David Fincher's Zodiac (2007), written by producer James Vanderbilt and adapted from the true crime works of James Graysmith, remains one of the most respected films of the early 21st century. As the second film featuring a serial killer (and the first based on fact) by Fincher, Zodiac remains a standout in a varied but stylistically unified career. It similarly stands out among a new wave of crime cinema in the early 2000s, including the modern classics Inside Man, Michael Clayton, and Academy Award winner No Country for Old Men. While commonly described as a serial killer film, Zodiac also hybridizes the policier genre and the investigative reporter film. And yet, scholarship has largely ignored the film. This collection, edited by Matthew Sorrento and David Ryan, is the first book-length study dedicated to the film. Section One focuses on early influences, such as serial and spree killer films of the 1960s and 70s and how their treatments helped to shape Fincher's film. The second section analyses the film's unique treatment of narrative with studies of rhetoric onscreen, intertextuality, and gender. The book closes with a section on media studies, including chapters focusing on game theory, data and hegemony, the Zodiac's treatment in music, and the use of sound in cinema. By offering new avenues in Zodiac studies and continuing a few established ones, this book will interest scholars of cinema and true crime along with fans and enthusiasts in these areas.

"Color Monitors looks at a particular subset of imagined computer use, focusing on scenarios that demand from the person at the keyboard an intimate technical knowledge. My research has uncovered a peculiar pattern: race comes into sharp relief when computer use is depicted as difficult labor requiring special expertise. Time and again, in such scenarios, the helpful person of color is there to take the call to provide technical support, to deal with the machines. In interpreting such images, Color Monitors analyzes the computer-fearing strain in American whiteness, an aspect of white identity that defines itself against information technology and the racial other imagined to love it and excel at it." Martin KevorkianFollowing up on Ralph Ellison's intimation that blacks serve as "the machines inside the machine," Color Monitors examines the designation of black bodies as natural machines for the information age. Martin Kevorkian shows how African Americans are consistently depicted as highly skilled, intelligent, and technologically savvy as they work to solve complex computer problems in popular movies, corporate advertising, and contemporary fiction. But is this progress? Or do such seemingly positive depictions have more disturbing implications? Kevorkian provocatively asserts that whites' historical "fear of a black planet" has in the age of microprocessing converged with a new fear of computers and the possibility that digital imperatives will engulf human creativity.Analyzing escapist fantasies from Mission: Impossible to Minority Report, Kevorkian argues that the placement of a black man in front of a computer screen doubly reassures audiences: he is nonthreatening, safely occupied even imprisoned by the very machine he attempts to control, an occupation that simultaneously frees the action heroes from any electronic headaches. The study concludes with some alternatives to this scheme, looking to a network of recent authors, with shared affinities for Ellison and Pynchon, willing to think inside the black box of technology.Connecting race, technology, and American empire, Color Monitors will attract attention from scholars working in emerging areas of race theory, African American studies, film studies, cultural studies, and technology and communication studies."

"Color Monitors looks at a particular subset of imagined computer use, focusing on scenarios that demand from the person at the keyboard an intimate technical knowledge. My research has uncovered a peculiar pattern: race comes into sharp relief when computer use is depicted as difficult labor requiring special expertise. Time and again, in such scenarios, the helpful person of color is there to take the call to provide technical support, to deal with the machines. In interpreting such images, Color Monitors analyzes the computer-fearing strain in American whiteness, an aspect of white identity that defines itself against information technology and the racial other imagined to love it and excel at it." Martin KevorkianFollowing up on Ralph Ellison's intimation that blacks serve as "the machines inside the machine," Color Monitors examines the designation of black bodies as natural machines for the information age. Martin Kevorkian shows how African Americans are consistently depicted as highly skilled, intelligent, and technologically savvy as they work to solve complex computer problems in popular movies, corporate advertising, and contemporary fiction. But is this progress? Or do such seemingly positive depictions have more disturbing implications? Kevorkian provocatively asserts that whites' historical "fear of a black planet" has in the age of microprocessing converged with a new fear of computers and the possibility that digital imperatives will engulf human creativity.Analyzing escapist fantasies from Mission: Impossible to Minority Report, Kevorkian argues that the placement of a black man in front of a computer screen doubly reassures audiences: he is nonthreatening, safely occupied even imprisoned by the very machine he attempts to control, an occupation that simultaneously frees the action heroes from any electronic headaches. The study concludes with some alternatives to this scheme, looking to a network of recent authors, with shared affinities for Ellison and Pynchon, willing to think inside the black box of technology.Connecting race, technology, and American empire, Color Monitors will attract attention from scholars working in emerging areas of race theory, African American studies, film studies, cultural studies, and technology and communication studies."

Thomas Pynchon's longest novel to date, Against the Day (2006), excited diverse and energetic opinions when it appeared on bookstore shelves nine years after the critically acclaimed Mason & Dixon. Its wide-ranging plot covers nearly three decades from the 1893 World's Fair to the years just after World War I and follows hundreds of characters within its 1085 pages. The book s eleven essays by established luminaries and emerging voices in the field of Pynchon criticism, address a significant aspect of the novel's manifold interests. By focusing on three major thematic trajectories (the novel's narrative strategies; its commentary on science, belief, and faith; and its views on politics and economics), the contributors contend that Against the Day is not only a major addition to Pynchon's already impressive body of work, but also a defining moment in the emergence of twenty-first century American literature."