Brad Epps, Despina Kakoudaki (eds.): All About Almodóvar

A Passion for Cinema. USA 2009, 496 S., brochure, € 22.59
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One of the world cinema's most exciting filmmakers, Pedro Almodóvar has been delighting, provoking, arousing, shocking, and - above all - entertaining audiences around the globe since he burst on the film scene in the early 1980s. This book offers new perspectives on the filmmaker's artistic vision and cinematic preoccupations, influences, and techniques. Through overviews of his oeuvre and in-depth analyses of specific films, the essays here explore: Almodóvar's nuanced use of TV and music in his films, his reworkings of traditional film genres such as comedy, horror, and film noir, his penchant for melodrama and its relationship to melancholy, violence, and coincidence, his intricate questioning of sexual and national identities, and his inquiries into visuality and its limits.

Michael Maar: Proust Pharao

D 2009, 80 S., geb., € 19.53
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Marcel Proust war der Größte. Für den Biografen Michael Maar jedenfalls. Nicht einmal Thomas Mann oder Nabokov konnten den Spürsinn dieses Tüftlers derart wecken wie Proust. Dabei kommt Prousts Literatur (v.a. »Die Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit«) in einem liebenswürdigen wie boshaften Ton daher. Wie kaum ein anderer hat er seine Freunde, seine Liebhaber, seine Welt, seine eigene Biographie in Literatur verwandelt. Viele seiner Geheimnisse bevölkern nun die hintersten Winkel, die verborgenen Nebenräume, die Kellerverliese jenes prächtigen, monumentalen Gebäudes, das die »Recherche du temps perdu« für immer darstellt. Michael Maar führt nun durch diesen Literaturpalast und setzt den Leser demselben Zauber des großen Franzosen aus, dem er selbst schon lang erlegen ist.

Frank Kermode: Concerning E.M. Forster

USA 2009, 180 pp., hardback, € 21.79
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The author offers an informal but wide-ranging inquiry into puzzling features of Forster's life and work. After all, Forster's first novels, written before he was 30, showed tremendous energy and promise, but his productivity seemed to fizzle out after the triumph of »A Passage to India« in 1924. Why? Kermode reflects not only on Forster's considerable talent but on the sexual und social circumstances that Forster found restrictive but didn't challenge. On the many changes in English society before, during, and after WW I and WW II, which Forster wrote about as a critic but not as a storyteller. And on Forster's relations with his great contemporaries - Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and others. There Kermode shows that Forster was closest to the people who shared not his literary interests or artistic vocation but, rather, his homosexuality.

Aiden Shaw: Sordid Truths

Selling My Innocence for a Taste of Stardom. USA 2009, 235 pp., brochure, € 14.39
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This autobiography chronicles the author's ascent from being just another broke and very horny college boy, who dabbled with the idea that he could sell his young body for hard cash, to becoming the internationally renowned adult film idol. After finishing just one year of his BA degree he was 21 and easily lured away from study by the lusty mix of sex and money in London. Within a short time on the scene, he'd gained infamy and was something of a celebrity within his field. Peddling his flesh took him to the steamy underbelly of the UK's decadent capital city in the late 80s. Here he rubbed shoulders and other body parts with wealthy, weird, and wonderful eccentrics, celebrities. However, working as a prostitute turned minor league once gay porn sensation Chi Chi LaRue took Polaroids of Shaw naked and aroused and launched his career that's been documented by the adult industry's leading studios in more than 50 films.

Edmund White: City Boy

My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s. USA 2009, 298 pp., brochure, € 18.95
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When Edmund White left the Midwest after college he had an opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. at Harvard. Instead, he followed a lover to New York City. There he arrives broke and unknown, struggling to express himself as a gay man even as he holds out hope of being »cured«. Present at the Stonewall uprising in 1969, White witnesses the start of the gay movement and gradually begins to embrace his identity. After his first meeting with James Merrill, to whom he nervously reads aloud from his unpublished novel, White encounters icons from William Burroughs to Susan Sontag. Absorbing and filtering these heady influences, White finds his own artistic voice just as the city's high culture explodes in creativity. Within a decade, White will be the most celebrated gay writer in the world.

Barry Day (ed.): The Letters of Noel Coward

USA 2009, 781 pp., brochure, € 18.29
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Lavishly illustrated and annotated, this collection of letters to and from Coward provides a divine portrait of an age, from the Blitz to the Ritz and beyond. Noel Coward loved to correspond with friends, enemies, the famous and infamous, the talented and the powerful, including Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Greta Garbo, Tallulah Bankhead, Cary Grant, Laurence Olivier, Katherine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Lawrence of Arabia, Somerset Maugham, and many more. Granted unlimited access to the Coward archive, the editor presents many never-before-published letters and has unearthed new, startling evidence of Coward's wartime work as a spy. Along with 191 rare photographs, these letter glitter with the multi-gifted playwright's claws-out bitchiness, tremendous charm, and creative genius.

John Evans (ed.): Journeying Boy

The Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten 1928-1938. UK 2009, 576 pp., hardbound, € 29.95
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Britten documented his childhood and adolescence in a daily journal he kept for a decade. From his arrival as a boarder at Gresham's School and his private lessons in London with Frank Bridge, to his student days at the Royal College of Music and apprenticeship in London, we trace the progress of a journeying boy. The 1930s brought successful collaborations with the likes of Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice and Grierson, and international acclaim at home and abroad, juxtaposed with personal tragedy (the loss of both of his parents within three years) and an increasing sense of being an outsider: a young man struggling with his homosexuality and a pacifist at a time of imminent war. This portrait of a young boy's journey to adulthood, and his creative mind offers an understanding of the man and artist Britten was to become.

Judy Shepard: The Meaning of Matthew

My Son's Murder in Laramie and a World Transformed. USA 2009, 273pp., hardbound, € 23.49
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The mother of Matthew Shepard - a 21-year-old victim of a brutal hate crime - shares personal stories about her son's life, the aftermath of his death, and the choice she made to honor his legacy by becoming an international gay rights activist. Today the name Matthew Shepard is synonymous with gay rights, but for most of his life he was simply Judy Shepard's eldest son. In October 1998, one pivotal event in the small college town where her son lived would change the world forever. For the first time, Judy Shepard shares memories of Matthew, their life as a typical American family, and the impact of his death. This book follows the Shepard family in the days immediately after the crime, when Judy and her husband traveled to see their incapacitated son, kept alive by life support machines, shows how the Shepards learned of the incredible response from strangers all across the world, who held candlelit vigils and memorial services for their child, and, reveals how Judy and her husband struggled to navigate the legal system, helping prosecutors to convict Matthew's murderers.