New Books in Performing Arts

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of the best-loved films of Classical Hollywood cinema, a story of despair and redemption in the aftermath of war that is one of the central movies of the 1940s, and a key text in America's understanding of itself. This is a film that remains relevant to our own anxieties and yearnings, to all the contradictions of ordinary life, while also enacting for us the quintessence of the classic Hollywood aesthetic. Nostalgia, humour, and a tough resilience weave themselves through this movie, intertwining it with the fraught cultural moment of the end of World War II that saw its birth. It offers a still compelling merging of fantasy and realism that was utterly unique when it was first released, and has rarely been matched since.

Michael Newton's study of the film, It's a Wonderful Life (British Film Institute, 2023), investigates the source of its extraordinary power and its long-lasting impact. He begins by introducing the key figures in the movie's production - notably director Frank Capra and star James Stewart - and traces the making of the film, and then provides a brief synopsis of the film, considering its aesthetic processes and procedures, touching on all those things that make it such an astonishing film. Newton's careful analysis explores all those aspects of the film that are fundamental to our understanding of it, particularly the way in which the film brings tragedy and comedy together. Finally, Newton tells the story of the film's reception and afterlife, accounting for its initial relative failure and its subsequent immense popularity.

Michael Newton is Lecturer in English at Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981 (2012), and of Kind Hearts and Coronets (2003) and Rosemary's Baby (2020) in the BFI Film Classics series.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) has long been recognized as one of the seminal films of the sixties, with its revisionary mix of genres including neo-noir, New Wave, and spaghetti western. Its lasting influence can be traced throughout the decades in films like Mean Streets (1973), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Heat (1995), The Limey (1999) and Memento (2000).

Eric Wilson's compelling study Point Blank (British Film Institute, 2023) examines its significance to New Hollywood cinema. He argues that Boorman revises traditional Hollywood crime films by probing a second connotation of “point blank.” On the one hand, it is a neo-noir that aptly depicts close range violence, but, it also points toward blankness, a nothingness that is the consequence of corporate America unchecked, where humans are reduced to commodities and stripped of agency and playfulness.

He goes on to reimagine the film's experimental style as a representation of and possible remedy for trauma. Examining Boorman's formal innovations, including his favoring of gesture over language and blurring of boundaries between dream and reality, he also positions the film as a grimly comical exploration of toxic masculinity and gender fluidity.

Wilson's close reading of Point Blank reveals it to be a film that innovatively inflects its own generation and speaks powerfully to our own, arguing that it is this amplitude, which encompasses the many major films it has influenced, that qualifies the film as a classic.

Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA. His publications include Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film (2006) and The Strange World of David Lynch: Transcendental Irony from Eraserhead to Mulholland Dr (2007). His writing has featured in Psychology Today, L.A. Times, The New York Times and Huffington Post.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. 

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Sean Minogue about this play, Prodigals (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2025).

When a big-city dreamer from a small northern Ontario city returns to his hometown to testify in a murder trial, he faces old uncovered wounds in his circle of friends and discovers that his missed opportunities are more than just regrets.

Sean Minogue has written for film, television and theatre. His poems, stories and essays have been published in ARC Poetry Magazine, Maudlin House, Shift, THIS Magazine, Full Stop, Huffington Post and The Globe and Mail.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Wednesday, December 17—“The best play I’ve seen this season,” says New York Magazine’s Sara Holdren about Liberation, Bess Wohl’s moving exploration of the women’s movement through the story of an Ohio consciousness-raising group in the early 1970s and a daughter who yearns to understand her mother’s life and her own.
To discuss this timely play and the movement’s powerful literary roots, Wohl joins memoirist Honor Moore, co-editor of Library of America’s Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can, for a conversation about freedom, feminism, and visions for a better future, then and now.
LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations.

Max Rudin is President & Publisher of Library of America.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In 1981, David Bowie and Queen both happened to be in Switzerland: They met and made "Under Pressure." Recorded on a lark, the song broke the path for subsequent pop anthems. In Under Pressure (Duke University Press, 2025), Max Brzezinski tells the classic track's story, charting the relationship between pop music, collective politics, and dominant institutions of state, corporations, and civil society. Brzezinski shows that, like all great pop anthems, "Under Pressure" harnesses collective sentiments in order to model new ways of thinking and acting. As we continue to live under the sign of the global oppressive power the song names, analyzes, and attempts to move beyond, we remain, in Bowie and Freddie Mercury's phrase, under pressure.

Max Brzezinski is the author of Vinyl Age: A Guide to Record Collecting Now.

Max on Instragram

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival.

Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The media and creative industries thrive on passion, but that passion often comes at a cost. Behind the glamour of journalism, filmmaking, games, music, advertising, and online content creation lies a growing crisis-one of burnout, anxiety, substance abuse, and exhaustion. Why do so many creative professionals report feeling both deeply fulfilled and profoundly unwell?

Mark Deuze investigates the systemic issues that make creative work both exhilarating and unsustainable. Drawing on extensive research and in-depth interviews with media professionals, he notes the hidden downsides of doing what you love and offers a candid analysis of how workplace structures, high workloads, and perceived injustices contribute to mental and physical distress.

But this book is not just about what's broken; it's about what can be done. Deuze provides a roadmap for rethinking the culture of creative industries and offers strategies for balancing passion with sustainability. A practical resource for media scholars and those navigating the highs and lows of a creative career, this work challenges us to imagine a healthier future for our labour of love.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A spectacular graphic novel about the life and times of the legendary Fela Kuti—the Pan-African frontman, multi-instrumentalist, sociopolitical powerhouse, and father of Afrobeat.

