Flickering Light

Flickering Light
Author: Christoph Ribbat
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2013-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 178023127X

Without neon, Las Vegas might still be a sleepy desert town in Nevada and Times Square merely another busy intersection in New York City. Transformed by the installation of these brightly colored signs, these destinations are now world-famous, representing the vibrant heart of popular culture. But for some, neon lighting represents the worst of commercialism. Energized by the conflicting love and hatred people have for neon, Flickering Light explores its technological and intellectual history, from the discovery of the noble gas in late nineteenth-century London to its fading popularity today. Christoph Ribbat follows writers, artists, and musicians—from cultural critic Theodor Adorno, British rock band the Verve, and artist Tracey Emin to Vladimir Nabokov, Langston Hughes, and American country singers—through the neon cities in Europe, America, and Asia, demonstrating how they turned these blinking lights and letters into metaphors of the modern era. He examines how gifted craftsmen carefully sculpted neon advertisements, introducing elegance to modern metropolises during neon’s heyday between the wars followed by its subsequent popularity in Las Vegas during the 1950s and '60s. Ribbat ends with a melancholy discussion of neon’s decline, describing how these glowing signs and installations came to be seen as dated and characteristic of run-down neighborhoods. From elaborate neon lighting displays to neglected diner signs with unlit letters, Flickering Light tells the engrossing story of how a glowing tube of gas took over the world—and faded almost as quickly as it arrived.

Neon Gods

Neon Gods
Author: Katee Robert
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2021-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781728231730

Society darling Persephone Dimitriou wants nothing to do with her mother's ambitions. She's biding her time until she's able to leave the ultra-modern city of Olympus and start her doctorate degree. The one thing she never planned on? Her mother ambushing her with an engagement to Zeus--a man with more than a few dead wives in his past. Persephone will do anything to escape that fate...even flee the sparkling upper city and make a devil's bargain with a man she once believed was a myth. Hades has spent his life in the shadows, and he has no intention of stepping into the light. Not even for the woman who flees into his territory as if the very hounds of hell are on her heels. But when he finds that Persephone can offer a little slice of the revenge he's spent his entire life craving? It's all the excuse he needs to agree to help her--for a price. She'll be his for the summer, and then he'll see her safely out of Olympus and away from her mother and Zeus. Hades and Persephone's deal might seem simple enough, but they both quickly realize it's anything but. With every breathless night spent with Hades, Persephone wonders at her ability to leave him behind. And Hades? Now that he has a taste for Persephone, he's willing to go to war with Olympus itself to keep her...

The Neon Bible

The Neon Bible
Author: John Kennedy Toole
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802197329

“A moving evocation of the small-town South in the mid-twentieth century” that “belongs on the shelf with the works of Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty” (Orlando Sentinel). John Kennedy Toole—who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces—wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole’s heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole’s suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication. “Heartfelt emotion, communicated in clean direct prose . . . a remarkable achievement.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “John Kennedy Toole’s tender, nostalgic side is as brilliantly effective as his corrosive satire. If you liked To Kill A Mockingbird you will love The Neon Bible.” —Florence King “Shockingly mature. . . . Even at sixteen, Toole knew that the way to write about complex emotions is to express them simply.” —Kerry Luft, Chicago Tribune

Neon Green

Neon Green
Author: Margaret Wappler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781939419712

It's the summer of 1994 in suburban Chicago, and you can enter a sweepstakes for a spaceship from Jupiter to land in your backyard. According to the company facilitating the visits, the spaceship is 100 percent non-toxic. Ernest Allen's family won, but as his panic increases, so do his questions: What are the effects of longterm exposure to the saucer, and why is it really here? His wife Cynthia and their children, Alison and Gabe, are less concerned with the saucer, and more worried about his growing paranoia.

