Jocelyn, Jodie, Jennifer, Jacqui, Joelle. Ignoring the optimistic advice of elders, these five working-class teens in the Rust Belt band together in their embrace of bad behavior and poor taste as they navigate sexuality and identity with loud-mouthed joy and clear-eyed cynicism. Winner of the 2021 Blue Light Books Prize, Rochelle Hurt's The J Girls: A Reality Show is a tribute to the grit and glitter of millennial girlhood and a testament to its dangers and traumas. Hurt's creative, genre-bending mix of poetry, fiction, and screenplay brings the girls to life with campy performances of monologues, soap opera clips, mock interviews, talk shows, commercials, and even burlesque. Vulgar, rhapsodic language serves as costume and shield, allowing the J Girls to script their own images and project glowing, outsized versions of themselves into the safe space of the TV screen. Playful and poignant, The J Girls is a flashy ode to performance and a nostalgic elegy for adolescent friendships.

There is no writer who excels at the art of adaptation for the screen so much as Harold Pinter. His consummate skill and unerring ear for dialogue, coupled with his sensitivity and understanding of the work of other authors, make the three volumes of his screenplays (of which this is the first) a collective masterclass in screenwriting. Included in this collection are the screenplays for The Servant, The Pumpkin Eater, The Quiller Memorandum, Accident, The Last Tycoon and Langrishe, Go Down.

When Reservoir Dogs burst upon the screen in 1992, it announced the arrival of one of the most charismatic and audacious voices in cinema today. Reservoir Dogs is the story of a heist gone wrong, and how the group of outlaws concerned are subsequently undone in the course of their search for the enemy within. Quentin Tarantino uses words like bullets and writes with a propulsive energy that is compellingly readable. As always with Tarantino, the style of the storytelling is restlessly inventive, showcasing not only his fine ear for frank and foul-mouthed dialogue but also his grasp of formal structure, comparable to that of the smartest crime novelists.

Widely considered the darkest and most intriguing of the central Star Wars trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back deepens the exploration of mythic themes first essayed in A New Hope. From its opening amid a besieged Rebel stronghold on the ice planet Hoth to its finale on Bespin, the floating city run by gambler Lando Calrissian, Empire charts Luke Skywalker's travails on the arduous path to becoming a Jedi Knight - a journey that culminates in a punishing face-off with Imperial warlord Darth Vader, and Luke's realisation of the dreadful truth about the fate which befell his father Anakin. Derived from George Lucas's original story, the screenplay was composed by Leigh Brackett (veteran writer for Howard Hawks and Robert Altman) and Lawrence Kasdan (who soon afterwards established himself as a director with Body Heat and The Big Chill). Together, they produced a psychologically complex piece of epic storytelling, treasurably enhanced by the verbal jousting - and the affecting romance - between Han Solo and Princess Leia.

In The Ways of the Word, Garrett Stewart steps aside from theory to focus on the sheer pleasure of attentive reading and the excitement of recognizing the play of syllables and words upon which the best literary writing is founded. Emerging out of teaching creative writing and a broader effort to convene writers and critics, Stewart's "episodes in verbal attention" track the means to meaning through the byways of literary wording. Through close engagement with literary passages and poetic instances whose imaginative demands are their own reward, Stewart gathers exhibits from dozens of authors: from Dickinson, Dickens, and DeLillo to Whitman, Woolf, and Colson Whitehead. In the process, idiom, tense, etymology, and other elements of expressive language and its phonetic wordplay are estranged and heard anew. The Ways of the Word fluidly and intuitively reveals a verbal alchemy that is as riveting as it is elusive and mysterious. -- Cornell University Press

Made in 1959, North by Northwest is one of Alfred Hitchcock's most beloved thrillers, an enticing cocktail of suspense, comedy, eroticism, and danger. Cary Grant is a suave but stiff-necked executive who finds himself mistaken for a United States intelligence agent and, as a result, is forced into a series of life-threatening encounters with the villainous James Mason. Grant's consolation is that he also becomes involved with the elegant female spy played by Eva Marie Saint. But the game of international intrigue is played for high stakes—and in high style: in the film's classic sequences, Grant is chased across cornfields by a crop-dusting plane and, later, forced to climb the slopes of Mount Rushmore's National Memorial to escape his pursuers.

The screenplay is the work of one of the most versatile and successful American screenwriters, Ernest Lehman, who begins this volume an Introduction that fully explores the process of collaborating with Hitchcock on the film. Also the author of the screenplays for such diverse films as Sweet Smell of Success and The Sound of Music, Lehman managed in this work to combine witty wordplay and thoughtful suspense in such a way that North by Northwest stands as the epitome of Hitchcock's elegant and entertaining thrillers.

In The Ways of the Word, Garrett Stewart steps aside from theory to focus on the sheer pleasure of attentive reading and the excitement of recognizing the play of syllables and words upon which the best literary writing is founded. Emerging out of teaching creative writing and a broader effort to convene writers and critics, Stewart's "episodes in verbal attention" track the means to meaning through the byways of literary wording. Through close engagement with literary passages and poetic instances whose imaginative demands are their own reward, Stewart gathers exhibits from dozens of authors: from Dickinson, Dickens, and DeLillo to Whitman, Woolf, and Colson Whitehead. In the process, idiom, tense, etymology, and other elements of expressive language and its phonetic wordplay are estranged and heard anew. The Ways of the Word fluidly and intuitively reveals a verbal alchemy that is as riveting as it is elusive and mysterious. -- Cornell University Press