If the phrase “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” sounds very familiar to you, it could be you are one of the many millions of fans and admirers of either the books by L. Frank Baum or the many products that continued the tales of Oz. For nearly 120 years, the world […]
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Category: B. R. Literature
Book reviews, mostly covering literature.
James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction by Nathan Ashman (2018)
In his masterpiece The Black Dahlia, in the first L.A. Quartet novel, James Ellroy presents a detective very much devoted to the murder of Elisabeth Short. Both Ellroy and Detective Bucky Bleichert become obsessed with the violent crime; Bleichert finally turns almost insane reconstructing both the case and the victim’s body. Ellroy in an interview […]
Cowboy Politics: Myths and Discourses in Popular Westerns … by John S. Nelson (2018)
The popularity of the American western is still unbroken. This has to do with the story lines, great landscapes, good soundtracks and mostly with the deeds of some heroic men (and sometimes women) who did “the right thing” in times of distress and usually in very rough and dangerous times. However, Cowboy Politics is not […]
Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture After Apollo by Alexander C. T. Geppert (ed.) (2018)
Introducing the second volume of the European view on space programs and the sociocultural effects of current and future space travel and planet colonization plans, Limiting Outer Space continues the Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology series. The title is strongly linked to Vol. 1 Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the […]
Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other Media… by N. Bentley, B. Johnson and A. Zieleniec (eds.
With emphasis on “Teenage Dreams,” three loosely designed subdivisions – literary fictions, representations on screen, critical theory and representations in other media – approach the huge body of demonstrations of subcultures in popular culture in the title at hand. Already the very idea of subcultures is strongly connected to modes of narration: “One of the […]
Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, And Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction … by Iain Mcintyre and Andrew Nette (eds.)
The development and the origins of pulp fiction books are both well-documented and naturally before there was a market for those products, there was a demand for it. Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, however, starts not at the beginning of this genre, but dives deep into the phenomenon of the pulp books that dealt with subcultures […]
War Noir: Raymond Chandler and the Hard-Boiled Detective as Veteran … by Sarah Trott (2016)
Highly respected and valued by many fans of crime fiction and most likely America’s most distinguished crime writer ever, Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) together with Dashiell Hammett invented a new type of tough detective, independently of each other, they founded a style that later was described as “hard-boiled.” Many of their novels were turned into successful […]
Tarzan, Jungle King of Popular Culture by David Lemmo (2017)
Some writers of fiction seemingly are blessed with a fathomless imaginative power, which is the basis for many science fiction and adventure stories. In the case of Tarzan (of the Apes), it is also owed to the very adventurous and at times fast-paced biography of the author of the Tarzan tales, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 […]
Alice in Transmedia Wonderland: Curiouser and Curiouser … by Anna Kerchy (2016)
There are many, many texts, societies, journals and studies that deal with nothing but Lewis Carroll‘s Alice stories. This one, however, researches how the original story (or its texts) has transformed into many other forms of media, virtually designing various forms of a “Transmedia Wonderland.” Anna Kérchy follows adaptations of the tales “across a variety […]