Hard Hat Heroes


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Empire Rising


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A Novel of High-Stakes Romance and Betrayal, Set During the Race to Finish the World's Tallest Building In Empire Rising, his extraordinary third book, Thomas Kelly tells a story of love and work, of intrigue and jealousy, with the narrative verve that led the Village Voice's reviewer to dub him "Dostoevsky with a hard hat and lead pipe." As the novel opens, it is 1930-the Depression-and ground has just been broken for the Empire State Building. One of the thousands of men erecting the building high above the city is Michael Briody, an Irish immigrant torn between his desire to make a new life in America and his pledge to gather money and arms for the Irish republican cause. When he meets Grace Masterson, an alluring artist who is depicting the great skyscraper's ascent from her houseboat on the East River, Briody's life turns exhilarating-and dangerous, for Grace is also a paramour of Johnny Farrell, Mayor Jimmy Walker's liaison with Tammany Hall and the underworld. Their heartbreaking love story-which takes place both in the immigrant neighborhoods of the Bronx and amid the swanky nightlife of the '21' Club--is also a chronicle of the city's rough passage from a working-class enclave to a world-class metropolis, and a vivid reimagining of the conflict that pitted the Tammany Hall political machine and its popular mayor against the boundlessly ambitious Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Colin Harrison, in The New York Times Book Review, called Kelly's The Rackets "A well-paced, violent thriller, [and] an elegy for the city's old Irish working class." In Empire Rising, Kelly takes his work to a new level: telling of the story of the people who built the "eighth wonder of the world," he makes old New York the setting for a rich and unforgettable story.




But I'm Not a Hero


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High school sophomore Matt Pine always thought he'd grow up to be a superhero-after all, not everyone can move things with their mind. But he can only move small stuff, nothing big enough to matter; it wasn't big enough to save his mom from dying in a fire five years ago. Ever since he failed that night, he's been hiding from his Ability, and he's come to grips with the fact that superheroes aren't real. Now he just wants to get through high school in one piece. But when a semi-truck smashes into a car right in front of him, and he watches the driver die, Matt soon discovers that the death was anything but accidental. The owner of the local auto parts factory, Seth Crossman, took the man out to cover up a defective product...and he's not done killing yet. And since everyone else in town is too scared to do anything, Matt decides it's up to him. That means learning to use this Ability he's been hiding from; and getting some help from Phillip and Tess, who have their own overlooked talents. But they're going up against brawn and bullets, so they'll have to pool everything they have to keep anyone else from getting killed-including themselves. PRAISE & REVIEWS: "A rare story that empowers kids from regular walks of life... Heroes are not just comic book legends defined by their powers, but everyday people who simply do what is right. " —Early Reader Review "When Matt faces trouble in his hometown, the teen and his friends soon find out they're not losers after all. In this young-adult gem, Demarest creates genuine characters whose loyalty and courage are tested. While doing the right thing isn't always easy, sometimes it's even dangerous." —Nicole Sorrell, author of The Art of Living Series "A sinister plot that could prove deadly on a grand scale. Matt's not the only one who learns to appreciate a special power. Along the way, they all learn that sometimes a disability is an ability in disguise-it all depends on how you use it." —Fran Borin, author of The Ghost Adventures of Orion O'Brien Series "The characterization of Tess, a non-speaking autistic girl is not only extremely respectful and accurate, but something to be commended as an example as superb representation of a capable autistic individual." —Early Reader Review




Flying Safety


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Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men


