“A hilarious, sad . . . all too true novel about the rough underside of a college love affair.”—John Knowles, author of A Separate Peace When eighteen-year-old Jerry Payne first meets Pookie Adams at the Friarsburg, Oklahoma, bus depot, he is hardly aware that this moment marks the beginning of the most memorable love affair of his life. Overwhelmed (and yet secretly enchanted) by her zany, rambling monologue, Jerry is relieved to leave her in St. Louis as he continues to New York. Thinking he’s seen the last of her, he heads off to college, only to be pursued by seventeen lengthy letters, and before he knows it he’s involved with a seemingly crazy, startlingly honest girl who adores him. During the next two years, Pookie helps Jerry leave behind the fun-seeking, beer-blasted fraternity man he has become, as she teaches him to open his heart to her. Then, almost as suddenly as she appeared in his life, she disappears from it, leaving in her wake an eternal trail of love and wonder.

"For me, Alan Pakula was one of the great American filmmakers, but if you look at his films, they look so simple. The camera is not doing back—flips and he's not afraid to hold a shot. You can argue that if you do your work really well, no one should notice." —Todd Field, director ofIn the Bedroom To Kill a Mockingbird.Klute.All the President's Men.Sophie's Choice.Presumed Innocent. Alan J. Pakula was the creative force behind these great films and dozens more. Here at last is the definitive biography of this film genius, based on interviews with more than 40 friends, including Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, and Meryl Streep, and unrestricted access to Pakula's own family and archives. Born in the Bronx, destined to take over the family printing business, Pakula instead began writing and acting in plays as a teenager and moved to Hollywood in the 1950s. Artistically driven, boundlessly inventive, hugely influential, Pakula has left an enduring film legacy. • Three-time Academy Award-winning water/director/producer • Interviews with Harrison Ford, Laurne Bacall, Meryl Street, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Kevin Kline, Candice Bergen, Donald Sutherland, and over 30 other film celebrities • More than 25 never-before-published photos of Pakula from his family

An international bestseller and the basis for the hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of the defining works of the 1960s. In this classic novel, Ken Kesey’s hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over. A lusty, life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and women, and openly defies the rules at every turn. But this defiance, which starts as a sport, soon develops into a grim struggle, an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Nurse Ratched, backed by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy provides the story’s shocking climax. “BRILLIANT!”—Time “A SMASHING ACHIEVEMENT...A TRULY ORIGINAL NOVEL!”—Mark Schorer “Mr. Kesey has created a world that is convincing, alive and glowing within its own boundaries...His is a large, robust talent, and he has written a large, robust book.”—Saturday Review

An aspiring writing adrift in New York finds love and community at a corner empanada stand in this novel by the author of The Milagro Beanfield War. It’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, when ex-patriots, artists, and colorful bums are kings. A tiny stand selling empanadas near the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal streets is the center of the action for the shy narrator, an aspiring writer just out of college. There, he falls in with a crowd of kooky outcasts from Argentina who introduce him to their raucous adventures, melodramatic dreams, and women—particularly a tough little flamenco dancer from Buenos Aires. Charming and insightful, this deceptively simple novel is a tale told by a master. It is a wise coming-of-age story, full of joy and touched by heartbreak, that captures a special time and place with extraordinary empathy and humor.

With sequels, prequels, remakes, spin-offs, or copies of successful films or franchises dominating film and television production, it sometimes seems as if Hollywood is incapable of making an original film or TV show. These textual pluralities or multiplicities—while loved by fans who flock to them in droves—tend to be dismissed by critics and scholars as markers of the death of high culture. Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots takes the opposite view, surveying a wide range of international media multiplicities for the first time to elucidate their importance for audiences, industrial practices, and popular culture. The essays in this volume offer a broad picture of the ways in which cinema and television have used multiplicities to streamline the production process, and to capitalize on and exploit viewer interest in previously successful and/or sensational story properties. An impressive lineup of established and emerging scholars talk seriously about forms of multiplicity that are rarely discussed as such, including direct-to-DVD films made in Nigeria, cross-cultural Japanese horror remakes, YouTube fan-generated trailer mash-ups, and 1970s animal revenge films. They show how considering the particular bonds that tie texts to one another allows us to understand more about the audiences for these texts and why they crave a version of the same story (or character or subject) over and over again. These findings demonstrate that, far from being lowbrow art, multiplicities are actually doing important cultural work that is very worthy of serious study.

What happens when two oft-divorced and middle-aged sex fiends tie the knot again? Birds do it, bees do it, and Roger and Zelda do it whenever their teenage kids aren’t looking. Their ecstasy is boundless. But when the darker side of Paradise rears its comical head, they suddenly find themselves trapped in a Three Stooges movie directed by Freddy Krueger. This takeoff on matrimony will make you laugh, scream, or grind your teeth in recognition. If you are hitched yourself, take three Valiums before reading!

The Milagro Beanfield War is the first book in John Nichols's New Mexico trilogy (“Gentle, funny, transcendent.” —The New York Times Book Review), later adapted to film by Robert Redford. Joe Mondragon, a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, slammed his battered pickup to a stop, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into the arid patch of ground. Carefully (and also illegally), he tapped into the main irrigation channel. And so began-though few knew it at the time-the Milagro beanfield war. But like everything else in the dirt-poor town of Milagro, it would be a patchwork war, fought more by tactical retreats than by battlefield victories. Gradually, the small farmers and sheepmen begin to rally to Joe's beanfield as the symbol of their lost rights and their lost lands. And downstate in the capital, the Anglo water barons and power brokers huddle in urgent conference, intent on destroying that symbol before it destroys their multimillion-dollar land-development schemes. The tale of Milagro's rising is wildly comic and lovingly tender, a vivid portrayal of a town that, half-stumbling and partly prodded, gropes its way toward its own stubborn salvation.