In Fela: Music Is the Weapon (Amistad, 2025), artist Jibola Fagbamiye and writer Conor McCreery team up to tell the remarkable origin story of one of Nigeria’s most famous sons, the King of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti, who rose to superstardom with his band Africa 70 in the 1970s, during a charged political period for his nation.

A once-in-a-lifetime musical talent who innovated the musical genre Afrobeat, Fela was also an outspoken critic of the Nigerian military regime. Fela focuses on a pivotal moment in his life, when he and his mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the renowned Nigerian suffrage activist, were ruthlessly attacked in their own home by soldiers who suffered no repercussions for their violence. It also explores Fela’s complex relationship with women, including his mother and Sandra Izsadore, the American singer and activist who revitalize and inspired him. Over the course of his life, Fela married 27 women, fathered numerous children, and founded the Kalakuta Republic commune, where he and his band lived, declaring themselves independent from military rule.

As rich and original as its subject, Fela complements the historical with the surreal, featuring parallel dream world sequences, set between this realm and the next, in which Fela receives visions about his future and the dangerous path he will have to walk.

Chronicling Fela’s perilous journey to capture his destiny—to become the King of Afrobeat, and to advocate for Pan-African unity in the face of European imperialism and white supremacy—this masterful biographical graphic novel celebrates this enduring legend and his legacy, offering inspiration for our own troubled time.

Jibola Fagbamiye is a visual artist based in Toronto. His work draws inspiration from his two great loves: African history and North American pop culture. Jibola has exhibited in galleries in Toronto, Los Angeles, and Lagos, and his work has been featured on AfroPunk, Toronto Life, ByBlacks, and BlogTO.

Jibola’s website and Bluesky.

Conor McCreery is a former journalist turned comics scribe. He has written Assassin’s Creed, Sherlock Holmes vs Harry Houdini, Adventure Time, Regular Show, and has worked for many of the industry's top publishers including DC, IDW, BOOM!, Titan, and Dark Horse. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three children.

Conor on Facebook and Bluesky.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival.

Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Before Hacks and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, there was the comedienne who started it all.

First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll (NYU Press, 2024) tells the story of Jean Carroll, the first Jewish woman to become a star in the field we now call stand-up comedy. Though rarely mentioned among the pantheon of early stand-up comics such as Henny Youngman and Lenny Bruce, Jean Carroll rivaled or even outshone the male counterparts of her heyday, playing more major theaters than any other comedian of her period. In addition to releasing a hit comedy album, Girl in a Hot Steam Bath, and briefly starring in her own sitcom on ABC, she also made twenty-nine appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Carroll made enduring changes to the genre of stand-up comedy, carving space for women and modeling a new form of Jewish femininity with her glamorous, acculturated, but still recognizably Jewish persona. She innovated a newly conversational, intimate style of stand-up, which is now recognized in comics like Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman, and Tiffany Haddish. When Carroll was ninety-five she was honored at the Friars Club in New York City, where celebrities like Joy Behar and Lily Tomlin praised her influence on their craft. But her celebrated career began as an impoverished immigrant child, scrounging for talent show prize money to support her family.
Drawing on archival footage, press clippings, and Jean Carroll’s personal scrapbook, First Lady of Laughs restores Jean Carroll’s remarkable story to its rightful place in the lineage of comedy history and Jewish American performance.

Jane Scimeca, Professor of History at Brookdale Community College

Website here

@janescimeca.bsky.social

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense, Elliott Kalan (U Chicago Press, 2025) explains that it’s easier to write jokes when you have a dependable method for doing so. All jokes, he argues, are built from the same elements: structure, premise, voice, tone, wording, and audience—and these elements can be applied to any comedic genre, from stand-up to sitcoms to satire. Kalan analyzes examples from his own career—including jokes that he wrote (and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote . . . ) as head writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart—as well as material from a diverse array of comedians, writers, and filmmakers, highlighting the phrasing, rhythm, and precise details that make their work so dang funny.
Drawing on his experiences in professional writers’ rooms as well as episodes from everyday life, Kalan’s guide to jokes will appeal to aspiring writers, their mentors, comedy fans, and anyone who has to speak at a wedding. Joke Farming points the way toward a writing process that lessens stress and agony and yields more reliable rewards: a surprising tagline, a hilarious word choice, and—most importantly—a bigger laugh from the audience, whoever they may be.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sarah Derbew’s new book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) asks how should articulations of blackness from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century be properly read and interpreted? This important and timely book is the first concerted treatment of black skin color in the Greek literature and visual culture of antiquity. In charting representations in the Hellenic world of black Egyptians, Aithiopians, Indians, and Greeks, Derbew dexterously disentangles the complex and varied ways in which blackness has been co-produced by ancient authors and artists; their readers, audiences, and viewers; and contemporary scholars. Exploring the precarious hold that race has on skin coloration, the author uncovers the many silences, suppressions, and misappropriations of blackness within modern studies of Greek antiquity. Shaped by performance studies and critical race theory alike, her book maps out an authoritative archaeology of blackness that reappraises its significance. It offers a committedly anti-racist approach to depictions of black people while rejecting simplistic conflations or explanations.

Get 20% off a copy of Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity using promo code UBGA2022 at Cambridge University Press (valid until February 2023).

Keep up with Sarah’s work on Twitter @BlackAntiquity and on her website.

@amandajoycehall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.