A true story set in the mid-sixties reflecting the turbulent daily lives of two teenage suburban girlfriends as they begin commuting to London office jobs they hate. After their local dance hall burns down, the girls venture into the West End nightclubs in search of their favourite groups. Their lives become transformed as they make new friends and enter a world of music, boys and drugs. They spend Easter at Brighton among the thousands of Mods and Rockers, enduring a freezing night on the seafront. The girls inevitably clash with their parents as they yearn for more freedom so they eventually rent a flat in a house in London, only to discover that their landlord and landlady are as restrictive as their parents, complaining about the unsuitable hours they keep, and the noise from their music. The complaints culminate in a showdown one afternoon when the girls invite some boys back to the flat including one who is Jamaican. They are confronted by an irate, racist landlord demanding that they tell their black friend to leave the house at once. The girls refuse point blank, so they find themselves evicted instead with immediate effect. Now homeless, the girls comb the advertisements in the local newsagent’s window. Suddenly they are accosted by a suspicious-looking stranger who offers to rent them a bedsit in his house which provides an opportune solution to their problem.

The veteran producer and author of the bestseller Hello, He Lied takes a witty and critical look at the new Hollywood. Over the past decade, producer Lynda Obst gradually realized she was working in a Hollywood that was undergoing a drastic transformation. The industry where everything had once been familiar to her was suddenly disturbingly strange. Combining her own industry experience and interviews with the brightest minds in the business, Obst explains what has stalled the vast moviemaking machine. The calamitous DVD collapse helped usher in what she calls the New Abnormal (because Hollywood was never normal to begin with), where studios are now heavily dependent on foreign markets for profit, a situation which directly impacts the kind of entertainment we get to see. Can comedy survive if they don’t get our jokes in Seoul or allow them in China? Why are studios making fewer movies than ever—and why are they bigger, more expensive and nearly always sequels or recycled ideas? Obst writes with affection, regret, humor and hope, and her behind-the-scenes vantage point allows her to explore what has changed in Hollywood like no one else has. This candid, insightful account explains what has happened to the movie business and explores whether it’ll ever return to making the movies we love—the classics that make us laugh or cry, or that we just can’t stop talking about.

The Mysteries of Light is an original literary meditation on the significance and meaning of photobooks. Written by a photographer and novelist, the book brings a strong new light to the photobook phenomenon. It’s a mix of personal stories and examinations of such great artists as Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama, Saul Leiter, Alec Soth, Masahisa Fukase, and Christer Strömholm, as well as newcomers Daisuke Yokota, Laura El-Tantawy, and Jason Eskenazi. The Mysteries of Light is personal and passionate, fun, lively, informative, inspiring, and will help you understand photobooks—and get you jazzed about them—in a whole new way.

A captivating literary portrait of London explored at night by some of the city’s most iconic writers throughout history “Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today – home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun’s down. If nightwalking is a matter of “going astray” in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city. In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets. With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a fascinating literary exploration of the writers who traverse the city at night and the people they meet.

Acclaimed historian Berman and journalist Berger gather a stellar group of writers and photographers who combine their energies to weave a rich tale of New York Citys struggle, excitement, and wonder.

"The Congo Basin in Central Africa harbors approximately one quarter of the world's rainforests. Second in size only to that of the Amazon, the heart of this rainforest is populated by communities whose lives are vastly different from much of the rest of the world. This stunning photo series is part of the Tales of Us project, which sets out to demonstrate that the powerful but fragile ecosystems and the mythologies of the peoples who call them home are inextricably linked. In this book, local Congolese living in the Mbomo District staged and enacted the oral history of the Congo for fine art photographer Pieter Henket under the canopy of the ancient rainforest from which these stories sprang." --Page 4 of cover.