Books published by University Press of Mississippi

When George Jones recorded "He Stopped Loving Her Today" more than 30 years ago, he was a walking disaster. Twin addictions to drugs and alcohol had him drinking Jim Beam by the case and snorting cocaine as long as he was awake. This book tells the story behind the making of the song often voted the best country song ever by both critics and fans.

Loretta Young (1913-2000) was an Academy Award-winning actress known for devout Catholicism and her performances in The Farmer's Daughter, The Bishop's Wife, and Come to the Stable, and for her long-running and tremendously popular television series. But that was not the whole story. Hollywood Madonna explores the full saga of Loretta Young's professional and personal life. She made her film debut at age four, became a star at fifteen, and many awards and accolades later, made her final television movie at age seventy-six. This biography withholds none of the details of her affair with Clark Gable and the daughter that powerful love produced. Bernard F. Dick places Young's affair in the proper context of the time and the choices available to women in 1935, especially a noted Catholic like Young, whose career would have been in ruins if the public knew of her tryst. With the birth of a daughter, who would have been branded a love child, Loretta Young reached the crossroads of disclosure and deception, choosing the latter path. That choice resulted in an illustrious career for her and a tortured childhood for her daughter.

Despite their commercial appeal and cross-media reach, superheroes are only recently starting to attract sustained scholarly attention. This groundbreaking collection brings together essays and book excerpts by major writers on comics and popular culture.

These interviews cover the career to date of Neil Jordan (b. 1950), easily the most renowned filmmaker working in contemporary Irish cinema. His films have won many accolades, including the London Critics Circle Award for Best Film and Best Director, Best Film at the BAFTAs, and an Academy Award for Best Screenwriter.

American soul music of the 1960s is one of the most creative and influential musical forms of the twentieth century. Female performers were responsible for some of the most enduring and powerful contributions to the genre. All too frequently overlooked by the star-making critics, seven of these women are profiled in this book.

The interviews in this collection cover Walter Mosley's career and reveal an overarching theme: a belief in the transformative power of reading and writing. Conversations with Walter Mosley covers the breadth of Mosley's career and reveals a craftsman and wryly witty conversationalist.

No recent television creator has generated more critical, scholarly, and popular discussion or acquired as devoted a cult following as Joss Whedon. If Whedon has shown himself to be a virtuoso screenwriter/script-doctor, director, comic book author, and librettist, he is as well a masterful conversationalist.

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, Howard Chaykin: Conversations collects widely ranging discussions from Chaykin's earliest days to his recent work.

Although three earlier volumes were thought to have gathered most of Faulkner's interviews, continued research has turned up many more. Ranging from 1916, when he was a shabbily dressed young Bohemian poet to the last year of his life when he was putting finishing touches on his final novel, they are collected here for the first time.

Presents an irreverent and humorous collection of conversations with the acclaimed documentary filmmaker. Errol Morris (b. 1948) has created some of America's most innovative, lasting cinematic works. This volume features startling interviews from throughout his career, as well as intimate, never-before-published discussions.

Weaving incisive political commentary, razor-sharp satire, and suspense, John le Carre's work reflects upon and dissects both Cold War anxieties and the complications of social relationships. In Conversations with John le Carre, the acclaimed writer talks about his craft, the nature of language, the literature that he loves, and the ways in which his own life influences his novels.

These interviews starts with the years of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's early success and continue through his turn-of-the-century exchanges. He speaks of his childhood, his life as an indifferent student, his apprenticeship as a journalist, the inspiration for his most renowned novel, the difficulties brought by fame, and his leftist opinions.

Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, the Itals, the Ethiopians-they all dropped dazzling proverbs into their best known reggae tunes. Swami Anand Prahlad looks at the contexts and origins of these proverbs, using them as a cultural sheet music toward understanding the history of Jamaican culture, Rastafari religion, and the music.

Interviews with the creator of the comics series Hate and the former editor of the often outrageous Weirdo magazine

This wide-ranging and insightful collection of interviews with D.A. Pennebaker (b. 1925) spans the prolific career of this pioneer of observational cinema. From the 1950s to the present day, D.A. Pennebaker has made documentary films that have revealed the world of politics, celebrity culture, and the music industry.

The Writing Dead features original interviews with the writers of today's most frightening and fascinating shows. They include some of television's biggest names--Carlton Cuse (Lost and Bates Motel), Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, and Pushing Daisies), David Greenwalt (Angel and Grimm), Gale Anne Hurd (The Walking Dead, The Terminator series,Aliens, and The Abyss), Jane Espenson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica), Brian McGreevy (Hemlock Grove), Alexander Woo (True Blood), James Wong (The X-Files, Millennium, American Horror Story, and Final Destination), Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files and Millennium), Richard Hatem (Supernatural, The Dead Zone, and The Mothman Prophecies), Scott Buck (Dexter), Anna Fricke (Being Human), and Jim Dunn (Haven).The Writing Dead features thought-provoking, never-before-published interviews with these top writers and gives the creators an opportunity to delve more deeply into the subject of television horror than anything found online. In addition to revealing behind-the-scene glimpses, these writers discuss favorite characters and storylines and talk about what they find most frightening. They offer insights into the writing process reflecting on the scary works that influenced their careers. And they reveal their own personal fascinations with the genre.The thirteen interviews in The Writing Dead also mirror the changing landscape of horror on TV--from the shows produced by major networks and cable channels to shows made exclusively for online streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Studios. The Writing Dead will appeal to numerous fans of these shows, to horror fans, to aspiring writers and filmmakers, and to anyone who wants to learn more about why we like being scared.

