Slacker Girl

A hilarious debut novel about life, love, and the pursuit of leisure Jane Cooper is a different kind of New York woman. Charmingly unambitious in workaholic New York City, Jane believes that until corporate life was unfairly glamorized in “propaganda” films of the 1980s such as Working Girl, there were more people like her: connoisseurs of leisure. Still, a girl does have to pay the rent, so Jane finds a corporate job that supports her lifestyle. Unaware that her cute, hipster boss Ray just put his neck on the line to keep her from being fired, she and her best friend, Rebecka, take off on possibly the worst timed vacation. When Jane finds out that her commitment to slacking may be causing real world problems, she springs into action, putting even Joan Collins’s character in Dynasty to shame to save her job, her company, her friendship, and her heart. Fun, edgy, and starring an irresistible heroine, this is a book for every working girl (and slacker) who has ever wanted to step outside the corporate box.

A charming, unambitious, leisure-loving young woman, Jane Cooper is an anomaly in workaholic New York City, until her cute boss Ray puts his own job on the line to keep her from being fired and she discovers that her commitment to slacking is causing real problems, forcing her to come up with a plan to save her job, her company, her friendship, and her heart. A first novel. Original.

During the 1910s, films about war often featured a female protagonist. The films portrayed women as spies, cross-dressing soldiers, and athletic defenders of their homes—roles typically reserved for men and that contradicted gendered-expectations of home-front women waiting for their husbands, sons, and brothers to return from battle. The representation of American martial spirit—particularly in the form of heroines—has a rich history in film in the years just prior to the American entry into World War I. The American Girl Goes to War demonstrates the predominance of heroic female characters in in early narrative films about war from 1908 to 1919. American Girls were filled with the military spirit of their forefathers and became one of the major ways that American women’s changing political involvement, independence, and active natures were contained by and subsumed into pre-existing American ideologies.

Mainstream society has often had a deeply rooted fear of intelligent women. Why do brilliant women make society ill at ease? Focusing on the US, Sherrie Inness and contributors explore this question in the context of the last two decades, arguing that more intelligent women are appearing in popular culture than ever before.

Since the 1990s, when Reviving Ophelia became a best seller and “Girl Power” a familiar anthem, girls have assumed new visibility in the culture. Yet in asserting their new power, young women have redefined femininity in ways that have often mystified their mothers. They have also largely disavowed feminism, even though their new influence is a likely legacy of feminism’s Second Wave. At the same time, popular culture has persisted in idealizing, demonizing, or simply erasing mothers, rarely depicting them in strong and loving relationships with their daughters. Unruly Girls, Unrepentent Mothers, a companion to Kathleen Rowe Karlyn’s groundbreaking work, The Unruly Woman, studies the ways popular culture and current debates within and about feminism inform each other. Surveying a range of films and television shows that have defined girls in the postfeminist era—from Titanic and My So-Called Life to Scream and The Devil Wears Prada, and from Love and Basketball to Ugly Betty—Karlyn explores the ways class, race, and generational conflicts have shaped both Girl Culture and feminism’s Third Wave. Tying feminism’s internal conflicts to negative attitudes toward mothers in the social world, she asks whether today’s seemingly materialistic and apolitical girls, inspired by such real and fictional figures as the Spice Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, have turned their backs on the feminism of their mothers or are redefining unruliness for a new age.

From the author of Crying, a witty, wide-ranging cultural history of our attitudes toward work—and getting out of it Couch potatoes, goof-offs, freeloaders, good-for-nothings, loafers, and loungers: ever since the Industrial Revolution, when the work ethic as we know it was formed, there has been a chorus of slackers ridiculing and lampooning the pretensions of hardworking respectability. Reviled by many, heroes to others, these layabouts stretch and yawn while the rest of society worries and sweats. Whenever the world of labor changes in significant ways, the pulpits, politicians, and pedagogues ring with exhortations of the value of work, and the slackers answer with a strenuous call of their own: "To do nothing," as Oscar Wilde said, "is the most difficult thing in the world." From Benjamin Franklin's "air baths" to Jack Kerouac's "dharma bums," Generation-X slackers, and beyond, anti-work-ethic proponents have held a central place in modern culture. Moving with verve and wit through a series of fascinating case studies that illuminate the changing place of leisure in the American republic, Doing Nothing revises the way we understand slackers and work itself.

Award-winning author William J. Mann blends fact and fiction in this unconventional novel about the nature of celebrity The Biograph Girl is Florence Lawrence, who gets her first big break in vaudeville as a tiny tot who can whistle like a man. By 1910 she’s a legendary movie star, pursued by thousands of rabid fans. Just a few short decades later, she’s all but forgotten, reduced to walk-ons at MGM. In 1938 she kills herself by ingesting a lethal dose of ant paste. Fast-forward fifty-nine years. A 107-year-old woman named Flo Bridgewood is discovered in a Catholic nursing home in Buffalo. Could the feisty chain smoker with the red satin bow in her hair be America’s former sweetheart? Florence Lawrence is dead . . . isn’t she? And if not, then whose body is in her grave? That’s what journalist Richard Sheehan wants to find out as he and his identical twin brother, Ben, a documentary filmmaker, decide to cash in on a decades-old mystery. Sharing the stage is Flo herself, whose story is the stuff of Hollywood fantasy. A provocative melding of fact and fiction, The Biograph Girl is about what it means to be a celebrity—then and now.

Book Four in The Horizon Cycle