This Is Pleasure

This Is Pleasure
Author: Mary Gaitskill
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1524749141
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Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident. The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable. Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

May We Be Forgiven

May We Be Forgiven
Author: A.M. Homes
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2013-09-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 014750970X
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Winner of the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction—A darkly comic novel of twenty-first-century domestic life by a writer who is always “compelling, devastating, and furiously good” (Zadie Smith) Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, a taller, smarter, and more successful high-flying TV executive, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry, a historian and Nixon scholar, also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution. Harry finds himself suddenly playing parent to his brother’s two adolescent children, tumbling down the rabbit hole of Internet sex, dealing with aging parents who move through time like travelers on a fantastic voyage. As Harry builds a twenty-first-century family created by choice rather than biology, we become all the more aware of the ways in which our history, both personal and political, can become our destiny and either compel us to repeat our errors or be the catalyst for change. May We Be Forgiven is an unnerving, funny tale of unexpected intimacies and of how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together.

Sense and Celebrity

Sense and Celebrity
Author: Fiona Wallace
Publisher: Fiona Wallace
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2011-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1463604157
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Alice Croft has a PhD, a university post, a heavily mortgaged Oxford townhouse and her young brother Daniel, whom she has brought up since he was a day old. When Daniel wins SuperStar, the national televised talent competition, it brings Stephen Rowan, SuperStar judge and number one entertainment agent, oiling into their lives. Botoxed and bronzed, he is everything that Alice despises. Quiet, highly intelligent and a size twelve, Alice has nothing to interest Stephen. A month later: He's seen her in the shower and she's seen his size zero girlfriend. He's passed out in front of her and she's covered him in SPF 30+. He's taken her to Sydney on holiday and she's given him a public bath in The Ivy. Could this be love? Or is he making good on his statement that the best woman to chase is one who thinks she's too smart to be caught? Neither of them expected anything like this, but just as Stephen isn't the vapid celebrity his image suggests, Alice isn't a snooty intellectual either. Perhaps this mismatch might just work? But when Stephen starts manipulating Daniel's love life-for the good of the boy's career, of course-Alice issues an ultimatum. Unfortunately, Stephen spends every day controlling other people, and the habits of a lifetime are hard to break. Being at the top only means it's a very long way to fall.

Celebrity Culture and the American Dream

Celebrity Culture and the American Dream
Author: Karen Sternheimer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2014-12-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317689682
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Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, Second Edition considers how major economic and historical factors shaped the nature of celebrity culture as we know it today, retaining the first edition’s examples from the first celebrity fan magazines of 1911 to the present and expanding to include updated examples and additional discussion on the role of the internet and social media in today’s celebrity culture. Equally important, the book explains how and why the story of Hollywood celebrities matters, sociologically speaking, to an understanding of American society, to the changing nature of the American Dream, and to the relation between class and culture. This book is an ideal addition to courses on inequalities, celebrity culture, media, and cultural studies.

Celebrity and Entertainment Obsession

Celebrity and Entertainment Obsession
Author: Michael S. Levy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2015-08-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1442243139
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Celebrity culture surrounds us. We are inundated with information about actors and actresses, athletes, musicians, and others who have become famous or infamous. Although we never will likely meet or get to know them, our interest in them seems boundless. We are literally obsessed with being entertained as well as with the people who entertain us. Who our celebrities are has also shifted; in the past, celebrity status was bestowed on men and women of great accomplishment, those who had given the world something to be proud of and to celebrate. Conversely, today’s celebrities are generally people involved in entertainment—from TV newscasters to people who appear on reality television programs, as well as some who are simply famous for being famous. What remains an enigma is why we, as a society, are so infatuated with being entertained, as well as with those who entertain us and appear in the media. This book makes sense of this spectacle by explaining the reasons for this obsession from a psychological, social, and historical perspective. It suggests that we have become addicted in much the same way that a person becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol. Finally, the author offers his observations on how to free our minds from this captivation. Anyone interested in understanding more about our need to live vicariously through the rich and famous will find answers in this book.

