Anna Faktorovich

This summer issue features three interviews with established researchers and writers. Dr. John Milton Hoberman (University of Texas at Austin) discusses a variety of topics connected with his books, including his most recent book, Dopers in Uniform, on steroids in policing. Allen M. Hornblum (covered widely on CBS, CNN, and BBC) replies to questions on medical ethics and smear campaigns in sports, topics related to his latest release, American Colossus: Big Bill Tilden and the Creation of Modern Tennis. And professor Michele McArdle Stephens (West Virginia University) touches on the use of the hallucinogenic drug, peyote, in the Huichol culture, the subject of her first major book-length publication, In the Lands of Fire and Sun: Resistance and Accommodation in the Huichol Sierra, 1723-1930. Then an essay of film criticism by Heather Duerre Humann (Florida Gulf Coast University) discusses gender in science fiction in the film Sucker Punch. Samantha Lauer contributes her regular feature with reviews of recently released films that she particularly enjoyed including Coco, Mother and Annihilation. In keeping with CCR's mission to promote all visual and audio arts, the last section is a photography project on the themes of timelessness and comfort from a widely published photographer and author, Fabrice Poussin (Shorter University).

The content of this issue includes an extended set of detailed reviews from the editor, Anna Faktorovich, of recently released and forthcoming scholarly and general interest non-fiction books. These titles cover the history of the Americas, recent political issues and politicians, biographies of famous or applauded individuals, space exploration studies or personal narratives, and various other works (some outstanding and some nonsensical). Then follows a scholarly essay by R. Joseph Rodr guez, a professor at the California State University, Fresno, on reading and teaching poetics about the Borderlands. This season brought in an unusually heavy volume of innovative, modern and emotional poetry from Jonathan Bracker, Michael Ceraolo, Louis Gallo (a regular contributor, who offered eleven poems and all of them were too good to refuse), Susie Gharib, Rob Luke, Tom McFadden, Andrew Alexander Mobbs, Timothy Robbins, Robert Ronnow, and Kobina Wright. In the last section, you will find a set of short fictional stories on topics ranging from the sea to Eastern European fairytales from John W. Dennehy, Alan Fleishman, Kevin Harris and Kathleen Murphey.

This issue of CCR includes an interview with Jerry London, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, who has worked with some of the top stars in Hollywood. He talks about the directing craft, art, and about the perils of the film industry. Samantha Lauer once again reviewed a set of interesting films, with screenshots to illustrate the descriptions. Finally, an essay from Judity Williams analyzes the rhetoric in the Game of Thrones.

This issue contains an interview with the Director, Francisca Alegria, and Producer, Birgit Gernboeck, of a Sundance-Winning short film, "And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow's Eye." They answer questions about filming outstanding, artistic films in Chile and in other countries. They also touch on comedy versus tragedy, realism and spiritualism, and how to build up a career by making connections during an MFA at Columbia, or by building up a reel of outstanding work. The film reviews section once again includes reflections from Samantha Lauer and Antonio Sanna. Sheri Chinen Biesen examines Andrew Davies' media adaptations of Jane Austen from BBC's "Pride and Prejudice" (1995) to "Sense and Sensibility" (2008). Finally, Anthony Ballas offers criticism of "Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space" by Brian Jacobson.

"Gender Bias in Mystery and Romance Novel Publishing" examines gender bias from the perspective of readers, writers and publishers, with a focus on the top two best-selling genres in modern fiction. It is a linguistic, literary stylistic, and structurally formalist analysis of the male and female "sentences" in the genres that have the greatest gender divide: romances and mysteries. The analysis will search for the historical roots that solidified what many think of today as a "natural" division. Virginia Woolf called it the fabricated "feminine sentence," and other linguists have also identified clear sex-preferential differences in Anglo-American, Swedish and French novels. Do female mystery writers adopt a masculine voice when they write mysteries? Are female-penned mysteries structurally or linguistically different from their male competitors', and vice versa among male romance writers? The first part can be used as a textbook for gender stylistics, as it provides an in-depth review of prior research. The second part is an analysis of the results of a survey on readers' perception of gender in passages from literature. The last part is a linguistic and structural analysis of actual statistical differences between the novels in the two genres, considering the impact of the author's gender. "A must-read for a mystery author like me, but also for every man and woman interested in the way we interact because art mimics reality... Or is it just the opposite...: ): ) " -Bob Van Laerhoven, winner of the Hercule Poirot Prize "The data offered allows for concrete conclusions on questions gender linguists have been asking for several decades, such as the use of male active heroes and villains, but the diminishing of female characters to serve as passive victims or love interests in both popular romance and mystery genres." -David R. Slavitt, author of more than 100 critically acclaimed books

"Fabrications": is a spritely love story that in its odd way recapitulates Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. A young man and a young woman are in love but don't have the financial resources they know they will need not just to be comfortable but to avoid the resentment either one would feel about having made a great sacrifice for their lives together. In James's story, Merton Densher married a wealthy young woman at death's door so he can inherit the money he needs in order to marry Kate Croy. Here, it is Nadine, the starlet, who marries the elderly producer with heart troubles, so that she and Abner, the writer, can look forward to a life of comfort and ease. Slavitt notices what James didn't, or couldn't in 1902-that the situation is inherently comic. And he has written a novel that is sprightlier than its model but, because of its humor, closer to the texture of life.

Chanameed is a novel in verse, set in a fictional village on Long Island. The present volume also contains the London cycle "Down in the Tube Station (Not Necessarily at Midnight)", as well as other verses.

This book creates a taxonomy for the major bestselling fictional genres: romance (e.g., authors Heyer, Cartland, Woodiwiss and Roberts), religious and inspirational (Corelli and Douglas), mystery and detective (Conan Doyle, Christie and Mankell), and science fiction, horror and fantasy (Wells, Tolkien, Orwell, Niven, King and Rowling). Chapters look at a genre from its roots to its most recent works. The structural patterns in the plot, characters and setting of these genres are then explained. The book also provides a critique of currently popular hyper-formulaic, hack, unliterary writings that have multiplied in recent decades. Special topics such as the publishing oligopoly and the resulting homogeneity among bestselling works and the steady movement from literary to unliterary fiction are also examined.

When three of Britain's best-loved and best-selling authors each publish at least two novels with a historical rebellion theme, there might be an interesting pattern worth examining. This is a long overdue study of the previously overlooked rebellion novel genre, with a close look at the works of Sir Walter Scott (Waverly and Rob Roy), Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities and Barnaby Rudge), and Robert Louis Stevenson (Kidnapped and The Young Chevalier). The linguistic and structural formulas that these novels share are presented, along with a comparative study of how these authors individualized the genre to adjust it to their needs. Scott, Dickens and Stevenson were led to the rebellion genre by direct radical interests. They used the tools of political literary propaganda to assist the poor, disenfranchised and peripheral people, with whom they identified and hoped to see free from oppression and poverty.