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Everywhere you look in 1970s American cinema, you find white working-class men. They bring a violent conclusion to Easy Rider, murdering the film's representatives of countercultural alienation and disaffection. They lurk in the Georgia woods of Deliverance, attacking outsiders in a manner that evokes the South's recent history of racial violence and upheaval. They haunt the singles nightclubs of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, threatening the film's newly liberated heroine with patriarchal violence. They strut through the disco clubs of Saturday Night Fever, dancing to music whose roots in post-Stonewall homosexuality invite ambiguity that the men ignore. Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men argues that the persistent appearance of working-class characters in these and other films of the 1970s reveals the powerful role class played in the key social and political developments of the decade, such as the decline of the New Left and counterculture, the re-emergence of the South as the Sunbelt, and the rise of the women's and gay liberation movements. Examining the "youth cult" film, the neo-Western "southern," and the "new nightlife" film, Nystrom shows how these cinematic renderings of white working-class masculinity actually tell us more about the crises facing the middle class during the 1970s than about working-class experience itself. Hard Hats thus demonstrates how these representations of the working class serve as fantasies about a class Other-fantasies that offer imaginary resolutions to middle-class anxieties provoked by the decade's upheavals. Drawing on examples of iconic films from the era-Saturday Night Fever, Cruising, Five Easy Pieces, and Walking Tall, among others-Nystrom presents an incisive, evocative study of class and American cinema during one of the nation's most tumultuous decades.




Working-Class Comic Book Heroes


Book Description

Contributions by Phil Bevin, Blair Davis, Marc DiPaolo, Michele Fazio, James Gifford, Kelly Kanayama, Orion Ussner Kidder, Christina M. Knopf, Kevin Michael Scott, Andrew Alan Smith, and Terrence R. Wandtke In comic books, superhero stories often depict working-class characters who struggle to make ends meet, lead fulfilling lives, and remain faithful to themselves and their own personal code of ethics. Working-Class Comic Book Heroes: Class Conflict and Populist Politics in Comics examines working-class superheroes and other protagonists who populate heroic narratives in serialized comic books. Essayists analyze and deconstruct these figures, viewing their roles as fictional stand-ins for real-world blue-collar characters. Informed by new working-class studies, the book also discusses how often working-class writers and artists created these characters. Notably Jack Kirby, a working-class Jewish artist, created several of the most recognizable working-class superheroes, including Captain America and the Thing. Contributors weigh industry histories and marketing concerns as well as the fan community's changing attitudes towards class signifiers in superhero adventures. The often financially strapped Spider-Man proves to be a touchstone figure in many of these essays. Grant Morrison's Superman, Marvel's Shamrock, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, and The Walking Dead receive thoughtful treatment. While there have been many scholarly works concerned with issues of race and gender in comics, this book stands as the first to deal explicitly with issues of class, cultural capital, and economics as its main themes.










An Ex-Heroes Collection


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A genre-bending thriller series from Peter Clines, bestselling author of 14, and The Fold In the days after civilization fell to the zombie hordes, a small team of heroes—including St. George, Zzzap, Cerberus, and Stealth—does everything they can to protect human survivors. Each day is a desperate battle against overwhelming odds as the heroes fight to keep the undead at bay, provide enough food and supplies for the living, and lay down their lives for those they’ve sworn to protect. But the hungry ex-humans aren’t the only threats the heroes face. Former allies, their powers and psyches hideously twisted, lurk in the shadows of the ruin that lies everywhere…and they may be the most terrifying threat of all. Find out whether the heroes survive in this special omnibus edition, featuring the first four books in the series: Ex-Heroes, Ex-Patriots, Ex-Communication, and Ex-Purgatory, with an excerpt from the fifth book, Ex-Isle.




The Novel


Book Description

Paul Hoover's The Novel is a booklength poem written in response to the author's experience of having his first novel, Saigon, Illinois (Vintage, 1988), published after a mere six months in the making. Hoover examines the privilege of the novelist from the poet's point of view, asking in both astonishment and disappointment: why is the novelist at once the most lordly and common of authors? A mosaic in organization, the poem's thirty parts mix, among others, Shakespeare and deconstructionist "shoptalk" with an account of Graceland when Elvis was alive and a gloss of the mass-market paperback of James M. Cain's The Enchanted Isle, whose heroine Mandy appears in the poem as the fictive author's lover. The Novel presents no dichotomy between pop culture and the intensely literary, resisting closure by replicating the counterpoint speed of obsessive TV channel-changing. "The closer the look one takes at a world/the greater the distance from which it looks back."