In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw. The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada’s life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows. She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws...

"A remarkable, deeply moving memoir of one man's gender transition amid a pivotal political moment in America"-- Becoming a Man is the striking memoir of P. Carl's journey to become the man he always knew himself to be. For fifty years, he lived as a girl and a queer woman, building a career, a life, and a loving marriage, yet still waiting to realize himself in full. As Carl embarks on his gender transition, he takes us inside the complex shifts...

"Television shows have now eclipsed films as the premier form of visual narrative art of our time. This new book by one of our finest critics explains--historically, in depth, and with interviews with the celebrated creators themselves--how the art of must-see/binge-watch television evolved. Darwin had his theory of evolution, and David Bianculli has his. Bianculli's theory has to do with the concept of quality television: what it is and, crucially,...

Dave Kehr's writing about film has garnered high praise from both readers and fellow critics. Among his admirers are some of his most influential contemporaries. Roger Ebert called Kehr zone of the most gifted film critics in America.y James Naremore thought he was zone of the best writers on film the country as a whole has ever produced.y But aside from remarkably detailed but brief capsule reviews and top-ten lists, you won't find much of Kehr's...

"In the vein of You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) and Black Nerd Problems, this witty, incisive essay collection from New York Times critic at large Maya Phillips explores race, religion, sexuality, and more through the lens of her favorite pop culture fandoms. From the moment Maya Phillips saw the opening scroll of Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, her childhood changed forever. Her formative years were spent loving not just...

"A celebrated Irish writer's magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world. Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government--in despair, because all the young people were leaving--opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We...

"A new novel from Ron Hansen, the award-winning author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, about an iconic American criminal of the old West: legendary outlaw, Billy the Kid. Born Henry McCarty, Billy the Kid was a diminutive, charming, blond-haired young man who, growing up in New York, Kansas, and later New Mexico, demonstrated a precocious dexterity at firing six-shooters with either hand--a skill that both got him into...

"1938. The Golden Age of Hollywood. Palm trees and movie stars. Film studios pumping out musicals, westerns, and gangster films at a furious pace. Everyone wants to be a star--except society girl and aspiring astronomer Kate Hildebrand, who'd rather study them in the night sky. She's already famous after a childhood tragedy turned her into a newspaper headline. What she craves is stability. But when Kate has to move to Hollywood to live with her washed-up...

"Growing up in Lahore, Pakistan, Shahzia flew kites, ate fruit from jamun trees, and devoured Russian fairy tales, American Westerns, and Bollywood films. She also read poetry in Urdu, her own language, and learned the slow and detailed painting technique of Indo-Persian miniatures. And when she moved far from home to study art, she brought her roots with her. Roots and Wings is a deeply personal story about how an artist grows. It is based on the...

"When novelist Sadie Goodwin is forced to stop writing westerns and charged with penning a contemporary romance novel to rescue her lackluster sales, there's only one tiny problem: She's never been in love. Desperate to salvage her career, Sadie accepts an invitation to hole up at her friend's beach duplex for the summer and devote herself to this confounding genre. After all, where better to witness love than on the beautiful South Carolina shore?...