Here are 100 books that Cinema Speculation fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve always been fascinated by film and television. No matter how challenging life can be at times, we're forever united by what stories captivate us on the gold and silver screens. Whatever challenges the world may throw at this type of storytelling be it a world war, the internet, Covid, or TikTok, nothing beats sitting down on your sofa to enjoy the finest entertainment the world has to offer. Critically studying our most treasured past time might sound like the best way of sucking the life out of it. But I’m here to show you how this isn't the case. Join me on a quest through the best writings that can capture your imagination.
The Television Genre Book is a smorgasbord of leading international scholars who come together to offer an accessible yet comprehensive introduction to the debates, issues, and concerns of what it is that makes unique television genres so appealing.
From the news and quiz shows to soaps and serious HBO dramas I still remember first opening this book and being enthralled by my newfound ability to look at our favourite pastime differently and critically.
Genre is central to understanding the industrial context and visual form of television. This new edition of the key textbook on television genre brings together leading international scholars to provide an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the debates, issues and concerns of the field. Structured in eleven sections, The Television Genre Book introduces the concept of 'genre' itself and how it has been understood in television studies, and then addresses the main televisual genres in turn: drama, soap opera, comedy, news, documentary, reality television, children's television, animation and popular entertainment.
This third edition is illustrated throughout with case studies of…
I’ve always been fascinated by film and television. No matter how challenging life can be at times, we're forever united by what stories captivate us on the gold and silver screens. Whatever challenges the world may throw at this type of storytelling be it a world war, the internet, Covid, or TikTok, nothing beats sitting down on your sofa to enjoy the finest entertainment the world has to offer. Critically studying our most treasured past time might sound like the best way of sucking the life out of it. But I’m here to show you how this isn't the case. Join me on a quest through the best writings that can capture your imagination.
If I asked you whether you fancied reading the entire history of British television from its beginnings on the BBC in the 1930s to its position today, you’d probably tell me to get lost.
But the evocative writing of Lez Cooke makes this a far more pleasurable experience than it otherwise ought to be. I guarantee you will be stimulated yet entertained as you are walked through the key creatives, technologies, dramas, and genres that captured the imaginations of millions of avid British telly addicts each decade. You will put down this book as an immediate expert in the field, guaranteed.
This widely-respected history of British television drama is an indispensable guide to the significant developments in the area; from its beginnings on the BBC in the 1930s and 40s to its position in the twenty-first century, as television enters a multichannel digital era. Embracing the complete spectrum of television drama, Lez Cooke places programmes in their social, political and industrial contexts, and surveys the key dramas, writers, producers and directors.
Thoroughly revised and updated, this second edition includes new images and case studies, new material on British television drama before 1936, an expanded bibliography and a substantial new chapter that…
I’ve always been fascinated by film and television. No matter how challenging life can be at times, we're forever united by what stories captivate us on the gold and silver screens. Whatever challenges the world may throw at this type of storytelling be it a world war, the internet, Covid, or TikTok, nothing beats sitting down on your sofa to enjoy the finest entertainment the world has to offer. Critically studying our most treasured past time might sound like the best way of sucking the life out of it. But I’m here to show you how this isn't the case. Join me on a quest through the best writings that can capture your imagination.
This compelling story reveals how a young little-known director called Kenneth Loach fought against the odds to produce a seismic shifting piece of television. Part documentary, part drama learn how a captivating story about a woman called Cathy losing custody of her children came to change British laws on homelessness.
Television can change the world and the fact Bloomsbury now only produces these delightful glossy page books exclusively on films rather than television, is nothing short of a disgrace.
