This volume considers for the first time in a single collection this acclaimed, award-winning director's entire oeuvre, addressing and analyzing themes such as identity, family, and masculinity, supported by in-depth coverage of the generic and aesthetic aspects of DiCillo's distinctive and influential film style. Through detailed chapters on each of DiCillo's feature films, presented here is a candid look behind-the-scenes of both the American independent film industry - from the No Wave movement of the 1980s, through the Indie boom of the 1990s, to the contemporary milieu - and the Hollywood studio system. This study documents the writing, production, and release of every DiCillo picture, each followed by an extensive Q&A with the director. Also featured are exclusive interviews and commentary with many cast members and collaborators, and members of legendary rock group, The Doors. Films covered include Johnny Suede, Living In Oblivion, Box of Moonlight, The Real Blonde, Double Whammy, Delirious, When You're Strange, and Down in Shadowland.

Living in Oblivion is a satiric look behind the scenes of the new wave of independent film-makers in America today - the world of Hal Hartley, Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino. A media-fed generation who make post-modern films. Not since François Truffaut's Oscar-winning Day For Night has a film captured so well the nightmare of making movies. The screenplay is accompanied by 'Eating Crow', the diary which Tom DiCillo kept during the making of the film and which follows the film's genesis from a 15-minute short to the media frenzy surrounding its appearance at the Sundance Film Festival.

This acclaimed twenty-first–century Russian novel is “a Dantean descent” into the abandoned Soviet gulags, written “with a clear poetic sensibility” (The Wall Street Journal). In Sergei Lebedev’s debut novel, an unnamed young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a mysterious neighbor who once saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where man and machine work in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today’s Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel is an epic literary act of bearing witness, attempting to rescue history from the brink of oblivion. A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Novel of the Year “Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn has Russia had a writer as obsessed as Sergei Lebedev with that country’s history or the traces it has left on the collective consciousness . . . The best of Russia’s younger generation of writers.” ―The New York Review of Books

Born in Chicago in 1918, the prodigiously gifted and erudite Isaac Rosenfeld was anointed a genius upon the publication of his luminescent novel, Passage from Home and was expected to surpass even his closest friend and rival, Saul Bellow. Yet when felled by a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, Rosenfeld had published relatively little, his life reduced to a metaphor for literary failure. In this deeply contemplative book, Steven J. Zipperstein seeks to reclaim Rosenfeld's legacy by opening up his work. Zipperstein examines for the first time the small mountain of unfinished manuscripts the writer left behind, as well as his fiercely candid journals and letters. In the process, Zipperstein unearths a turbulent life that was obsessively grounded in a profound commitment to the ideals of the writing life. Rosenfelds Lives is a fascinating exploration of literary genius and aspiration and the paradoxical power of literature to elevate and to enslave. It illuminates the cultural and political tensions of post-war America, Jewish intellectual life of the era, andmost poignantlythe struggle at the heart of any writers life.

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown (The Soul Is Not a Smithy). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way (The Suffering Channel). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring (Oblivion). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.