Performance Studies

Frank Peretti is the ever-witty character Mr. Henry, telling some of the most popular and beloved stories from the Bible in his own unique style. Combining imaginative storytelling and absolute truth, Salvation follows Jesus through his last days on Earth, from his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and his stand before Pilate to Peter's denial and Jesus' appearance with Mary and the Disciples after the resurrection.

In the early 20th century, World War I was the most devastating event humanity had yet experienced. New machines of war left tens of millions killed or wounded in the most grotesque of ways. The Great War remade the world's map, created new global powers, and brought forth some of the biggest problems still facing us today. But it also birthed a new art form: the horror film, made from the fears of a generation ruined by war. From Nosferatu to Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man, the touchstones of horror can all trace their roots to the bloodshed of the First World War.

Librarians spend their lives weeding - not weeds, but books - books that have reached the end of their shelf life both literally and figuratively. They remove books that patrons no longer check out, and they put back books they treasure. Annie Spence, who has a decade of experience as a Midwestern librarian, does this not only at her Michigan library but also at home, for her neighbors, at cocktail parties - everywhere. In Dear Fahrenheit 451, she addresses those books directly.

On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers?

Read in a single voice with subtle background music, the NIV Listener’s Audio Bible features Max McLean’s skillful, engaging, but never over-dramatized style reading Psalms and Proverbs. This audio Bible will bring God’s Word to life during your personal and family devotion times, group Bible study, or during your weekday commute.

From the lush feather boas that adorned early female impersonators to the sequined lip syncs of barroom queens to the drag kings that have us laughing in stitches, drag has played a vital role in the creative life of New York City. But the evolution of drag in the city—as an art form, a community and a mode of liberation—has never before been fully chronicled.

Whereas most writing texts focus exclusively on analysis or techniques to improve writing, Holcomb and Killingsworth blend these two schools of thought to provide a singular process of thinking about writing. They discuss not only the benefits of conventional methods, but also the use of deviation from tradition; the strategies authors use to vary their style; and the use of such vehicles as images, tropes, and schemes.

StoryCorps OutLoud sets out across the country to record and preserve the stories of LGBT individuals along with their families and friends. OutLoud is a project undertaken in the memory of Isay's father, psychiatrist Dr. Richard Isay. Professionally credited for helping to persuade the mental-health community that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, Dr. Isay was himself a closeted gay man for many years.

Generation after generation, women have faced the devastating reality that Hollywood is a system built to keep them out. The films created by that system influence everything from our worldviews to our brain chemistry. When women's voices are excluded from the medium, the impact on society is immense. Actor, screenwriter, and award-winning independent filmmaker Naomi McDougall Jones takes us inside the cutthroat, scandal-laden film industry, where only five percent of top studio films are directed by women and less than 20 percent of leading characters in mainstream films are female.

Women have been instrumental in the success of American cinema since its very beginning. One of the first people to ever pick up a motion picture camera was a woman, as was the first screenwriter to win two Academy Awards, the inventor of the boom microphone, and the first person to be credited with the title film editor. Throughout the entire history of Hollywood women have been revolutionizing, innovating, and shaping how we make movies. Yet their stories are rarely shared. This is what film reporter Alicia Malone wants to change. Backwards and in Heels tells the history of women in film in a different way.

A Thousand Cuts is a candid exploration of one of America's strangest and most quickly vanishing subcultures. It is about the death of physical film in the digital era and about a paranoid, secretive, eccentric, and sometimes obsessive group of film-mad collectors who made movies and their projection a private religion in the time before DVDs and Blu-rays.

"Why do conservatives hate comedy? Why is there no right-wing Jon Stewart?" These sorts of questions launch a million tweets, a thousand op-eds, and more than a few scholarly analyses. That's Not Funny argues that it is both an intellectual and politically strategic mistake to assume that comedy has a liberal bias. Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx take listeners—particularly self-described liberals—on a tour of contemporary conservative comedy and the "right-wing comedy complex."

The work of Stanley Kubrick amounts to a sustained reflection on the male condition: past, present, and future. The persistent theme of his filmmaking is less violence or sex than it is the pressurized exertion of masculinity in unusual or extreme circumstances, where it may be taxed or exaggerated to various effects, tragic and comic—or metamorphosed, distorted, and even undone.

Back in January 1995 in Los Angeles, California, a Singaporean pornstar named Annabel Chong took cultural rebellion to an extreme, on terms that had never been negotiated before. She was filmed having sex with a long receiving line of men, servicing them 251 times over a ten-hour period to set a new world record: The World’s Biggest Gangbang.

The inside story of San Francisco's burgeoning gay history and Hollywood's trials and tribulations. Marc Huestis' showbiz memoir is an entertaining and personal retelling of his coming out in the streets of San Francisco in the early ’70s, his relationship with Harvey Milk, his award-winning early AIDS documentary work, and 20 years of memorable experiences and behind the scenes secrets of screen icons - including Debbie Reynolds, John Waters, Patty Duke, and Tony Curtis - honored at his grand singular extravaganzas at the world-renowned Castro Theater.

A great script is only as good as the effort you put into your career, but there is little information for the aspiring screenwriter about how to break in. Even those who study TV or film in college are taught to simply “get a production assistant job.” But then what? Anton Schettini provides a rare insider’s glimpse of the modern-day network and streaming TV writers’ room. Here, you will find practical advice, career path strategies, and first-hand accounts for how to establish your network, grow within it, and acquire the necessary tools to become a TV writer.

Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, High Heel moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, and from the golden ratio to glam rock. Summer Brennan considers this most provocative of fashion accessories as a nexus of desire and struggle, sex and society, violence and self expression, setting out to understand what it means to be a woman by walking a few hundred years in her shoes.

Trans woman and screenwriter Tilly Bridges takes you through the trans allegories of the Matrix franchise, with deep dives into The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Animatrix, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Matrix Resurrections, tracking one person’s transition journey—from Thomas Anderson, to Neo… to Trinity. Each movie’s allegory is deeply layered, building from movie to movie, and speaks to a different aspect of trans existence.

This friendly, fun biography series focuses on the traits that made our heroes great - the traits that kids can aspire to in order to live heroically themselves. Each book tells the story of one of America's icons in a lively, conversational way that works well for the youngest nonfiction listeners and that always includes the hero's childhood influences. This volume features Walt Disney, who makes dreams come true for himself and countless kids around the world.

Unique insights into Shakespeare, from one of the world’s most revered theatre directors. Who was the man who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Why does Shakespeare never go out of date? How should actors approach Shakespeare’s verse? In this short but immensely wise book, visionary theatre director Peter Brook debates the questions that are central to our understanding of Shakespeare, and revisits the plays he has directed with notable brilliance, including King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and, of course, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.