Neon Revenge

Neon Revenge
Author: Graeme J. Greenan
Publisher: Independently Published
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-08-23
Genre:
ISBN: 9781688076853

A CITY WITH A DARK SECRET... In the not so distant future, there came a point in time when mankind had waged war with itself to the point of certain extinction. The scant number that survived the self-genocide were left with an ultimatum: Devise a new way in which to live in peace or face destruction. Among their wisest leaders, stepped forward a man who claimed to hold the key to their salvation. He was known as Prime Vonn. He shared his vision of the future. A place where the human race could live in peace and prosperity, away from the molestations of war. For this gift of emancipation, he asked for only one thing in return: the people's unquestioning loyalty and obedience... Enter - Sanctum-One. A place where all could thrive under the wise leadership of Prime Vonn. Shielded and protected from the natural sins of man, it slowly became a shining example of how civilisation should have conducted itself from the very beginning. At last, the sons and daughters of a bygone era could flourish into a golden age where anything was possible... ...But it was all a lie. A smokescreen where mankind's saviour was, in fact, her cruel dictator; seizing control of her free will with the aid of his 'Inner-Sanctum'. A secret organisation extricating anyone who sees through the veil of distortion Vonn has blinded his citizens with. Enter - Lex. Betrayed by the lie she'd sworn to protect; she's left with nothing but the will and determination to find those responsible for the death of the one person she cherished most in the world. One of the few who knows Sanctum-One for what it really is and fuelled by an all-consuming rage, she wreaks a one-woman rampage across Sanctum-One, one high-ranking official at a time. To Vonn's 'Inner-Sanctum', she is known as 'The Woman'. And she will have her vengeance. She will have her retribution. She will have her revenge.

Neon Books: My First Book of the Alphabet

Neon Books: My First Book of the Alphabet
Author: Editors of Silver Dolphin Books
Publisher: Silver Dolphin Books
Total Pages: 10
Release: 2021-03-23
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781645175896

The ABCs—brighter and bolder than ever before! Learn the ABCs with a bright new twist! From alligator to zebra, little learners will be captivated by the bold neon illustrations and die-cut letters throughout this unique board book. This fun, modern take on the traditional ABC book will become a daily favorite as toddlers learn the alphabet and their first words.

Neon Empire

Neon Empire
Author: Drew Minh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-11-12
Genre:
ISBN: 9781955085236

"Minh creates a nonstop social media frenzy amid a rich cyberpunk landscape in this vivid debut." -Publishers Weekly Imagine a near future where social-media influencers are given their own city, a massive riff on Las Vegas set in the plains of central America called Eutopia. There, the world's top influencers compete in a dog-eat-dog ecosystem of likes, trends, comments, and advertising that's half guerilla marketing, half guerilla warfare. Against this backdrop, a has-been Hollywood director and an investigative journalist race to uncover the relationship between a rising tide of violence and corporate corruption.

Beyond the Neon Lights

Beyond the Neon Lights
Author: Hanchao Lu
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2023-07-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 052093167X

How did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? How did the citizens of Shanghai cope with the epic upheavals—revolution, war, and again revolution—that shook their lives? Even after decades of scholarship devoted to modern Chinese history, our understanding of the daily lives of the common people of China remains sketchy and incomplete. In this carefully researched study, Hanchao Lu weaves rich documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in China's largest and most complex city in the first half of this century.

Cinema at the City's Edge

Cinema at the City's Edge
Author: Yomi Braester
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2010-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 962209984X

East Asia is a pivotal region in the advancement of media technologies, globalized consumerism and branding economies. City and urban spaces are now attracting cinematic imaginaries and the academic examination of visual images and urban space in East Asian contexts. Highlighting changing conceptions and blurring boundaries of "where city ends and cinema begins," this collection offers an original contribution to film/media and cultural studies, urban studies, and sociology.-Koichi Iwabucchi, Waseda University The originality of this book on the fragmented cities of Asia lies in the manner in which it pins down the relationship between visual images and urban space. The arguments are eloquent and persuasive, with close readings of critical media texts. Many of the dynamic issues tackled in the book are "on the edge" of film and cultural studies in Asia and should attract a wide readership.-Zhou Xuelin, University of Auckland

Kerouac

Kerouac
Author: Ann Charters
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2015-03-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1466892811

Now that Kerouac's major novel, On the Road is accepted as an American classic, academic critics are slowly beginning to catch up with his experimental literary methods and examine the dozen books comprising what he called 'the legend of Duluoz.' Nearly all of his books have been in print internationally since his death in 1969, and his writing has been discovered and enjoyed by new readers throughout the world. Kerouac's view of the promise of America, the seductive and lovely vision of the beckoning open spaces of our continent, has never been expressed better by subsequent writers, perhaps because Kerouac was our last writer to believe in America's promise--and essential innocence--as the legacy he would explore in his autobiographical fiction.