In the surreal world of Buffy Cram's stories, someone or something slips beneath the skin of her already beleaguered characters. Stealing into their worlds, it rearranges the familiar into something strange and possibly threatening, making off with their emotional and even physical goods. A smug suburbanite becomes obsessed with the 'hybrids,' the wandering mob of intellectual vagrants overrunning his complacent little cul de sac, snacking on pate and reciting poetry; a father and daughter's post-apocalyptic Pacific island civilization, built of floating garbage and sustained entirely by rubber, is beginning to fray, literally, revealing something disastrously like moss beneath its smooth synthetic skin; following an appendectomy, a young woman's belly starts transmitting what sound like Russian radio signals. Inhabited, occupied, possessed--suddenly, the world as they knew it is no longer quite recognizable, not to mention safe-if it actually was safe before. But it's the surprising, often revelatory ways in which Cram's characters navigate through these strange new landscapes that imbues these stories with complexity, grace and luster.

In the surreal world of Buffy Cram’s stories, someone or something has slipped beneath the skins of her already beleaguered characters, rearranging the familiar into something strange and even sinister, making off with their emotional and even physical goods. In Large Garbage: A Radio Belly Single, a smug suburbanite becomes obsessed with the "hybrids," the wandering mob of intellectual vagrants overrunning his complacent little cul de sac, snacking on pate and reciting poetry. Equally repelled by the hybrids' uncleanliness and intrigued by their freedom, Henry draws dangerously close to their secret nighttime life of sloshing claret and Proust quotes that overflow from finger-printed wine glasses and dirt-smudged lips. As the LA Times wrote: this "'new breed of homelessness'...cleverly envisions an alternative to the ever-widening circle of consumption that defines us now."

“Border Radio tells the 50,000-watt clear-channel story of the most outrageous and audacious phenomenon to ever hit the airwaves.”—Los Angeles Times Before the Internet brought the world together, there was border radio. These mega-watt “border blaster” stations, set up just across the Mexican border to evade U.S. regulations, beamed programming across the United States and as far away as South America, Japan, and Western Europe. This book traces the eventful history of border radio from its founding in the 1930s by “goat-gland doctor” J. R. Brinkley to the glory days of Wolfman Jack in the 1960s. Along the way, it shows how border broadcasters pioneered direct sales advertising, helped prove the power of electronic media as a political tool, aided in spreading the popularity of country music, rhythm and blues, and rock, and laid the foundations for today’s electronic church. The authors have revised the text to include even more first-hand information and a larger selection of photographs. “The magic of [a] wildly colorful chapter in broadcast history lives on in this entertainingly informative look at the forces and the people who contributed to the rise of the medium.”—Chicago Tribune “Characters like Wolfman Jack, Reverend Ike, Norman Baker, “Dr.” J. R. Brinkley, Pappy O’Daniel and others were master showmen and tremendously successful salesmen. Secret-formula medicines, magic prayer cloths, Crazy Water Crystals, and goat-gland rejuvenations are just part of this often hilarious telling of this outrageous period in broadcast history.”—Variety “If you’re wondering where Herbalife, Home Shopping Network, No-Money-Down Seminars, and Jim and Tammy Bakker found their inspiration and techniques, look no further than this superb book.”—Dallas Morning News

Besides providing a thorough overview of advances in the concept of identity in Translation Studies, the book brings together a variety of approaches to identity as seen through the prism of translation. Individual chapters are united by the topic and their predominantly cultural approach, but they also supply dynamic impulses for the reader, since their methodologies, level of abstraction, and subject matter differ. The theoretical impulses brought together here include a call for the ecology of translational attention, a proposal of transcultural and farcical translation and a rethinking of Bourdieu’s habitus in terms of František Miko’s experiential complex. The book also offers first-hand insights into such topics as post-communist translation practices, provides sociological insights into the role politics played during state socialism in the creation of fields of translated fiction and the way imported fiction was able to subvert the intentions of the state, gives evidence of the struggles of small locales trying to be recognised though their literature, and draws links between local theory and more widely-known concepts.