Books published by University Press of Mississippi

The vampire, with roots in medieval European folklore, and the zombie, with origins in Afro-Caribbean mythology, have both undergone significant transformations in global culture, proliferating as deviant representatives of the zeitgeist. As this volume demonstrates, distribution of vampires and zombies across time and space has revealed these undead figures to carry multiple meanings.

Michael Allred stands out for his blend of spiritual and philosophical approaches with an art style reminiscent of 1960s era superhero comics, which creates a mixture of both postmodernism and nostalgia. Michael Allred: Conversations features interviews with the cartoonist from the early days of Madman's success through to his current mainstream work for Marvel Comics.

While the success of Disneyland is largely credited to Walt and Roy Disney, there was a third, mostly forgotten dynamo instrumental to the development of the park - fast-talking Texan C.V. Wood. Three Years in Wonderland presents the never-before-told, full story of "the happiest place on earth".

In 2000, readers voted Willie Morris (1934-1999) Mississippi's favorite nonfiction author of the millennium. After conducting over fifty interviews and combing through over eighty boxes of papers in the archives at the University of Mississippi, many of which had never been seen before by researchers, Teresa Nicholas provides new perspectives on a Mississippi writer and editor who changed journalism and redefined what being southern could mean. More than fifty photographs-some published here for the first time, including several by renowned photographer David Rae Morris, Willie's son-enhance the exploration. From an early age, Willie demonstrated a talent for words. At the University of Texas at Austin, he became a controversial editor of the Daily Texan. He later studied history as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, England, but by 1960 he was back in Austin, working as editor for the highly regarded Texas Observer. In 1967 Willie became the youngest editor of the nation's oldest magazine, Harper's. His autobiography, North Toward Home, achieved critical as well as artistic success, and it would continue to inspire legions of readers for decades to come. In the final tally, he published hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, along with twenty-three books. His work covered the gamut from fiction to nonfiction, for both adults and children, often touching on the personal as well as the historical and the topical, and always presented in his lyrical prose. In 1980, he returned to his home state as writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi. In 1990, he married his editor at the University Press of Mississippi, JoAnne Prichard, and they made a home in Jackson. With his broad knowledge of history, his sensitivity, and his bone-deep understanding of the South, he became a celebrated spokesman for and interpreter of the place he loved.

A pioneer of the New Queer Cinema, Todd Haynes (b. 1961) is a leading American independent filmmaker. He has garnered numerous awards and nominations and an expanding fan base for his provocative and engaging work. Gathering interviews from 1989 to 2012, this collection presents a range of themes, films, and moments in the burgeoning career of Todd Haynes.

Moviegoers know her as the housekeeper in White Christmas, the nurse in Now, Voyager, and the crotchety choir director in Sister Act. This book, filled with never-published behind-the-scenes stories from Broadway and Hollywood, chronicles the life of a complicated woman who brought an assortment of unforgettable nurses, nuns, and housekeepers to life on screen and stage. Wickes (1910-1995) was part of some of the most significant moments in film, television, theatre, and radio history. On that frightening night in 1938 when Orson Welles recorded his earth-shattering "e;War of the Worlds"e; radio broadcast, Wickes was waiting on another soundstage for him for a rehearsal of Danton's Death, oblivious to the havoc taking place outside. When silent film star Gloria Swanson decided to host a live talk show on this new thing called television, Wickes was one of her first guests. When Lucille Ball made one of her first TV appearances, Wickes appeared with her-and became Lucy's closest friend for more than thirty years. Wickes was the original Mary Poppins, long before an umbrella carried Julie Andrews across the rooftops of London. And when Disney began creating 101 Dalmatians, Wickes was asked to pose for animators trying to capture the evil of Cruella De Vil. The pinched-face actress who cracked wise by day became a confidante to some of the day's biggest stars by night, including Bette Davis and Doris Day. Bolstered by interviews with almost three hundred people, and by private correspondence from Ball, Davis, Day, and others, Mary Wickes: I Know I've Seen That Face Before includes scores of never-before-shared anecdotes about Hollywood and Broadway. In the process, it introduces readers to a complex woman who sustained a remarkable career for sixty years.

Grenada experienced much turmoil in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in an armed Marxist revolution, a bloody military coup, and finally in 1983 Operation Urgent Fury, a United States-led invasion. Wendy C. Grenade combines various perspectives to tell a Caribbean story about this revolution, weaving together historical accounts and contemporary analysis.

