Darkly comic and wickedly incisive, Kieran Shea’s The Americana Psychorama is an assemblage of stories portraying a delightfully bleak but all-too-familiar America. A suburban man stumbles into more than he bargained for when he steals a neighboring teenager’s drug stash. A teenage boy acts out when his widower father brings home a much younger clone of his mother. A thief discovers that karma can be both swift and random. And more than one couple finds their interpersonal conflict suddenly overshadowed by the malevolent outside forces they face. In settings that run the gamut from the historical west to a near-future post-apocalypse, the characters of these stories—whether felons or lovers, dockhands or diplomats, vigilantes or frauds, monsters or artificial life forms, con men or survivors, fathers or sons—are all, in some way, blindsided by the easy corruptions and outlandish hostilities of everyday life. Mixing styles, genres, and lengths, The Americana Psychorama presents Kieran Shea’s short-story writing at its best. Unique, brash, and wholly original. Praise for THE AMERICANA PSYCHORAMA: “These short, sharp stabs of the knife showcase a writer intent on showing us life in the cracks of the American dream. There are crimes, gallows humor, and the type of characters you wouldn’t want to pick up hitchhiking. Shea will give you a shot of 100 proof, served in a dirty ashtray and lit on fire. And you’ll love it.” —Eric Beetner, author of All The Way Down “Shea puts more heart and guts into a single story than most writers do a novel.” —Nik Korpon, author of Wear Your Home Like a Scar

A cult classic, adapted into a film starring Christian Bale. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? Patrick Bateman has it all: good looks, youth, charm, a job on Wall Street, reservations at every new restaurant in town and a line of girls around the block. He is also a psychopath. A man addicted to his superficial, perfect life, he pulls us into a dark underworld where the American Dream becomes a nightmare . . . With an introduction by Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is one of the most controversial and talked-about novels of all time. A multi-million-copy bestseller hailed as a modern classic, it is a violent black comedy about the darkest side of human nature.

Most films rely on a script developed in pre-production. Yet beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the recent mumblecore movement, key independent filmmakers have broken with the traditional screenplay. Instead, they have turned to new approaches to scripting that allow for more complex characterization and shift the emphasis from the page to performance. In Rewriting Indie Cinema, J. J. Murphy explores these alternative forms of scripting and how they have shaped American film from the 1950s to the present. He traces a strain of indie cinema that used improvisation and psychodrama, a therapeutic form of improvised acting based on a performer’s own life experiences. Murphy begins in the 1950s and 1960s with John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Barbara Loden, Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer, William Greaves, and other independent directors who sought to create a new type of narrative cinema. In the twenty-first century, filmmakers such as Gus Van Sant, the Safdie brothers, Joe Swanberg, and Sean Baker developed similar strategies, sometimes benefitting from the freedom of digital technology. In reading key films and analyzing their techniques, Rewriting Indie Cinema demonstrates how divergence from the script has blurred the divide between fiction and nonfiction. Showing the ways in which filmmakers have striven to capture the subtleties of everyday behavior, Murphy provides a new history of American indie filmmaking and how it challenges Hollywood industrial practices.

Now available in paperback. In this volume, theoretical frames, modalities, and applicationsare examined for Interpersonal/Humanistic/Existentialpsychotherapy. Topics range from "Culturally SensitivePsychotherapy with Children" to "Spiritually Sensitive Therapy" and"Existential Treatment with HIV/AIDS clients."

The gold standard reference for all those who work with people with mental illness, Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, edited by Drs. Robert Boland and Marcia L. Verduin, has consistently kept pace with the rapid growth of research and knowledge in neural science, as well as biological and psychological science. This two-volume eleventh edition offers the expertise of more than 600 renowned contributors who cover the full range of psychiatry and mental health, including neural science, genetics, neuropsychiatry, psychopharmacology, and other key areas.

This book examines alternative healing practices in American popular culture. From traditional folk approaches to more recent developments, it discusses the rise and fall of more than 100 popular approaches to addressing both physical ailments and mental health needs. Offering insightful accounts of everything from aging prevention to voodoo & Santería, Alternative Healing in American History: An Encyclopedia from Acupuncture to Yoga situates each popular approach in the history and culture of health and wellness in America. Moreover, the book shows that "orthodox" medicine and unconventional approaches may have more in common than many people think, because both are subject to the changing nature of the medical understanding and the strength of their appeal to consumers. While the main focus is on remedies lying outside the medical mainstream, the book also highlights how many widely accepted therapeutic treatments of the past—for example, "the water cure" (hydrotherapy) or lobotomy (psychosurgery)—fell out of favor and were quickly forgotten. Besides examining popular healing techniques, the book also explores the changing nature of the medical marketplace and how once-standard treatments (e.g., leeching, psychoanalysis) have had their ups and downs. The book comprises five chronological sections covering time periods from pre-1900 to the present.