New Books in Popular Culture

I Spit On Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies (Headpress, 2024) by Heidi Honeycutt is the first book-length history of female horror directors from the late 1800s to present day. Having conducted hundreds of interviews and watched thousands of horror films, Honeycutt defines the political and cultural forces that shape the way modern horror movies are made by women. The women's rights and civil rights movements, new distribution technology, digital cameras, the destruction of the classic studio system, and the abandonment of the Hays code have significantly impacted women directors and their movies. So, too, social media, modern ideas of gender and racial equality, LGBTQ acceptance, and a new generation of provocative, daring films that take shocking risks in the genre. Includes short films, anthologies, documentaries, animated horror, horror pornography, pink films, and experimental horror.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

What if the original teachings of Jesus were different from the Bible's sanitized 'orthodox' version? What covert motivations might inspire those who decide what the text of the Bible 'says' or what it 'means'? For some who ask conspiratorial questions like these, the Bible is the vulnerable victim of secular forces seeking to divest the USA of its founding identity. For others, the biblical canon suppresses religious truths that could upend the status quo. Such suspicions surrounding the Bible find full expression in Gospel Thrillers: a 1960s fictional genre that endures and still commands a substantial following. These novels imagine a freshly discovered first-century gospel and a race against time to unlock its buried secrets. They also reflect the fears and desires that the Bible continues to generate. In Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible (Cambridge UP, 2023), Andrew Jacobs reveals, in his authoritative examination, how this remarkable fictional archive opens a window onto disturbing biblical anxieties.New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew ReviewFind more information on the Gospel Thrillers here.Andrew Jacobs is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and the Editor of Cambridge University Press’s book series Element of Religion in Late Antiquity. His Epiphanius of Cyprus: a cultural biography of Late Antiquity (UC Press, 2016), won the Philip Schaff Best Book prize from the American Society of Church History. Andrew has also just finished a stint as President of the North American Patristics Society. Find him at @drewjackeprof.bsky.social, or on X: @drewjackeprofMichael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston. @mikemotia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In the 1990s, India's mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (U California Press, 2024), Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and maps the genre's circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as South Asian pornography. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, Mini also explores the soft-porn industry's utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, as well as how actresses and production personnel who are marked by their involvement with a taboo form negotiate their social lives. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, this study offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries.Dr. Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. She did her PhD from the University of Southern California. Her teaching and research lie at the intersection of gender, sexuality, transnational media, migrant media and screen cultures of South Asia. She is the co-editor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene (Routledge, 2024).Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. Her interdisciplinary academic interests lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, anthropology of the body, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinhaKhadeeja Amenda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore. She can be reached at khadeejaamenda@u.nus.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In 1900, Britain and America were in the grip of a cat craze. An animal that had for centuries been seen as a household servant or urban nuisance had now become an object of pride and deep affection. From presidential and royal families who imported exotic breeds to working-class men competing for cash prizes for the fattest tabby, people became enthralled to the once-humble cat. Multiple industries sprang up to feed this new obsession, selling everything from veterinary services to leather bootees via dedicated cat magazines. Cats themselves were now traded for increasingly large sums of money, bolstered by elaborate pedigrees that claimed noble ancestry and promised aesthetic distinction.Dr. Kathryn Hughes chronicles the cat craze of the early twentieth century through the life and career of Louis Wain. In the US the book is titled Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) and in the UK is called Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World (Fourth Estate, 2024).Wain's anthropomorphic drawings of cats in top hats falling in love, sipping champagne, golfing, driving cars, and piloting planes are some of the most instantly recognizable images from the era. His round-faced fluffy characters established the prototype for the modern cat, which cat "fanciers" were busily trying to achieve using their newfound knowledge of the latest scientific breeding techniques. Despite being a household name, Wain endured multiple bankruptcies and mental breakdowns, spending his last fifteen years in an asylum, drawing abstract and multicolored felines. But it was his ubiquitous anthropomorphic cats that helped usher the formerly reviled creatures into homes across Europe.Beautifully illustrated and based on new archival findings about Wain's life, the wider cat fancy, and the media frenzy it created, Catland chronicles the fascinating history of how the modern cat emerged.