Bryn Mawr Authors

This book explores a new character archetype that permeated Soviet film during what became known as the era of Stagnation, a stark period of loneliness, disappointment, and individual despair. This new type of character was neither negative nor positive, but nevertheless systematically undermined Soviet norms of behaviour, hairstyle, dress, lifestyle, and perspective, in stark contrast to Socialist Realism's traditional, positive hero who fought for Soviet values and who vanquished the enemies of socialism. The book discusses a wide range of films from the period, showing how the new antiheroic archetype of Stagnation resonated through a multitude of characters, mostly male, and vividly reflected the realities of Soviet life. The book thereby provides great insight into the lives, outlook, and psychology of citizens in the late Soviet period.

The 2020 presidential primaries are on the horizon and this third edition of Elaine Kamarck's Primary Politics will be there to help make sense of them. Updated to include the 2016 election, it will once again be the guide to understanding the modern nominating system that gave the American electorate a choice between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton.

In Primary Politics, political insider Elaine Kamarck explains how the presidential nomination process became the often baffling system we have today, including the "robot rule." Her focus is the largely untold story of how presidential candidates since the early 1970s have sought to alter the rules in their favor and how their failures and successes have led to even more change. She describes how candidates have sought to manipulate the sequencing of primaries to their advantage and how Iowa and New Hampshire came to dominate the system. She analyzes the rules that are used to translate votes into delegates, paying special attention to the Democrats' twenty-year fight over proportional representation and some of its arcana.

Drawing on meticulous research, interviews with key figures in both parties, and years of experience, this book explores one of the most important questions in American politics-how we narrow the list of presidential candidates every four years.

A bilingual edition of Leonid Schwab's poetry with an introduction by Maria Stepanova.

Leonid Schwab is an integral figure for the understanding of Russian contemporary poetry; he's also one of its least conforming members. While remaining singularly unique, Schwab has had a liberating effect on a number of Russophone poets during the past two decades. In his strange poems, elimination of the lyric subject and heightened narrativity unite with masterfully measured lines to create worlds that remain perpetually beguiling.

The verses trace the contours of something along the lines of happiness, they delineate its momentary trajectories, indicate the direction--until a new shift exposes the next, still uninhabited tract of invisible territory. This strange, dazzling, twilit universe--inhabited by bison, electricians, and short circuits--is something like a promise that you cannot not believe: Schwab knows what he's talking about.--Maria Stepanova

Borges tells of imperial cartographers attempting to construct a map of the empire that was the size of the empire. Discolored tatters of the abandoned project still exist in the desert; beggars and animals live in them. He might have been talking about the poetry of Leonid Schwab. Schwab's astonishing semilegible living pictures, poetic tatters of imperial dreams, studies in slowed-down, polyphonic time, remnants of an unwritable, strangely male epic are among the most hauntingly beautiful poems written in Russian today. I love them but I could never set them to music, a composer friend says, 'they are music'--Eugene Ostashevsky

Leonid Schwab is a poet who creates worlds that oscillate between past and present, stillness and passage, mystery and nightmare. His poems travel far and wide, taking the reader on unexpected visits to Chkalov, Hebron, Chicago, Poland, Manchuria, and even the Moon. Schwab's poetry transcends rigid cultural frames and national allegiances by engaging in dynamic experiments with border-crossing, diasporic aesthetics, and homelessness.--Alex Moshkin

Poetry.

"A travelogue of purgatory. Brutal, but minutely rendered--a chronicle of small betrayals and vicissitudes in a ruthless world. Losers, hustlers and delusional artists, all trapped in their pretense and hollow lives; making deals with the devil at the crossroads of Tinseltown." --Guillermo del Toro

Tim Blake Nelson's debut novel is an epic group portrait of four men grappling for control of a script in a radically changing Hollywood, or the City of Blows.

It's early 2020, and legendary producer Jacob Rosenthal is eager to make his next film, Coal, adapted from the bestselling novel by the celebrated writer Rex Patterson. The project--which takes on the controversial topic of race in America--is Jacob's envisioned magnum opus, and likely his swan song. He selects David Levit to direct, a major opportunity for the classically trained actor/director whose own films, while garnering critical acclaim, have not resulted in box office success.

But the announcement of David's hiring doesn't sit well with a producer from David's past, Brad Shlansky, who channels the last remaining vestiges of his creativity into a revenge plot that could very well scupper the making of Coal, and ruin the lives of its producer and director in the process.

A sprawling, character-driven depiction of the modern film industry, City of Blows reaches back decades to the formative experiences of each of the novel's central figures to explore what first motivated them to become involved in the quixotic and often venal world of movie-making. Driven by their diverse backgrounds, each must navigate the same huckstering circus that puts films on screen.

From the start, Tim Blake Nelson's sharp and unsparing voice holds a mirror up to America itself, using Hollywood to investigate the cultural and economic fault lines that have come to dominate and confound us all. You will find yourself unable to turn away from the ruthlessness and despair, the hubris and sheer evil, as City of Blows accelerates to its unimaginable yet inevitable crescendo.