front cover of Fire in the Hole
Fire in the Hole
Sybil Downing
University Press of Colorado, 1996
The award-winning Fire in the Hole is the tale of a young widowed lawyer swept up in the violence of the famous Colorado coal strike of 1913-1914 known to history as the Ludlow Massacre. Opposed by the coal companies, the union, Wall Street, and the federal government, Alex hatches a scheme involving the president to overturn martial law and settle the strike. A gripping tale of a woman who dares to go beyond the conventions of the day to find freedom and justice amid a power struggle so terrifying it would wrench the nation's conscience for decades.
[more]

front cover of Flying through a Hole in the Storm
Flying through a Hole in the Storm
Poems
Fleda Brown
Ohio University Press, 2021
A keenly observant collection of poems on disaster, aging, and apocalypse. Golda Meir once said, “Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there’s nothing you can do.” The poems in Fleda Brown’s brave collection, her thirteenth, take readers on a journey through the fury of this storm. There are plenty of tragedies to weather here, both personal and universal: the death of a father, a child’s terminal cancer, the extinction of bees, and environmental degradation. Brown’s poems are wise, honest, and deeply observant meditations on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, and aging. With tributes to visionary artists, including Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, and Grandma Moses, as well as to life’s terrors, sadnesses, and joys, these works are beautiful dispatches from a renowned poet who sees the shadows lengthening and imagines what they might look like from the other side.
[more]

front cover of Hole in Our Soul
Hole in Our Soul
The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music
Martha Bayles
University of Chicago Press, 1996
From Queen Latifa to Count Basie, Madonna to Monk, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music traces popular music back to its roots in jazz, blues, country, and gospel through the rise in rock 'n' roll and the emergence of heavy metal, punk, and rap. Yet despite the vigor and balance of these musical origins, Martha Bayles argues, something has gone seriously wrong, both with the sound of popular music and the sensibility it expresses.

Bayles defends the tough, affirmative spirit of Afro-American music against the strain of artistic modernism she calls 'perverse.' She describes how perverse modernism was grafted onto popular music in the late 1960s, and argues that the result has been a cult of brutality and obscenity that is profoundly anti-musical.

Unlike other recent critics of popular music, Bayles does not blame the problem on commerce. She argues that culture shapes the market and not the other way around. Finding censorship of popular music "both a practical and a constitutional impossibility," Bayles insists that "an informed shift in public tastes may be our only hope of reversing the current malignant mood."
[more]

front cover of The Hole in the Fabric
The Hole in the Fabric
Science, Contemporary Literature, and Henry James
Strother B. Purdy
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977

In this imaginative and provocative book, Purdy draws upon the work of a such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Günter Grass, Samuel Becket, and Eugene Ionesco to suggest ways in which novelists explore the unknown. His ingenious consideration of Henry James in conjunction with these novelists, as well as with science fiction and detective fiction writers and with mid-century scientific discoveries and advances—black holes, hydrogen bombs, space travel—offers rich, new insights into James’s work and into the twentieth-century view of humanity’s place in the world.

[more]

front cover of A Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top
A Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top
Fraud and Deceit in the Golden Age of American Mining
Dan Plazak
University of Utah Press, 2006
Coal, silver, gold. There is something about the allure of hidden treasure that puts a glint in people’s eyes. By gathering such familiar stories as that of Nevada’s infamous Comstock Lode with a succession of lesser-known scandals, Dan Plazak provides an entertaining and informative volume that delightfully investigates the history of mining frauds in the United States from the Civil War to World War I.
[more]

logo for Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
A Hole in the Heavens
Dyan Elliott
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017
What if Satan were to disguise himself as an angel of light? What if he even appeared as Christ? Schoolmen in late medieval Paris were obsessed with that question--and A Hole in the Heavens explores the alarming consequences of this obsession. It soon becomes impossible to tell the difference between saints and impostors, conversion and demonic possession, heresy and the true faith. Even the wisest and holiest may be deceived. A struggling student, a pair of prostitutes, and a beautiful priest's daughter are among those caught up in the chaos. Based on meticulous research, Dyan Elliott's first novel is an absorbing and ultimately chilling exercise in the discernment of spirits.
[more]

logo for University of Iowa Press
A Hole in the Language
Marly Swick
University of Iowa Press, 1990

These stories are delicate seismographic meditations on disaster and its aftershocks. The characters are survivors, digging their way out of the past, shaken but hopeful. Despite all their tragic losses, there is a pervasive sense of humor, hope, and forgiveness: abandonment leads ultimately to reunion, grief to solace. This is contemporary America—a jigsaw puzzle of fragmented families constantly picking up the pieces and fitting themselves together in new ways to form unforgettable pictures.


[more]

front cover of Time Slips
Time Slips
Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History
Jaclyn I. Pryor
Northwestern University Press, 2017
This bold book investigates how performance can transform the way people perceive trauma and memory, time and history. Jaclyn I. Pryor introduces the concept of "time slips," moments in which past, present, and future coincide, moments that challenge American narratives of racial and sexual citizenship.
 
Framing performance as a site of resistance, Pryor analyzes their own work and that of four other queer artists—Ann Carlson, Mary Ellen Strom, Peggy Shaw, and Lisa Kron—between 2001 and 2016. Pryor illuminates how each artist deploys performance as a tool to render history visible, trauma recognizable, and transformation possible by laying bare the histories and ongoing systems of violence woven deep into our society. Pryor also includes a case study that examines the challenges of teaching queer time and queer performance within the academy in what Pryor calls a post-9/11 “homeland” security state.
 
Masterfully synthesizing a wealth of research and experiences, Time Slips will interest scholars and readers in the fields of theater and performance studies, queer studies, and American studies.
[more]

front cover of Way Down in the Hole
Way Down in the Hole
Race, Intimacy, and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement
Angela J. Hattery
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with prisoners, correctional officers, and civilian staff conducted in solitary confinement units, Way Down in the Hole explores the myriad ways in which daily, intimate interactions between those locked up twenty-four hours a day and the correctional officers charged with their care, custody, and control produce and reproduce hegemonic racial ideologies. Smith and Hattery explore the outcome of building prisons in rural, economically depressed communities, staffing them with white people who live in and around these communities, filling them with Black and brown bodies from urban areas and then designing the structure of solitary confinement units such that the most private, intimate daily bodily functions take place in very public ways. Under these conditions, it shouldn’t be surprising, but is rarely considered, that such daily interactions produce and reproduce white racial resentment among many correctional officers and fuel the racialized tensions that prisoners often describe as the worst forms of dehumanization. Way Down in the Hole concludes with recommendations for reducing the use of solitary confinement, reforming its use in a limited context, and most importantly, creating an environment in which prisoners and staff co-exist in ways that recognize their individual humanity and reduce rather than reproduce racial antagonisms and racial resentment.

Way Down the Hole Video 1 (https://youtu.be/UuAB63fhge0)
Way Down the Hole Video 2 (https://youtu.be/TwEuw1cTrcQ)
Way Down the Hole Video 3 (https://youtu.be/bOcBv_UnHIs​)
Way Down the Hole Video 4 (https://youtu.be/cx_l1S8D77c)
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter