Böcker av Jeremy Dauber

From the acclaimed author of American Comics and Jewish Comedy comes a sweeping and entertaining narrative that details the rise and enduring grip of horror in American literature, cinema, and, ultimately, culture-from the taut, terrifying stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the grisly, lingering films of Jordan PeeleAmerica is held captive by horror stories. They flicker on the screen of a darkened movie theater and are shared around the campfire. They blare out in tabloid true-crime headlines, and in the worried voices of local news anchors. They are consumed, virally, on the phones in each of our pockets. Like the victims in any slasher worth its salt, we can't escape the thrall of scary stories.In American Scary, noted cultural historian and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes the reader to the startling origins of the horror genre in the United States, drawing a surprising through-line between the lingering influence of the European Gothic, the enslaved insurrection tales propagated by slaveholders, and the apocryphal chronicles of colonial settlers kidnapped by Native Americans, among many others.These foundational narratives give rise to and are influenced by the body of work we more closely associate with horror: the weird fiction of HP Lovecraft, the lingering stories of Shirley Jackson, the unsettling films of Alfred Hitchcock, the up-all-night tales of Stephen King, and the gripping critiques of Jordan Peele. From "The Tell-Tale Heart" to M3gan, we begin to see why the horror genre is the perfect prism through which to view America's past and present.With the extraordinary historical breadth and dexterous weave of insight and style that has made him twice a finalist for the National Jewish Book, Dauber makes the haunting case that horror reveals the true depths of the American mind.Featuring cameos from:Shirley Jackson The Sixth Sense Edgar Allan Poe Nathaniel Hawthorne Anne Radcliffe Charles Brockden Brown Los Espookys Washington Irving Nat Turner Night of the Living Dead H.P. Lovecraft Alien Mary Heaton Vorse Edith Wharton Norman Bates Lon Chaney Frankenstein Dracula H.G. Wells William Faulkner Dashiell Hammett Tananarive Due Twilight Zone The Handmaid's Tale Ray Bradbury I Am Legend Elia Kazan Psycho Ralph Ellison The Blair Witch Project Stanley Kubrick Helter Skelter Jordan Peele The Walking Dead H.H. Holmes Harriet Beecher Stowe

A spirited dive into the life and career of a performer, writer, and director who dominated twentieth-century American comedy

Part of the Jewish Encounters seriesThe first comprehensive biography of one of the most beloved authors of all time: the creator of Tevye the Dairyman, the collection of stories that inspired Fiddler on the Roof. Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature. The creator of a pantheon of characters who have been immortalized in books and plays, he provided readers throughout the world with a fascinating window into the world of Eastern European Jews as they began to confront the forces of cultural, political, and religious modernity that tore through the Russian Empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. But just as compelling as the fictional lives of Tevye, Golde, Menakhem-Mendl, and Motl was Sholem Aleichem's own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovich in Ukraine in 1859, he endured an impoverished childhood, married into fabulous wealth, and then lost it all through bad luck and worse business sense. Turning to his pen to support himself, he switched from writing in Russian and Hebrew to Yiddish, in order to create a living body of literature for the Jewish masses. He enjoyed spectacular success as both a writer and a performer of his work throughout Europe and the United States, and his death in 1916 was front-page news around the world; a New York Times editorial mourned the loss of "the Jewish Mark Twain." But his greatest fame lay ahead of him, as the English-speaking world began to discover his work in translation and to introduce his characters to an audience that would extend beyond his wildest dreams. In Jeremy Dauber's magnificent biography, we encounter a Sholem Aleichem for the ages.(With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations)