In Murder on the Reservation, Ray B. Browne surveys the work of several of the best-known writers of crime fiction involving Indian characters and references virtually every book that qualifies as an Indian-related mystery. Browne believes that within the genre of crime fiction all people are equal, and the increasing role of Indian characters in criminal fiction proves what an important role this genre plays as a powerful democratizing force in American society. He endeavors to both analyze and evaluate the individual work of the authors, and at the same time, provide a commentary on the various attitudes towards race relations in the United States that each author presents. Some Indian fiction is intended to right the wrongs the authors feel have been leveled against Indians. Other authors use Indian lore and Indian locales as exotic elements and locations for the entertaining and commercially successful stories they want to write. Browne’s analysis includes authors and works of all backgrounds, with mysteries of first-class murder both on and off the reservation.

Murder on the Reservation: American Indian Crime Fiction (Ray and Pat Browne Books)

Literature & Fiction

Browne, Ray B.

History & Criticism

Popular Press 3

The essays in Goddesses and Monsters recognize popular culture as a primary repository of ancient mythic energies, images, narratives, personalities, icons, and archetypes.  Together, they take on the patriarchal myth, where serial killers are heroes, where goddesses—in the form of great white sharks, femmes fatales, and aliens—are ritually slaughtered, and where pornography is the core story underlying militarism, environmental devastation, and racism.  They also point to an alternative imagination of female power that still can be found behind the cult devotion given to Princess Diana and animating all the goddesses disguised as popular monsters, queen bitches, mammies, vamps, cyborgs, and sex bombs.

Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture (Ray and Pat Browne Books)

Caputi, Jane

The essays in Goddesses and Monsters recognize popular culture as a primary repository of ancient mythic energies, images, narratives, personalities, icons, and archetypes. Together, they take on the patriarchal myth, where serial killers are heroes, where goddesses—in the form of great white sharks, femmes fatales, and aliens—are ritually slaughtered, and where pornography is the core story underlying militarism, environmental devastation, and racism. They also point to an alternative imagination of female power that still can be found behind the cult devotion given to Princess Diana and animating all the goddesses disguised as popular monsters, queen bitches, mammies, vamps, cyborgs, and sex bombs.

Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture

Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture

    Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture is John G. Cawelti’s discussion of American popular culture and violence, from its precursors in Homer and Shakespeare to the Lone Ranger and Superman. Cawelti deciphers the overt sexuality, detached violence, and political intrigue embedded within Batman and .007. He analyzes the work of such famous pop-culture icons as Alfred Hitchcock, the Beatles, and Andy Warhol, and looks at a range of films, from Psycho and Dances with Wolves, and literature, from The Waste Land to Catch 22.    Examples from popular movies, television, literature, and music, according to the author, characterize the evolving psychological, sociological, and political state of a nation. The book explores the relationship between racial and cultural groups in popular media such as Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman.  Here also are new perspectives on mystery literature, the detective story, and twentieth-century mystery writers from one of the founders of popular culture studies.

Politics & Social Sciences

Cawelti, John G.

Social Sciences

Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture is John G. Cawelti’s discussion of American popular culture and violence, from its precursors in Homer and Shakespeare to the Lone Ranger and Superman. Cawelti deciphers the overt sexuality, detached violence, and political intrigue embedded within Batman and .007. He analyzes the work of such famous pop-culture icons as Alfred Hitchcock, the Beatles, and Andy Warhol, and looks at a range of films, from Psycho and Dances with Wolves, and literature, from The Waste Land to Catch 22. Examples from popular movies, television, literature, and music, according to the author, characterize the evolving psychological, sociological, and political state of a nation. The book explores the relationship between racial and cultural groups in popular media such as Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. Here also are new perspectives on mystery literature, the detective story, and twentieth-century mystery writers from one of the founders of popular culture studies.

    From essays about the Salem witch trials to literary uses of ghosts by Twain, Wharton, and Bierce to the cinematic blockbuster The Sixth Sense, this book is the first to survey the importance of ghosts and hauntings in American culture across time. From the Puritans’ conviction that a thousand preternatural beings appear every day before our eyes, to today’s resurgence of spirits in fiction and film, the culture of the United States has been obsessed with ghosts. In each generation, these phantoms in popular culture reflect human anxieties about religion, science, politics, and social issues.    Spectral America asserts that ghosts, whether in oral tradition, literature, or such modern forms as cinema have always been constructions embedded in specific historical contexts and invoked for explicit purposes, often political in nature. The essays address the role of "spectral evidence" during the Salem witch trials, the Puritan belief in good spirits, the convergence of American Spiritualism and technological development in the nineteenth century, the use of the supernatural as a tool of political critique in twentieth-century magic realism, and the "ghosting" of persons living with AIDS. They also discuss ghostly themes in the work of Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Gloria Naylor, and Stephen King.

Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (Ray and Pat Browne Books)

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

From essays about the Salem witch trials to literary uses of ghosts by Twain, Wharton, and Bierce to the cinematic blockbuster The Sixth Sense, this book is the first to survey the importance of ghosts and hauntings in American culture across time. From the Puritans’ conviction that a thousand preternatural beings appear every day before our eyes, to today’s resurgence of spirits in fiction and film, the culture of the United States has been obsessed with ghosts. In each generation, these phantoms in popular culture reflect human anxieties about religion, science, politics, and social issues. Spectral America asserts that ghosts, whether in oral tradition, literature, or such modern forms as cinema have always been constructions embedded in specific historical contexts and invoked for explicit purposes, often political in nature. The essays address the role of "spectral evidence" during the Salem witch trials, the Puritan belief in good spirits, the convergence of American Spiritualism and technological development in the nineteenth century, the use of the supernatural as a tool of political critique in twentieth-century magic realism, and the "ghosting" of persons living with AIDS. They also discuss ghostly themes in the work of Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Gloria Naylor, and Stephen King.

Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (A Ray and Pat Browne Book)

Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew

    Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch’s Mouth, inspired by the British Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today, was the first book to be published on popular American witchcraft and remains the classic survey of white and black magic. Newly revised and updated for twenty-first-century readers, the author—an ordained but marvelously fallen exorcist—tells all about the evil eye, the queer eye, women and witch trials, the Old Religion, magic Christianity, Satanism, and New Age self-help.    Jack Fritscher sifts through legends of sorcery and the twisted history of witchcraft, including the casting of spells and incantations, with a focus on the growing role of witchcraft in popular culture and its mainstream commercialization through popular music, Broadway, Hollywood, and politics. As seriously historical as it is fun to read, there is no other book like it.

Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch's Mouth (A Ray and Pat Browne Book)

FRITSCHER, JACK

    Walking Shadows dramatically dissects the wild, high-profile battle between newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and famous young actor, director, and filmmaker Orson Welles over Welles’s groundbreaking film Citizen Kane. In 1940 and 1941 it became the center of public controversy and scandal, especially in Hollywood where Welles’s own stark honesty and blatant self-confidence heightened the drama.    Citizen Kane portrayed the ruthless career of an all-powerful magnate bearing (not accidentally) a striking resemblance to Hearst, who immediately tried to kill the picture. John Evangelist Walsh here illuminates the conflict between these two outsize personalities and for the first time brings Hearst’s vengeful anti-Kane campaign to the fore. Walsh provides thorough documentation, supplemental notes, and an extended bibliography.

Walking Shadows: Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst, and Citizen Kane (A Ray and Pat Browne Book)

Biographies & Memoirs

John Evangelist Walsh

Arts & Literature

Trick-or-treating. Flower girls. Bedtime stories. Bar and bat mitvah. In a nation of increasing ethnic, familial, and technological complexity, the patterns of children's lives both persist and evolve. This book considers how such events shape identity and transmit cultural norms, asking such questions as: * How do immigrant families negotiate between old traditions and new? * What does it mean when children engage in ritual insults and sick jokes? * How does playing with dolls reflect and construct feelings of racial identity? * Whatever happened to the practice of going to the Saturday matinee to see a Western? * What does it mean for a child to be (in the words of one bride) "flower-girl material"? How does that role cement a girl's bond to her family and initiate her into society? * What is the function of masks and costumes, and why do children yearn for these accoutrements of disguise? Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives suggests the manifold ways in which America's children come to know their society and themselves.

Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives (A Ray and Pat Browne Book)

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Popular Press 3 publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Popular Press 3

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Popular Press 3 publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Murder on the Reservation: American Indian Crime Fiction (Ray and Pat Browne Books)

Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture (Ray and Pat Browne Books)

Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture

Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture

Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture

Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (Ray and Pat Browne Books)

Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (A Ray and Pat Browne Book)

Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch's Mouth (A Ray and Pat Browne Book)

Walking Shadows: Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst, and Citizen Kane (A Ray and Pat Browne Book)

Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives (A Ray and Pat Browne Book)