A compendious anthology of women's writing on film.

A compendious anthology of women's writing on film.

Class schedules, locker combinations, and the play for popularity — middle school is a new world with new rules. At the start of 7th grade, Elita Brown’s friends enjoy their seats at the popular lunchroom table. Meanwhile, Elita hides in the bathroom. This is not how she envisioned middle school. And her omission from the popular table is only the beginning of her problems. What will she do when she’s terrorized by the meanest girl in school and accused of a crime she didn’t commit? Elita befriends an older couple living in the woods and gains confidence through her project on the red fox. Will Elita find her way and take her seat at the best table? Full of suspense and divine moments, readers will be captivated by this story. Parents and teachers who loved Seated with Christ can invite their middle school reader to This Seat’s Saved. With great discussion questions and a main character who learns to read her Bible, trust God for the first time, and understand what it means to be seated with Christ from Ephesians 2:6, This Seat’s Saved will help young readers on their journey with Jesus.

It's widely assumed that Britain in the 1950s experienced a return to traditional gender roles. Popular cinema has typically been seen to represent this era through the dominant image of the 'happy housewife'. "Femininity in the Frame" is a sharply observant account of how British cinema engaged with femininity and women's roles during this important period. Written in a lively and accessible manner, it challenges received understandings, arguing that the period was marked by social unease and anxiety about gender roles and femininity, with much British cinema producing ambiguous messages about feminine identities and the role of women. Through analysing marginalized figures, such as prostitutes, criminals and femmes fatales, and addressing central themes, notably sexuality, marriage and female friendship, Melanie Bell examines how British popular cinema imagined and constructed femininity in this era of rapid social and cultural change. She draws together sources ranging from official reports to film reviews, with case studies of films across genres, including "The Perfect Woman", "Young Wives' Tale", "The Weak and the Wicked" and "A Town Like Alice", to show how new ideas and understandings of femininity were seeping into the cultural imagery at this time. She demonstrates how such films expressed proto-feminist ideas and how they ultimately explored new forms of femininity in a manner that has not until now been recognised.

A rich account that combines media-industry history and cultural studies, Their Own Best Creations looks at women writers' contributions to some of the most popular genres of postwar TV: comedy-variety, family sitcom, daytime soap, and suspense anthology. During the 1950s, when the commercial medium of television was still being defined, women writers navigated pressures at work, constructed public personas that reconciled traditional and progressive femininity, and asserted that a woman's point of view was essential to television as an art form. The shows they authored allegorize these professional and personal pressures and articulate a nascent second-wave feminist consciousness. Annie Berke brings to light the long-forgotten and under-studied stories of these women writers and crucially places them in the historical and contemporary record.

Aldous Huxley decried "the horrors of modern 'pleasure,'" or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting work. Laura Frost follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism's signature characteristics, such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity, to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss. In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic play of Joyce, Lawrence, Stein, Rhys, and others. She considers pop cultural phenomena and the rise of celebrities such as Rudolph Valentino and Gypsy Rose Lee against contemporary sociological, scientific, and philosophical writings on leisure and desire. Throughout her study, Frost incorporates recent scholarship on material and visual culture and vernacular modernism, recasting the period's high/low, elite/popular divides and formal strategies as efforts to regulate sensual and cerebral experience. Capturing the challenging tensions between these artists' commitment to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced yet deployed in their writing, Frost calls attention to the central role of pleasure in shaping interwar culture.

From Pulitzer Prize–nominated New York Times reporter Sarah Maslin Nir, the author of the memoir Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman in Love with an Animal, comes the third book in her Once Upon a Horse series of middle-grade novels inspired by real horses and the people who love them Lights . . . Camera . . . Giddyap? Billy is a Norwegian Fjord horse—short as horses go, but with the natural star power of a Hollywood celebrity. Lori Allegria is a horse-loving seventh grader as awkward as she is tall for her age, who finds refuge from her shyness on her family farm with her best friend: Billy, the Fjord. Their peace is shattered when Billy is “discovered” by Marlowe Narang, superstar kid actor, and given the opportunity of a horsey lifetime—to star in a film! And with that, the chance for Lori and her mom to save their struggling stables. Lori tearfully agrees to send her horse to a new life across the country on the set of Marlowe’s newest Hollywood production, a Western set in a real ghost town. But Billy’s star turn is cut short when a mountain lion stalks the desert set and sends him fleeing into the Mojave. When word gets back to Lori, she runs away too—to find her Billy! Lost in the endless desert, as horse and girl make their way to each other, Lori and Billy both find they are not alone. Joined in their search by a cast of characters including wild donkeys, a sassy teenage cowgirl, a plucky service dog, and even the world’s biggest kid actor himself, The Star Horse is a story about finding your herd—human and horse—and along the way, finding your voice. Once Upon a Horse series The Flying Horse (#1) The Jockey & Her Horse (#2), written with Raymond White Jr. The Star Horse (#3)