"A beautiful aftershock of the movies." -David Gordon Green EVERYONE HAS A SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES...As featured on NPR's Weekend Edition. A whip-smart fiction debut inspired by classic and cult cinema, Our Secret Life in the Movies lures us into a lush dream world. These linked short stories follow two boys coming of age in the 1980s. Blade Runner and space camp collide with Reaganomics, food stamps, and the end of the Cold War in this haunting coauthored collection. "Wildly intelligent and deeply felt, OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES gives us a fascinating look at American life, shot through an insightful and compassionate lens. After reading it, the world seems bigger. A tremendous book." -Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans "Reading OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES is like finding a lost frequency on the AM dial. The voices you hear in this book are strange, hypnotic, and intensely American." -Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men "OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES deftly weaves together the art of film and the art of fiction to create a literary-cinematic adventure that is hauntingly beautiful, dreamily inventive, and thrillingly original." -Maud Casey, author of The Man Who Walked Away "Tyree and McGriff conjure up lonliness, loss, and euphoria with the indelible resonance of an iconic tight shot." -Suzanne Rivecca, author of Death is Not an Option "A book of poignant and affecting beauty. Readers are presented with characters who are losing their innocence in lockstep with the changing nation they inhabit, and the end result is a book that provides great insight into both who we are and how we got this way. A remarkable achievement." -Skip Horack, author of The Eden Hunter "You don't need to see all, or any, of the movies on their list to love this book. You just need to have a secret life." -Maria Hummel, author of Motherland

Our Secret Life in the Movies

Humor & Entertainment

Tyree, J.M.

McGriff, Michael

Movies

A Strange Object

Literary Nonfiction. Thomas Pynchon's cult detective novel, Inherent Vice, depicts drug-addled private investigator "Doc" Sportello, a leftover of 1960s idealism, on an errant quest to decipher the disappearance of a real estate tycoon. As in his other books, Pynchon imagines a "counterforce" of marginalized dreamers and weirdos seeking a more humane world. Tracing Inherent Vice's hilariously tangled plotlines and its hallucinatory prose, J. M. Tyree explores the clues that link a paranoiac thriller set in Nixon-era Los Angeles to toxic national myths that define America today. Tyree arranges each chapter after something Pynchon stands against--werewolves, sobriety, linear time, Hollywood--and defends the liberties taken in Paul Thomas Anderson's film of Inherent Vice. If, as Pynchon suggests, another past is possible, then perhaps a different future is possible. A lucid guide to Pynchon's idiosyncratic historical fiction, THE COUNTERFORCE argues that facts alone cannot save us. We need better stories.

The Counterforce: Thomas Pynchon's INHERENT VICE (...AFTERWORDS)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Fiction Advocate

Vanishing Streets reveals an American writer's twenty-year love affair with London. Beguiling and idiosyncratic, obsessive and wry, it offers an illustrated travelogue of the peripheries, retracing some of London's most curious locations. As J. M. Tyree wanders deliriously in "the world's most visited city," he rediscovers and reinvents places that have changed drastically since he was a student at Cambridge in the 1990s. Tyree stumbles into the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock, Graham Greene, and the pioneers of the British Free Cinema Movement. He offers a new way of seeing familiar landmarks through the lens of film history, and reveals strange nooks and tiny oddities in out-of-the-way places, from a lost film by John Ford supposedly shot in Wapping to the beehives hidden in Tower Hamlets Cemetery, an area haunted by a translation error in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz. This book blends deeply personal writing with a foreigner's observations on a world capital experiencing an unsettling moment of transition. Vanishing Streets builds into an astonishing and innovative multi-layered project combining autobiography, movie madness, and postcard-like annotations on the magical properties of a great city. Tyree argues passionately for London as a cinematic dream city of perpetual fascinations and eccentricities, bridging the past and the present as well as the real and the imaginary.

Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London

Travel

Redwood Press

The Haunted Screen

Literary

Wonder, Horror, Mystery is a dialogue between two friends, both notable arts critics, that takes the form of a series of letters about movies and religion. One of the friends, J.M. Tyree, is a film critic, creative writer, and agnostic, while the other, Morgan Meis, is a philosophy PhD, art critic, and practicing Catholic. The question of cinema is raised here in a spirit of friendly friction that binds the personal with the critical and the spiritual. What is film? What’s it for? What does it do? Why do we so intensely love or hate films that dare to broach the subjects of the divine and the diabolical? These questions stimulate further thoughts about life, meaning, philosophy, absurdity, friendship, tragedy, humor, death, and God. 
The letters focus on three filmmakers who challenged secular assumptions in the late 20th century and early 21st century through various modes of cinematic re-enchantment: Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The book works backwards in time, giving intensive analysis to Malick’s To The Wonder (2012), Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), and Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1988), respectively, in each of the book’s three sections. Meis and Tyree discuss the filmmakers and films as well as related ideas about philosophy, theology, and film theory in an accessible but illuminating way. The discussion ranges from the shamelessly intellectual to the embarrassingly personal. Spoiler alert: No conclusions are reached either about God or the movies. Nonetheless, it is a fun ride. 
Morgan Meis is a contributor at The New Yorker. He has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He won the Whiting Award for nonfiction in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. He is the author of Ruins, Dead People, and The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality. 
J.M. Tyree is the author of BFI Film Classics: Salesman (British Film Institute/Bloomsbury), and the coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff, A Strange Object/Deep Vellum), an NPR Best Books Selection. His writing on cinema has appeared in Sight & Sound, Film Quarterly, Film International, and Critical Quarterly. A former Keasbey Scholar in Religious Studies at Cambridge and a Stegner Fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford, he currently serves as a Nonfiction Editor at New England Review and teaches as Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Wonder, Horror, Mystery: Letters on Cinema and Religion in Malick, Von Trier, and Kieślowski