Wonderland

Wonderland
Author: Stacey D'Erasmo
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2014
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0544074815
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This breakout novel from a brilliant stylist--dropping us into the life a female rock star--centers on that moment when we decide whether to go all-in or give up our dreams

Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen

Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen
Author: Jocelyn Harris
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2017-08-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611488435
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In Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen, Jocelyn Harris argues thatJane Austen was a satirist, a celebrity-watcher,and a keen political observer.In Mansfield Park, she appears to baseFanny Price on Fanny Burney, criticizethe royal heir as unfit to rule, and exposeSusan Burney’s cruel husband throughMr. Price. In Northanger Abbey, she satirizes the young Prince of Wales as the vulgar John Thorpe; in Persuasion, she attacks both the regent’s failure to retrench, and his dangerous desire to become another Sun King. For Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Austen may draw on the actress Dorothy Jordan, mistress of the pro-slavery Duke of Clarence, while her West Indian heiress in Sanditon may allude to Sara Baartman, who was exhibited in Paris and London as “The Hottentot Venus,” and adopted as a test case by the abolitionists. Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, this new book by Jocelyn Harris contributes significantly to the growing literature about Austen’s worldiness by presenting a highly particularized web of facts, people, texts, and issues vital to her historical moment.

Celebrity and the Environment

Celebrity and the Environment
Author: Dan Brockington
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1848136242
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The battle to save the world is being joined by a powerful new group of warriors. Celebrities are lending their name to conservation causes, and conservation itself is growing its own stars to fight and speak for nature. In this timely and essential book, Dan Brockington argues that this alliance grows from the mutually supportive publicity celebrity and conservation causes provide for each other, and more fundamentally, that the flourishing of celebrity and charismatic conservation is part of an ever-closer intertwining of conservation and corporate capitalism. Celebrity promotions, the investments of rich executives, and the wealthy social networks of charismatic conservationists are producing more commodified and commercial conservation strategies; conservation becomes an ever more important means of generating profit. Celebrity and the Environment provides vital critical analysis of this new phenomena and argues that, ironically, there may be a hidden cost to celebrity power to individual's relationships with the wild. The author argues that whilst wildlife television documentaries flourish, there is a significant decline in visits to national parks in many countries around the world and this is evidence that t a time when conservationists are calling for us to restore our relationships with the wild, many people are doing so simply by following the exploits of celebrity conservationists.

IMAGINES

IMAGINES
Author: Anna Todd
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 656
Release: 2016-04-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 150113082X
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Anna Todd (#1 internationally bestselling author of the After series) headlines this unique anthology of “imagines”—the first book of its kind—stories from Wattpad writers that immerse you in a fantasy world of fame, adventure, and flirtation with your favorite celebrities. Imagine running around the city, dodging paparazzi with Jennifer Lawrence… Imagine Justin Bieber setting up a romantic scavenger hunt for your anniversary, retelling the story of your love… Imagine selfies have been outlawed, making Kim Kardashian a freedom fighter who needs your help in bringing justice and good lighting to the people… Let your fantasies take over! That’s what the top Wattpad authors have done in this special collection of fictional scenarios that bring you up close and personal with the real celebrities you love—star alongside Zayn Malik, Cameron Dallas, Kanye West, Selena Gomez, Dylan O’Brien, Tom Hardy, Jamie Dornan, Benedict Cumberbatch, and many more! Authors included in the book are Leigh Ansell, Rachel Aukes, Doeneseya Bates, Scarlett Drake, A. Evansley, Kevin Fanning, Ariana Godoy, Debra Goelz, Bella Higgin, Blair Holden, Kora Huddles, Annelie Lange, E. Latimer, Bryony Leah, Jordan Lynde, Laiza Millan, Peyton Novak, C.M. Peters, Michelle Jo Quinn, Dmitri Ragano, Elizabeth A. Seibert, Rebecca Sky, Karim Soliman, Kate J. Squires, Steffanie Tan, Kassandra Tate, Anna Todd, Katarina E. Tonks, Marcella Uva, Tango Walker, Bel Watson, Jen Wilde, and Ashley Winters. Wattpad is a writing community in which users are able to post articles, stories, fanfiction, and poems about anything either online or through the Wattpad app. Note: Although this book mentions many real celebrities, they have not participated in, authorized, or endorsed its creation.

The Psychology of Celebrity

The Psychology of Celebrity
Author: Gayle Stever
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 122
Release: 2018-10-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1351252089
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Why are we fascinated by celebrities we’ve never met? What is the difference between fame and celebrity? How has social media enabled a new wave of celebrities? The Psychology of Celebrity explores the origins of celebrity culture, the relationships celebrities have with their fans, how fame can affect celebrities, and what shapes our thinking about celebrities we admire. The book also addresses the way in which the media has been and continues to be an outlet for celebrities, culminating in the role of social media, reality television, and technology in our modern society. Drawing on research featuring real life celebrities from the Kardashians to Michael Jackson, The Psychology of Celebrity shows us that celebrity influence can have both positive and negative outcomes and the impact these can have on our lives.