Downtown Film and TV Culture 1975-2001 brings together essays by filmmakers, exhibitors, cultural critics and scholars from multiple generations of the New York Downtown scene to illuminate individual films and filmmakers and explore the creation of a Downtown Canon, the impact of AIDS on younger filmmakers, community access to cable television broadcasts, and the impact of the historic downtown scene on contemporary experimental culture. The book includes J. Hoberman's essay 'No Wavelength: The Parapunk Underground', as well as historical essays by Tony Conrad and Lynne Tillman, interviews with filmmakers Bette Gordon and Beth B, and essays by Ivan Kral and Nick Zedd.

William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century is the definitive book on Burroughs' overarching cut-up project and its relevance to the American twentieth century. Burroughs's Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded) remains the best-known of his textual cut-up creations, but he committed more than a decade of his life to searching out multimedia for use in works of collage. By cutting up, folding in, and splicing together newspapers, magazines, letters, book reviews, classical literature, audio recordings, photographs, and films, Burroughs created an eclectic and wide-ranging countercultural archive. This collection includes previously unpublished work by Burroughs such as cut-ups of work written by his son, cut-ups of critical responses to his own work, collages on the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, excerpts from his dream journals, and some of the few diary entries that Burroughs wrote about his wife, Joan. William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century also features original essays, interviews, and discussions by established Burroughs scholars, respected artists, and people who encountered Burroughs. The essays consider Burroughs from a range of starting points-literary studies, media studies, popular culture, gender studies, post-colonialism, history, and geography. Ultimately, the collection situates Burroughs as a central artist and thinker of his time and considers his insights on political and social problems that have become even more dire in ours.

Even before Jean-Luc Godard and other members of the French New Wave championed Hollywood B movies, aesthetes and cineasts relished the raw emotions of genre films. This contradiction has been particularly true of horror cinema, in which the same images and themes found in exploitation and splatter movies are also found in avant-garde and experimental films, blurring boundaries of taste and calling into question traditional distinctions between high and low culture.

In Cutting Edge, Joan Hawkins offers an original and provocative discussion of taste, trash aesthetics, and avant-garde culture of the 1960s and 1970s to reveal horror's subversiveness as a genre. In her treatment of what she terms "art-horror" films, Hawkins examines home viewing, video collection catalogs, and fanzines for insights into what draws audiences to transgressive films. Cutting Edged provides the first extended political critique of Yoko Ono's rarely seen Rape and shows how a film such as Franju's Eyes without a Face can work simultaneously as an art, political, and splatter film. The rediscovery of Tod Browning's Freaks as an art film, the "eurotrash" cinema of Jess Franco, camp cults like the one around Maria Montez, and the "cross-over" reception of Andy Warhol's Frankenstein are all studied for what they reveal about cultural hierarchies.

Looking at the low aspects of high culture and the high aspects of low culture, Hawkins scrutinizes the privilege habitually accorded "high" art -- a tendency, she argues, that lets highbrow culture off the hook and removes it from the kinds of ethical and critical social discussions that have plagued horror and porn. Full of unexpected insights, Cutting Edge calls fora rethinking of high/low distinctions -- and a reassigning of labels at the video store.

A moving and often harrowing account of one young woman's struggle against her childhood demons, "Bailey" explores the idea of self, and how the psyche can lose its way in a labyrinth of memory, fear and desire. Confined in an asylum, Bailey seeks to emerge from a hazy, tormented existence in which the only solid entity is Jim, her fellow inmate. The problem is that Jim is a creature as haunted as Bailey herself, and their respective pasts cloud a secret that makes their friendship more than a chance encounter. The struggle of Bailey to recover her belief in the goodness of the child she'd been and the growing certainty that Jim Peabody was the hero of her childhood provides the momentum of the story. With its themes of social snobbery, family dysfunction and ultimate redemption, Bailey is a passionate, daring novel that reveals the underbelly of a society that presents itself as the epitome of respectability.

A novel of greed, love and family. When Helen Reed, a wealthy widow, engages young masseur, David Sweeney, to alleviate the pain of her final days, her voracious brood move in with other plans. A novel of greed, love and family. When Helen Reed, a wealthy widow, engages young masseur, David Sweeney, to alleviate the pain of her final days of illness, her brood move in voraciously with other plans. Trespassis a fascinating portrait of a family, of a moribund, spirited woman living life to the full for as long as she has it. It's the tale of a young girl coming of age, of a musician's fear of failure, an artist's quest for success and about the financial collapse of a man whose city career has just fallen apart. Joan Hawkins' third novel is set in an idyllic New England haven, where a newly-constructed swimming pool in the leafy grounds of Helen's home becomes a symbol of her independence and of her family's deepest resentments. While masseur David Sweeney brings relief and calm to the widow's pain, the underbelly of Helen Reed's summer cottage cannot be brushed under the Persian carpet. Its quagmire of misguided dreams, desires and betrayals make truth and beauty as elusive as the ripples across the pool in her yard.