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Las Vegas is a place the American dream made; a city built in the middle of desert visited by millions of people every year hoping to make their dreams (big or small) come true. The essays in The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas (University of Illinois Press, 2023) examines Las Vegas not as a kitschy, vaguely embarrassing American tourist destination, but rather takes seriously the performers and audiences who have made Las Vegas the embodiment of American mythology. In this interview, the volume's editor, Jake Johnson, is joined by two contributors: Brian F. Wright, author of “Elvis in Vegas: The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and the City of Second Chances” and Joanna Dee Dass co-author with Maddie House-Tuck of “The Real Deal: Impersonation and the American Dream in Branson and Vegas.” The Possibility Machine is a large collection of essays that examines music and performance in Las Vegas from multiple perspectives and considers the city’s history from mob-dominated playground to a family-friendly tourist destination. The essays explore music as an important facet of the lives of the city's residents, its promise of second chances to performers, the allure of its spectacle to audiences, and the circulation of its reputation around the U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In 1971, the New York Times called the Taiwanese-Chinese chef, Fu Pei-Mei, the “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.”But, as Michelle T. King notes in her book Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (Norton, 2024), the inverse–that Julia Child was the Fu Pei-Mei of French cuisine–might be more appropriate. Fu spent decades on Taiwanese television, wrote three seminal cookbooks on Chinese cuisine, ran a famous cooking academy and even provided important culinary advice to those making packaged food and airline meals.And this all starts from humble beginnings, when she was an amateur–and not very good–home cook arriving in Taiwan from mainland China.In this interview, Michelle and I talk about Fu Pei-Mei, her humble beginnings and rise to the heights of Chinese cooking, and what Fu’s work tells us about Chinese cuisine.Michelle T. King is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in modern Chinese gender and food history. She can be followed on Instagram at @michtking.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Chop Fry Watch Learn. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In September 2006, Margo Jefferson spoke to the Institute about her book, On Michael Jackson (Vintage, 2007). Jefferson received the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for criticism when she was at the New York Times. Her 2015 book, Negroland: A Memoir, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. And in 2022, she published, Constructing a Nervous System, a memoir in fragments. She has taught at NYU, The New School, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she is a professor of professional practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Casablanca is one of the most celebrated Hollywood films of all time, its iconic romance enshrined in collective memory across generations. Drawing from archival materials, industry trade journals, and cultural commentary, in Immortal Films: "Casablanca" and the Afterlife of a Hollywood Classic (University of California Press, 2022), Dr. Barbara Klinger explores the history of Casablanca's circulation in the United States from the early 1940s to the present by examining its exhibition via radio, repertory houses, television, and video. By resituating the film in the dynamically changing industrial, technological, and cultural circumstances that have defined its journey over eight decades, Dr. Klinger challenges our understanding of its meaning and reputation as both a Hollywood classic and a cult film. Through this single-film survey, Immortal Films proposes a new approach to the study of film history and aesthetics and, more broadly, to cinema itself as a medium in constant interface with other media as a necessary condition of its own public existence and endurance.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Ishita Tiwary’s book Video Culture in India: The Analog Era (Oxford UP, 2024) is an unprecedented attempt in foregrounding the diverse media history of the analog video era in India. It reconstructs the evolution of analog video culture through interdisciplinary approaches, including oral histories, archival resources, and discarded tapes. At the same time, it provides key information on the socio-political context of video culture, which existing digital media studies lack.Dr. Ishita Tiwary is an Assistant Professor in Film Studies and the Canada Research Chair at the Department of Cinema at Concordia University, Montreal. She is also the director of the research lab “Raah." Ishita Tiwary's research interests include video cultures, media infrastructures, migration, contraband media practices, and media aesthetics. She has published essays in Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, JumpCut, Post Script: Essays in Film and Humanities, Culture Machine, MARG: Journal of Indian Art, and in edited collections on topics of media piracy, video histories, and streaming platforms.Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. Her interdisciplinary academic interests lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, anthropology of the body, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2024), Jerry Rafiki Jenkins examines four types of human monsters that frequently appear in Black American horror fiction--the monsters of White rage, respectability, not-ness, and serial killing. Arguing that such monsters represent specific ideologies of American anti-Blackness, Jenkins shows that despite their various motivations for harming and killing Black people, these monsters embody the horrors that emerge when Black American is disassociated from American. Although these monsters of anti-Blackness are dangerous because they can terrorize Black people with virtual impunity, their "anti-Black sadism," as Jenkins calls it, is what makes them repulsive. Jenkins examines a variety of these monstrous forms in Tananarive Due's The Between, Victor LaValle's The Changeling, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, and many other works. While these monsters and the texts that they populate ask us to think about the role that anti-Blackness plays in being or becoming American, they also offer intellectual resources that Black and non-Black people might use to combat the everyday versions of human monstrosity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture