“Engaging and hilarious, Uprooting Ernie is the perfect summer read with its Long Island setting, light (but not trite) prose and very human humor.” — Tamsen Schultz, best-selling author of the Windsor Series mysteries “Uprooting Ernie is an intriguing murder mystery, full of twists and turns, interesting characters, and hilarious escapades you don’t want to miss.” — Angel Sefer, best-selling author of The Greek Isles Series “Oh what a fun read!... There are some seriously superb ideas in this book! The names especially—I mean, how not to love Sexy Beast, the most adorable, lovable purse-sized doggie in the world, who just happens to be a millionaire, owning a mansion for his house. And his human, the Death Diva (aka Jane Delaney)? Come on, admit you’re smiling at this point... Yeah, lots of good chuckles, a bit of nail-biting suspense, a love triangle of sorts, or at least a good dilemma in the subject—all my faves!!!... Really entertaining book!!! Two thumbs up!” — BookBug's World “This is a fun, quick read on a summer day... I enjoyed the humor—Jane is a funny, funny lady.” — It's Not All Gravy ◊ Death Diva Jane is simply going about her business, which in this case requires her to empty a three-liter spigot box of cheap rosé on a grave, when she and her furry sidekick, Sexy Beast, make a grisly discovery in the town cemetery. The victim was murdered three decades ago, but memories are fresh and old grievances fresher as facts come to light and fingers start pointing. Naturally Jane must investigate. Well, what would you do if one of your best pals turned out to be Suspect Numero Uno? Meanwhile, between her amorous ex and a sexy bad boy who keeps popping up in the most distracting way—not to mention the (creepy? bizarre? pathetic?) guys she’s meeting through a dog lovers’ dating site—her love life has never been so (creepy? bizarre? pathetic?)… interesting.

Joan Rivers returns: It ain't a culinary book, although characters eat a lot of fantastic dishes and dish about celebrities.This is not biography of any kind either. It's full of real data from Joan's life to keep it more close to our hearts and down to earth. Joan was once a comedienne. Due to unfortunate tour of events she crosses over to a new world that seems to be so like ours, but it's not the same. Before afterlife of star treatment she has few more assignments on the menu. With her new pals Mandy, Ksav, Monique and Mary she must go to new frontiers, to declutter and clean talentless celebrities from public life. You will "Meet the Farthashians", "Cleaning Ladies of Hollywood-end", "Divas without the voices", "Housewives from the Sexy mansion" and "Spoiled and dumb - kids of Beverly Halls" plus many more in the book, that glorifies true talent and puts satire treatment on so called stars of the Hollywood. Did I mention Joan's dog is back? Max will give you extra thrills

Brian Norman uncovers a curious phenomenon in American literature: dead women who nonetheless talk. These characters appear in works by such classic American writers as Poe, Dickinson, and Faulkner as well as in more recent works by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, and others. These figures are also emerging in contemporary culture, from the film and best-selling novel The Lovely Bones to the hit television drama Desperate Housewives. Dead Women Talking demonstrates that the dead, especially women, have been speaking out in American literature since well before it was fashionable. Norman argues that they voice concerns that a community may wish to consign to the past, raising questions about gender, violence, sexuality, class, racial injustice, and national identity. When these women insert themselves into the story, they do not enter precisely as ghosts but rather as something potentially more disrupting: posthumous citizens. The community must ask itself whether it can or should recognize such a character as one of its own. The prospect of posthumous citizenship bears important implications for debates over the legal rights of the dead, social histories of burial customs and famous cadavers, and the political theory of citizenship and social death. -- Leonard Cassuto, author of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories

A brand-new quirky mystery with recipes in the longrunning Pennsylvania-Dutch series. When a bestselling novelist falls face-down dead into Magdalena Yoder’s prize-winning apple pie during the village of Hernia’s 110th Annual Festival of Pies, there is no shortage of suspects in the subsequent murder investigation. A former guest at Magdalena’s PennDutch Inn, the author had made many enemies on publication of her subsequent tell-all book, exposing the faults and foibles of members of the local Amish/Mennonite community, and mocking their way of life. But who was enraged enough to want to poison the acid-tongued writer? Hopelessly out of his depth, Hernia’s inexperienced young Chief of Police requests Magdalena’s help in uncovering the answer. As she sets about questioning her friends and neighbours, Magdalena discovers that more than one villager has a secret to hide.

Social death occurs when the social existence of a person or group ceases. With an individual, it can occur before or after physical death. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines have applied the concept to very diverse issues – including genocide, slavery, dementia, hospitalisation, and bereavement. Social death relates to social exclusion, social capital, social networks, social roles and social identity, but its theorising is not united – scholars in one field are often unaware of its use in other fields. This is the first book to bring a range of perspectives together in a pioneering effort to bring to the field conceptual clarity rooted in empirical data. Preceded by an original theoretical discussion of the concept of social death, contributions from the UK, Romania, Sweden, and Israel analyse the fourth age, end of life policies, dying alone at home, suicide, photographs on gravestones, bereavement, and the agency of dead musicians. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.

The term "queer cinema" is often used to name at least three cultural events: 1) an emergent visual culture that boldly identifies as queer; 2) a body of narrative, documentary, and experimental work previously collated under the rubric of homosexual or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) cinema; 3) a means of critically reading and evaluating films and other visual media through the lens of sexuality. By this expansive account, queer cinema encompasses more than a century of filmmaking, film criticism, and film reception, and the past twenty-five years have seen the idea of "queer cinema" expand further as a descriptor for a global arts practice. As the first of its kind, The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema treats these three currents as art and critical practice, bringing the canon of queer cinema together with a new generation of makers and scholars. The Handbook's contributors include scholars who research the worldwide canon of queer cinema, those who are uniquely positioned to address three decades of its particular importance, and those best positioned to ponder the forms it is taking or may take in our new century, namely digital media that moves in new circuits. In eight sections, they explore the many forms that queer cinema takes across time, discussing narrative, experimental, documentary, and genre filmmaking, including pornography. Likewise, although the study of cinema and media is not restricted to a single method, chapters showcase the unique combination of textual analysis, industrial and production history, interpretation, ethnography, and archival research that this field enables. For example, chapters analyze the ways in which queer cinema both is and is not self-evidently an object for study by examining films that reinforce negative understandings of queerness alongside those that liberate the subject; and by naming the films that are newly queered, while noting that many queerly-made texts await discovery. Finally, chapters necessarily assert that queer cinema is not an Anglophone phenomenon, nor is it restricted to the medium of film.

By bringing together chapters that are concerned both with the relationship between performance, music and film and the specificity of national, historical, social, and cultural contexts, this title is a study of the breadth and diversity of music's role in cinema including musical contributions to 'non-musical' films.