Borderless Thalia: A Multilingual, Pandemic Comic Collection was born out of a need to use comedy as a tool to cope with, at the time, the vast unknown of COVID-19 and to show how, through writing in English as well as in translation, we can be together, we can laugh, and we can show solidarity, thus moving forward. There is the famous Phoenix myth, the bird that manages to get reborn out form its own ashes, and afterwards stay indestructible. In a similar vein, yet in a much more refined gesture, the female playwrights selected for this volume proved that writing remains a therapeutical method, and a way to connect with one another and face any difficulty that may appear insurmountable in the moment. It is women of all kinds who carry the weight of the world, and not Atlas, and yet, these women teach us that we need to make time to see what is inside and around us. This collection includes the following playwrights: Christine Benvenuto, Barbara Blatner, Sarah Congress, Connie Dinkler, Selma Dragos, Tjasa Ferme, Catalina Florina Florescu, Avery Grace, Jinna Kim, Elena Naskova, Joyce Newman Scott, Nella Ohayon, Cindi Sansone-Braff, Ellis Stump, Laurie Tanner, and Otilia Vieru-Baraboi. Dr. Catalina Florina Florescu holds a PhD in Medical humanities from Purdue University, teaches at Pace University in New York, curates the new play festival at Jersey City Theater Center, and she is a mother of a beautiful teen.

THE REBELLED BODY PLAYS by Catalina Florina Florescu. Three Plays: MIA, SUICIDAL DOG AND LAIKA, and THREE AS IN A TRI-ANGLE, OR THE AFTERTASTES OF LIFE. Catalina Florina Florescu holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Purdue University with a double specialization in medical humanities and comparative theater. This collection is from NoPassport Press.

Monolingual, monolithic English is an issue of the past. In this collection, by using cinema, poetry, art, and novels we demonstrate that English has become the heteroglossic language of immigration - Englishes of exile. By appropriating its plural form we pay respect to all those who have been improving standard English, thus proving that one may be born in a language as well as give birth to a language or add to it one's own version. The story of the immigrant, refugee, exile, expatriate is everybody's story, and without migration, we could not evolve our human race.

Charting the intersection of aesthetic representation and the material conditions of urban space, The City Since 9/11 posits that the contemporary metropolis provides a significant context for reassessing theoretical concerns related to narrative, identity, home, and personal precarity. In the years since the September 11 attacks, writers and filmmakers have explored urban spaces as contested sites-shaped by the prevailing discourses of neoliberalism, homeland security, and the war on terror, but also haunted by an absence in the landscape that registers loss and prefigures future menace. In works of literature, film, and television, the city emerges as a paradoxical space of permanence and vulnerability and a convergence point for anxieties about globalization, structural inequality, and apocalyptic violence. Building on previous scholarship addressing trauma and the spectacle of terror, the contributors also draw upon works of philosophy, urban studies, and postmodern geography to theorize how literary and visual representations expose the persistent conflicts that arise as cities rebuild in the shadow of past ruins. Their essays advance new lines of argument that clarify art's role in contemporary debates about spatial practices, gentrification, cosmopolitanism, memory and history, nostalgia, the uncanny and the abject, postmodern virtuality, the politics of realism, and the economic and social life of cities. The book offers fresh readings of familiar post-9/11 novels, such as Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, but it also considers works by Teju Cole, Joseph O'Neill, Silver Krieger, Colum McCann, Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Pynchon, Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, William Gibson, Amitav Ghosh, and Katherine Boo. In addition, The City Since 9/11 includes essays on the films Children of Men, Hugo, and the adaptation of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, chapters on the television series The Bridge, The Killing, and The Wire, and an analysis of Michael Arad's Reflecting Absence and the 9/11 Memorial.

Small Cinemas in Global Markets addresses aspects such as identity, revisiting the past, internationalized genres, new forms of experimental cinema, markets and production, as well as technological developments of alternative small screens that open new perspectives into small cinema possibilities. Small and big markets for small industries reveal an unimagined diversification of the cultural product and consequently the need to analyze the impact at local, regional, and global levels. Much needed to continue and expand the existing scholarship in the field, this volume is based on research by authors who approach their subject from Western theoretical perspectives with a professional (mostly native) knowledge of the language, cultural realities, and film industry practices. It covers aspects from fifteen different countries, including Bolivia, Brazil, China (Hong Kong), Croatia, East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda), Greece, Indonesia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Morocco, and the United States. Since both film and documentary distribution from certain areas of the globe on international markets remains problematic, it is important for the academic field to discuss and circulate them as much as possible, and to create the basis for further exploration. Documenting and reflecting on the role, state, and reception of the film industry provides scholarly understanding to the industry's wide range of seemingly chaotic technological transformations.

Disjointed Perspectives on Motherhood presents the accounts of mothers who have suffered a major physical and/or psychically traumatic accident, and, as a consequence, their minds and bodies have been drastically changed. They live under the pressure of having discovered the alter ego of their traumatized personality, and now, distressed, cannot embrace their unconditional maternal love. Instead, they enter into a phase where they face the challenge of revealing who they are as persons before accepting or motivating themselves as mothers. The mothers presented in this volume also seem to have another thing in common: their transnational, fluid, female identity as they enter into an imaginary dialog that transcends geographical and temporal perspectives on womanhood and motherhood. This collection introduces and analyzes recurrent words that define a woman's body and mind today: fear, competition, motherhood and career rights, selfishness, ambition, destruction, distance, and identity. By using unprecedented comparative critical approaches such as phenomenological, medical, feminist, and re-enchantinent theories, and by analyzing works from literature, cinema, and visual arts, this collection attempts to reestablish and redefine a canonical concept with the intention to revitalize an otherwise taken-for-granted image and role.