Never before have comics seemed so popular or diversified, proliferating across a broad spectrum of genres, experimenting with a variety of techniques, and gaining recognition as a legitimate, rich form of art. Maaheen Ahmed examines this trend by taking up philosopher Umberto Eco's notion of the open work of art, whereby the reader-or listener or viewer, as the case may be-is offered several possibilities of interpretation in a cohesive narrative and aesthetic structure. Ahmed delineates the visual, literary, and other medium-specific features used by comics to form open rather than closed works, methods by which comics generate or limit meaning as well as increase and structure the scope of reading into a work. Ahmed analyzes a diverse group of British, American, and European (Franco-Belgian, German, Finnish) comics. She treats examples from the key genre categories of fictionalized memoirs and biographies, adventure and superhero, noir, black comedy and crime, science fiction and fantasy. Her analyses demonstrate the ways in which comics generate openness by concentrating on the gaps essential to the very medium of comics, the range of meaning ensconced within words and images as well as their interaction with each other. The analyzed comics, extending from famous to lesser known works, include Will Eisner's The Contract with God Trilogy, Jacques Tardi's It Was the War of the Trenches, Hugo Pratt's The Ballad of the Salty Sea, Edmond Baudoin's The Voyage, Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's Arkham Asylum, Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, Moebius's Arzach, Yslaire's Cloud 99 series, and Jarmo Makila's Taxi Ride to Van Gogh's Ear.

Tells the story of one of the most notorious figures in the history of popular music, Morris Levy. At nineteen, he cofounded the nightclub Birdland in Hell's Kitchen, which became the home for a new musical style, bebop. Levy operated one of the first integrated clubs on Broadway and helped build the careers of Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell and most notably aided the reemergence of Count Basie.

Taiwanese born, Ang Lee has produced diverse films in his award-winning body of work. Sometimes working in the West, sometimes in the East, he creates films that defy easy categorization. Ang Lee humbly reveals here a personal journey that brought him from Taiwan to his chosen home in the United States as he struggled and ultimately triumphed in his quest to become a superb filmmaker.

With a career spanning more than forty years, Barbara Kopple (b. 1946) long ago established herself as one of the most prolific and award-winning American filmmakers of her generation. Her projects have ranged from labor union documentaries to fictional feature films to an educational series for kids on the Disney Channel. Through it all, Kopple has generously made herself available for a great many print and broadcast interviews. The most revealing and illuminating of these are brought together in this collection.Here, Kopple explains her near-constant struggles to raise money (usually while her films are already in production) and the hardships arising from throwing her own money into such projects. She makes clear the tensions between biases, objectivity, and fairness in her films. Her interviewers raise such fundamental questions as what is the relationship between real people in documentaries and characters in fictional films? Why does she embrace a cinéma vérité style in some films but not others? Why does she seem to support gun ownership in Harlan County, U.S.A., only to take a decidedly more neutral view of the issue in her film Gun Fight?Kopple's concern for people facing crises is undeniable. So is the affection she has for her more famous subjects--Woody Allen playing a series of European jazz concerts, Gregory Peck on tour, and the Dixie Chicks losing a fan base but making a fresh start.GREGORY BROWN, Valdosta, Georgia, is an assistant professor of mass media at Valdosta State University. A former newspaper reporter and editor, he has served both as a juror for the Broadcast Education Association's annual student documentary film festival as well as a member of the screening committee of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Arkansas.

A noted comics artist himself, Santiago Garca follows the history of the graphic novel from early nineteenth-century European sequential art, through the development of newspaper strips in the United States, to the development of the twentieth-century comic book and its subsequent crisis. He considers the aesthetic and entrepreneurial innovations that established the conditions for the rise of the graphic novel all over the world. Garca not only treats the formal components of the art, but also examines the cultural position of comics in various formats as a popular medium. Typically associated with children, often viewed as unedifying and even at times as a threat to moral character, comics art has come a long way. With such examples from around the world as Spain, France, Germany, and Japan, Garca illustrates how the graphic novel, with its increasingly global and aesthetically sophisticated profile, represents a new model for graphic narrative production that empowers authors and challenges longstanding social prejudices against comics and what they can achieve.

Superheroes such as Superman and Spider-Man have spread all over the world. As this edited volume shows, many national cultures have created or reimagined the idea of the superhero, while the realm of superheroes now contains many icons whose histories borrow from local folklore and legends. Consequently, the superhero needs reconsideration.

