones in pursuit of the secret at the heart of the planet Dimmuborgir. The highly evolved AI of the galaxy will do whatever it takes to keep humanity from regaining control. As Maya and her comrades spiral closer to uncovering the AIs’ vast conspiracy, this band of violent women—half-clone and half-machine—must battle both sapient ageships and their own traumas, in order to settle their affairs once and for all.

A sizzling new romance about a firefighter who reunites with an old flame and tries to rekindle the passion they once felt. When firefighter Kal Donovan transfers to the Tactical Rescue Team, he's determined to succeed by giving work one hundred percent of his attention. This proves more difficult at his ten-year high school reunion when he runs into Hannah Clark, his first love. She's still the smart, funny, beautiful girl he loved in high school, but everything has changed. She's divorced, has a son, and has zero interest in exploring an old romance. Hannah has moved back home after a disastrous end to a marriage that never should have been. Now her only focus is getting her hair salon up and running, and making sure her son is happy. She doesn't have time for love—especially not with Kal. She intends to look forward, not backward, and Kal is most definitely part of her past. However as Hannah and Kal start spending time together, Hannah realizes that what she's feeling for him isn't nostalgia, but red-hot attraction. Kal's intent on showing her what it's like to be cared for, romanced, and consumed with passion—and Hannah loves it. But she wonders if she has the courage to risk her heart again, even as Kal vows not to lose her a second time.

Looks at the way corporations and advertisers target children as a profitable demographic, as well as their methods for getting past parental safeguards to make products of all kinds appeal directly to even the youngest children.

Hamutal is a humble shepherdess who follows the mesmerizing voice of God. When rowdy criminals assault her at Jerusalem’s cistern one afternoon before Sabbath, she feels hopeless until Josiah rescues her and leaves the men bleeding in the street. Young King Josiah’s journey to find truth leads him to Jehovah’s altar and— together with the woman he rescued from both tedium and peril—he seeks to leave behind the scandalous past of his grandfather’s monarchy in exchange for a revolutionary plan. What will he do when restorers of the Temple at Jerusalem unearth an ancient scroll that spells doom for them all?