Arts & Photography

Meis, Morgan

Photography & Video

Punctum Books

About the Author\nJ.M. Tyree is Writer-at-Large for Film Quarterly. He has taught at Stanford University, spoken at the BFI's National Film Theatre, and contributed to Sight & Sound magazine.\nBen Walters is a writer, producer, programmer, critic and activist living in London, UK. From 2009-2013 he was Time Out London's Cabaret Editor. He is the author of Orson Welles (2005) and the co-author, with J.M. Tyree, of The Big Lebowski (BFI Film Classics, 2007).\nEthan and Joel Coen's The Big Lebowski was released in 1998 to general bafflement. A decade on, it had become a cult classic and remains so over 20 years later, inspiring a thriving circuit of 'Lebowski Fests' during which costumed devotees gather at bowling alleys and guzzle White Russians. Beyond its superabundance of deliciously quotable lines, how has the movie inspired such remarkable affection? And why does its critical stock continue to rise? 
The film's unlikely anchor is Jeff Bridges' career-best performance as Jeffrey Lebowski, a fully-baked 1960s radical turned Venice Beach drop-out known to his friends as 'the Dude'. Mistaken for an identically-named grandee whose young trophy wife is in trouble, the Dude finds himself embroiled in an impossibly convoluted kidnap plot involving pornographers, nihilists and threats to his 'johnson'. Worst of all, it conflicts with his bowling commitments.\nIn part an irreverent pastiche of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (as filmed by Howard Hawks), The Big Lebowski is also a jukebox of film history, littered with playful references to everything from Hitchcock and Altman to Busby Berkeley. This riot of addled quotations reflects the film's Los Angeles setting, a discombobulated world inhabited by flakes, phonies and poseurs with put-on identities.\nLike many Coen films, the movie plays havoc with the conventions of the crime genre and the absurdities of classical American 'heroism'. But it's also that rare thing: a comedy that gets richer, funnier and more affecting with each viewing. Beneath its breakneck pacing and foul-mouthed ribaldry, the Dude's story offers disarmingly humane lessons in the value of simple things: friendship, laughter and bowling.\nIn their foreword to this new edition, the authors reflect on Lebowski's cult status and its contemporary resonances as a film about gentle non-conformity and friendship in an increasingly polarized world. The new edition also includes an interview with the Coens, revealing the origins of the name 'Jeffrey Lebowski'.

The Big Lebowski (BFI Film Classics)

WALTERS, BEN

British Film Institute

Since its release, 'The Big Lebowski' has become a classic. This study sets the movie into the context of 1990s Hollywood cinema, anatomised for its relationship with the classics which it satirises, and discussed in terms of its key theme: the hopeless flailing of ridiculously unmanly men in the world of put-on identities that is Los Angeles.

This book includes an exclusive Q&amp;A with filmmaker Albert Maysles. Selected by the Library of Congress as one of the most significant American films ever made, Salesman (1966-9) is a landmark in non-fiction cinema, equivalent in its impact and influence to Truman Capote's 'non-fiction novel' In Cold Blood. The film follows a team of travelling Bible salesmen on the road in Massachusetts, Chicago, and Florida, where the American dream of self-reliant entrepreneurship goes badly wrong for protagonist Paul Brennan. Long acknowledged as a high-water mark of the 'direct cinema' movement, this ruefully comic and quietly devastating film was the first masterpiece of Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, the trio who would go on to produce The Rolling Stones documentary, Gimme Shelter (1970). Based on the premise that films drawn from ordinary life could compete with Hollywood extravaganzas, Salesman was critical in shaping 'the documentary feature'. A novel cinema-going experience for its time, the film was independently produced, designed for theatrical release and presented without voiceover narration, interviews, or talking heads. Working with innovative handheld equipment, and experimenting with eclectic methods and a collaborative ethos, the Maysles brothers and Zwerin produced a carefully-orchestrated narrative drama fashioned from unexpected episodes. J. M. Tyree suggests that Salesman can be understood as a case study of non-fiction cinema, raising perennial questions about reality and performance. His analysis provides an historical and cultural context for the film, considering its place in world cinema and its critical representations of dearly-held national myths. The style of Salesman still makes other documentaries look static and immobile, while the film's allegiances to everyday subjects and working people indelibly marked the cinema.

Salesman (BFI Film Classics)

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Books by Tyree, J.M.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tyree, J.M.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Our Secret Life in the Movies

The Counterforce: Thomas Pynchon's INHERENT VICE (...AFTERWORDS)

Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London

The Haunted Screen

Wonder, Horror, Mystery: Letters on Cinema and Religion in Malick, Von Trier, and Kieślowski

The Big Lebowski (BFI Film Classics)

The Big Lebowski (BFI Film Classics)

Salesman (BFI Film Classics)