Grand in its scope, Asian Comics dispels the myth that, outside of Japan, the continent is nearly devoid of comic strips and comic books. Relying on his fifty years of Asian mass communication and comic art research, during which he traveled to Asia at least seventy-eight times and visited many studios and workplaces, John A. Lent shows that nearly every country had a golden age of cartooning and has experienced a recent rejuvenation of the art form.As only Japanese comics output has received close and by now voluminous scrutiny, Asian Comics tells the story of the major comics creators outside of Japan. Lent covers the nations and regions of Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.Organized by regions of East, Southeast, and South Asia, Asian Comics provides 178 black-and-white illustrations and detailed information on comics of sixteen countries and regions--their histories, key creators, characters, contemporary status, problems, trends, and issues. One chapter harkens back to predecessors of comics in Asia, describing scrolls, paintings, books, and puppetry with humorous tinges, primarily in China, India, Indonesia, and Japan. The first overview of Asian comic books and magazines (both mainstream and alternative), graphic novels, newspaper comic strips and gag panels, plus cartoon/humor magazines, Asian Comics brims with facts, fascinating anecdotes, and interview quotes from many pioneering masters, as well as younger artists.

Canadian cartoonist Gregory Gallant, pen name Seth, emerged as a cartoonist in the fertile period of the 1980s, when the alternative comics market boomed. These interviews, including one career-spanning, definitive interview between the volume editors and the artist published here for the first time, delve into Seth's output from its earliest days to the present.

Looks at a range of literary, artistic and other cultural products that celebrate the beauty of adolescent boys and young men. In recent decades, "Boys Love" (or simply BL) has emerged as a mainstream genre in manga, anime, and games for girls and young women. This collection provides the first comprehensive overview in English of the BL phenomenon in Japan.

Presents a collection of essays about autobiography, semiautobiography, fictionalized autobiography, memory, and self-narration in sequential art, or comics. Contributors come from a range of academic backgrounds including English, American studies, comparative literature, gender studies, art history, and cultural studies.

A reclamation and interpretation of a once-dismissed aspect of American film history

It has become an axiom in comic studies that "comics is a language, not a genre". In Comics and Language, Hannah Miodrag challenges many of the assumptions about the "grammar" and formal characteristics of comics, and offers a more nuanced, theoretical framework that she argues will better serve the field by offering a consistent means for communicating critical theory in the scholarship.

Blessed with one of the great tenor voices of all time, Mario Lanza (1921-1959) rose to spectacular heights in a film, recording, and concert career that spanned little more than a decade. Groomed at the outset for a career on the opera stage, Lanza instead flourished in Hollywood where his films, most notably The Great Caruso, broke box-office records the world over and influenced the careers of countless musicians. To this day, the Three Tenors cite him as an inspiration for their own careers on the classical stage. Lanza's recordings for RCA sold in the millions, and he remains the crossover artist supreme. But his tremendous success was derailed by his self-destructive lifestyle, and by age thirty-eight he was dead, with his extraordinary promise left unfulfilled. Newly revised and updated for its first U.S. edition, Mario Lanza: Singing to the Gods is the definitive account of the remarkable life and times of one of the twentieth century's most beloved singing stars. This richly detailed work also contains a selection of rare photographs, several of which are drawn from Lanza's estate. With the support of Lanza's daughter, Ellisa Lanza Bregman, the tenor's colleagues, and his closest friend, Terry Robinson, Derek Mannering has chronicled a fascinating and unforgettable life. From the fabulous successes of the early MGM years through the disastrous walkouts and cancellations that sent Lanza's career into freefall, Mannering objectively and movingly reveals the story of a great star torn apart by his own troubled psyche and undisciplined lifestyle.

This book is the follow-up to Thierry Groensteen's groundbreaking The System of Comics, in which he set out to investigate how the medium functions, introducing the principle of iconic solidarity. He now develops that analysis further, using examples from a very wide range of comics.

Fred Zinnemann directed some of the most acclaimed and controversial films of the twentieth century, yet he has been a shadowy presence in Hollywood history. In this volume, J.E. Smyth reveals the intellectual passion behind some of the most powerful films ever made about the rise and resistance to fascism and the legacy of the Second World War.

Takes up the assumption shared by many fans and scholars that original horror movies are more "disturbing," and thus better than the remakes. David Roche assesses the qualities of movies, old and recast, according to criteria that include subtext, originality, and cohesion.