The third volume in the Docalogue series, this book explores the significance of the documentary series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (2020), which became 'must-see-TV' for a newly captive audience during the global Covid-19 pandemic. The series – a true-crime, tabloid spectacle about a murder-for-hire plot within the big cat trade – prompts interesting questions about which documentaries become popular in particular moments and why. However, it also raises important questions related to the medium specificity of documentary in the streaming era, as well as the ethics of both human and animal representation. By combining five distinct perspectives on the Netflix documentary series, this book offers a complex and cumulative discourse about Tiger King’s significance in multiple areas including, but not limited to, animal studies, queer theory, genre studies, labor relations, and digital culture. Students and scholars of film, media, television, and cultural studies will find this book extremely valuable in understanding the significance of this larger-than-life true-crime documentary series.

Joe Exotic, star of the Netflix original documentary that “consumed the pop-cultural imagination” (The Atlantic) and transfixed a nation in the midst of a global crisis, opens up about his outlandish journey from Midwestern farmer to infamous Tiger King, and finally, to federal inmate. Shortly after his arrest (for charges including hiring a hitman to murder his rival, Carole Baskin), Joe Exotic began keeping a daily journal of his life behind prison walls. In support of his defense, Joe began writing everything he wished he could tell a jury of his peers. Little did Joe know that mere months later, the self-proclaimed “gun-toting, gay redneck with a mullet” would become one of the most famous men in the world. Written entirely while incarcerated, this no-holds-barred memoir is Joe Exotic’s first, and maybe only, chance to tell his side of the story—the full story. Despite never having seen Tiger King, Joe is aware of what’s been said about him, and he’s eager to answer all the questions the world is dying to know. Such as: -The origin of the mullet. -How Joe became the Tiger King. -Joe’s favorite animals. -Joe’s relationships. -Joe’s explanation of all charges against him. -What happened with Trump’s pardon. -What he thinks about caging animals now that he lives in a cage. -What Joe has to say now about Carole Baskin. From his tragic childhood riddled with abuse to his dangerous feuds with big cat rivals and beyond, nothing is off the table. This is the exclusive and definitive read for anyone who binged the “riveting” (Vanity Fair) documentary and finished it hungry for more. A memoir unlike any other, it proves that they can cage the Tiger King, but they can’t silence his roar.

A National Geographic photographer embarks on a one-man mission to address the plight of the tiger before it's too late.

As the inaugural volume in the Docalogue series, this book models a new form for the discussion of documentary film. James Baldwin’s writing is intensely relevant to contemporary politics and culture, and Peck’s strategies for representing him and conveying his work in I Am Not Your Negro (2016) raise important questions about how documentary can bring the work of a complex thinker like Baldwin to a broader public. By combining five distinct perspectives on a single documentary film, this book offers different critical approaches to the same media object, acting both as an intensive scholarly treatment of a film and as a guide for how to analyze, theorize, and contextualize a documentary. Undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars of film and media studies, communication studies, African American studies, and gender and sexuality studies will find this book extremely useful in understanding the significance of this film and the ways in which it offers insight into not only Baldwin and his writings but also wider historical and contemporary realities.

Although the "decline" of network television in the face of cable programming was an institutional crisis of television history, John Caldwell's classic volume Televisuality reveals that this decline spawned a flurry of new production initiatives to reassert network authority. Television in the 1980s hyped an extensive array of exhibitionist practices to raise the prime-time marquee above the multi-channel flow. Televisuality demonstrates the cultural logic of stylistic exhibitionism in everything from prestige series (Northern Exposure) and "loss-leader" event-status programming (War and Remembrance) to lower "trash" and "tabloid" forms (Pee-Wee's Playhouse and reality TV). Caldwell shows how "import-auteurs" like Oliver Stone and David Lynch were stylized for prime time as videographics packaged and tamed crisis news coverage. By drawing on production experience and critical and cultural analysis, and by tying technologies to aesthetics and ideology, Televisuality is a powerful call for desegregation of theory and practice in media scholarship and an end to the willful blindness of "high theory."

The enthralling new novel from the acclaimed author of Fallen Land, The River of Kings, and Gods of Howl Mountain Retired racehorse jockey and Vietnam veteran Anse Caulfield rescues exotic big cats, elephants, and other creatures for Little Eden, a wildlife sanctuary near the abandoned ruins of a failed development on the Georgia coast. But when Anse’s prized lion escapes, he becomes obsessed with replacing her—even if the means of rescue aren’t exactly legal. Anse is joined by Malaya, a former soldier who hunted rhino and elephant poachers in Africa; Lope, whose training in falconry taught him to pilot surveillance drones; and Tyler, a veterinarian who has found a place in Anse’s obsessive world. From the rhino wars of Africa to the battle for the Baghdad Zoo, from the edges of the Okefenokee Swamp to a remote private island off the Georgia coast, Anse and his team battle an underworld of smugglers, gamblers, breeders, trophy hunters, and others who exploit exotic game. Pride of Eden is Taylor Brown's brilliant fever dream of a novel: set on the eroding edge of civilization, rooted in dramatic events linked not only with each character’s past, but to the prehistory of America, where great creatures roamed the continent and continue to inhabit our collective imagination.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic of true crime, set in a most beguiling Southern city—now in a 30th anniversary edition with a new afterword by the author “Elegant and wicked . . . might be the first true-crime book that makes the reader want to book a bed and breakfast for an extended weekend at the scene of the crime.”—The New York Times Book Review Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. In this sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative, John Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case. It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman’s Card Club; the turbulent young gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the “soul of pampered self-absorption”; the uproariously funny drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young people dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a sublime and seductive reading experience.