Over the last five decades, the films of director Brian De Palma (b. 1940) have been among the biggest successes (The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible) and the most high-profile failures (The Bonfire of the Vanities) in Hollywood history. De Palma helped launch the careers of such prominent actors as Robert De Niro, John Travolta, and Sissy Spacek (who was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress in Carrie). Indeed Quentin Tarantino named Blow Out as one of his top three favorite films, praising De Palma as the best living American director. Picketed by feminists protesting its depictions of violence against women, Dressed to Kill helped to create the erotic thriller genre. Scarface, with its over-the-top performance by Al Pacino, remains a cult favorite. In the twenty-first century, De Palma has continued to experiment, incorporating elements from videogames (Femme Fatale), tabloid journalism (The Black Dahlia), YouTube, and Skype (Redacted and Passion) into his latest works. What makes De Palma such a maverick even when he is making Hollywood genre films? Why do his movies often feature megalomaniacs and failed heroes? Is he merely a misogynist and an imitator of Alfred Hitchcock? To answer these questions, author Douglas Keesey takes a biographical approach to De Palma's cinema, showing how De Palma reworks events from his own life into his films. Written in an accessible style, and including a chapter on every one of his films to date, this book is for anyone who wants to know more about De Palma's controversial films or who wants to better understand the man who made them.

David Fincher (b. 1962) did not go to film school and hates being defined as an auteur. He prefers to see himself as a craftsman, dutifully going about the art and business of making film. This collection of interviews highlights Fincher's unwavering commitment to his craft as he evolved from an entrepreneurial music video director into an enterprising feature filmmaker.

Offers a timely exploration of the American obsession with colour in its look at the sometimes contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction. The contributors explore science fiction worlds of possibility (literature, television, and film), lifting blacks, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples out from the background of this historically white genre.

Explores how the aesthetic and cultural movement "Steampunk" persuades audiences and wins new acolytes. Chapters in Clockwork Rhetoric explore topics ranging from jewelry to Japanese anime to contemporary imperialism to fashion. Throughout, the book demonstrates how language influences consumers of steampunk to hold certain social and political attitudes and commitments.

In 1977, Dave Sim (b 1956) began to self-publish Cerebus, one of the earliest and most significant independent comics, which ran for 300 issues and ended in 2004. Through it he analyzed politics, the dynamics of love, religion, and, most controversially, the influence of feminism. This book includes the few interviews that Sim gave.

One of the most distinctive voices in mainstream comics since the 1970s, Howard Chaykin has earned a reputation as a visionary formal innovator and a compelling storyteller. Beginning with early interviews in fanzines and concluding with a new interview conducted in 2010, this volume collects widely ranging discussions from Chaykin's earliest days to his recent work.

Drawing on DC and Marvel comics from the 1950s to the 1990s, and marshalling insights from three burgeoning fields of inquiry in the humanities - disability studies, death and dying studies, and comics studies, the author seeks to redefine the contemporary understanding of the superhero.

Makes available for the first time to English readership a selection of viewpoints from media practitioners, designers, educators, and scholars working in the East Asian Pacific. This collection not only engages a multidisciplinary approach in understanding the subject of Japanese animation but also shows ways to research, teach, and more fully explore this multidimensional world.

Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth. In Autobiographical Comics, Elisabeth El Refaie offers a long overdue assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this fascinating genre.

Although Alexander Payne's body of work is quantitatively small, it is qualitatively impressive. His movies have garnered numerous accolades and awards. In this first compilation of his interviews, Payne reveals himself as a captivating conversationalist. The discussions collected here range from 1996 to 2013.

A pioneer of the New Queer Cinema, Todd Haynes (b. 1961) is a leading American independent filmmaker. He has garnered numerous awards and nominations and an expanding fan base for his provocative and engaging work. Gathering interviews from 1989 through 2012, this collection presents a range of themes, films, and moments in the burgeoning career of Todd Haynes.

Sam Goldwyn's career spanned almost the entire history of Hollywood. The Search for Sam Goldwyn locates the real Sam Goldwyn and shatters the "hostile conspiracy of silence" that protected his legend. In writing Goldwyn's story, Carol Easton has given us a fine examination of "the civilization known as Hollywood" and how Goldwyn himself shaped that culture.

Mardiganian (1901-1994) witnessed the murder of her family and the suffering of her people at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. The film Ravished Armenia, also known as Auction of Souls, is a graphic retelling of Mardiganian's story. This volume contains an annotated reprint of Mardiganian's original narrative and the full screenplay.