?Cathy Come Home is one of the most influential and highly-regarded UK television dramas. First screened in 1966, it was a devastating indictment of government policy towards homelessness, and a powerful defence of the homeless. More than forty years on, it is still cited as one of the most important television dramas of all time. Screened in the BBC's groundbreaking Wednesday Play anthology series, Cathy was the first single UK television play to be made on film and shot substantially on location. Directed by Ken Loach and produced by Tony Garnett, the film had an immediate impact, recording unprecedented audience…
I’ve always been fascinated by film and television. No matter how challenging life can be at times, we're forever united by what stories captivate us on the gold and silver screens. Whatever challenges the world may throw at this type of storytelling be it a world war, the internet, Covid, or TikTok, nothing beats sitting down on your sofa to enjoy the finest entertainment the world has to offer. Critically studying our most treasured past time might sound like the best way of sucking the life out of it. But I’m here to show you how this isn't the case. Join me on a quest through the best writings that can capture your imagination.
This is my biggest inspiration for becoming an author right here.
James has a fantastically infectious writing style. Let his enthusiasm wash over you as he works his way through a plethora of fun and entertaining dramas that laced our television sets to evoke the world of possibility offered by the swinging sixties.
James ditches a typically dry academic writing style to pin down what made flamboyant crime fighters of The Avengers, The Saint, and The Persuaders, delectably enjoyable and still continue to inspire a cult following.
Eccentric, ironic and fantastic series like The Avengers and Danger Man, with their professional secret agents, or The Saint and The Persuaders, featuring flamboyant crime-fighters, still inspire mainstream and cult followings. Saints and Avengers explores and celebrates this television genre for the first time. Saints and Avengers uses case studies to look, for example, at the adventure series' representations of national identity and the world of the sixties and seventies. Chapman also proves his central thesis: that this particular type of thriller was a historically and culturally defined generic type, with enduring appeal, as the current vogue for remaking them…
I'm a London-based critic, author, and host whose love affair with film began after seeing The Lion King in the cinema as a kid. I trained as a journalist because I wanted to talk about the world. Since then I’ve been covering film and culture for the likes of Empire Magazine, Time Out, and IGN. I co-host MTV Movies and the weekly film reviews podcast Fade to Black; co-founder of The First Film Club event series and podcast, and am a member of London's Critics' Circle. I'm a voice for gender equality, diversity, and inclusion in the entertainment industry and an advocate for MENA representation as a writer of Tunisian heritage.
A massive influence on my own cultural approach to understanding cinema and intersectional representation, hooks offers acute analyses of the way films can affect us on a personal, political, and communal level, for better and for worse.
Hooks is smart, sharp, and switched on to how misogyny and racism can adversely affect the treatment of female characters of colour, especially.
Movies matter - that is the message of Reel to Real, bell hooks' classic collection of essays on film. They matter on a personal level, providing us with unforgettable moments, even life-changing experiences and they can confront us, too, with the most profound social issues of race, sex and class. Here bell hooks - one of America's most celebrated and thrilling cultural critics - talks back to films that have moved and provoked her, from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction to the work of Spike Lee. Including also her conversations with master filmmakers such as Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, Reel…
My dad instilled in me a love of, and respect for, history and an avid interest in golden-era Hollywood. In my adult life as a professional writer, that paternal guidance has translated into eight books about various aspects of old Hollywood, with a growing focus on the intersection of Hollywood and World War II. My career to date was punctuated by the international success of Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II, which detailed the future star’s very hard life in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation. Dad didn’t live long enough to know I’d written anything, let alone a number of books he would have enjoyed reading.
Leonard Maltin shot to prominence as a youth publishing the annual Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, with each new edition becoming an instant New York Times bestseller. Maltin also served a long stint as an on-air correspondent for Entertainment Tonight, where he earned backstage access to generations of movie stars.
His recently published memoir details his early obsession with the movies and then his slow but steady rise as one of Hollywood’s leading historians. I love this book most for its insights into the old stars that Maltin met—stars who knew him from his books and TV work and opened up about their own histories, making this book a valuable resource for film scholars.
Hollywood historian and film reviewer Leonard Maltin invites readers to pull up a chair and listen as he tells stories, many of them hilarious, of 50+ years interacting with legendary movie stars, writers, directors, producers, and cartoonists. Maltin grew up in the first decade of television, immersing himself in TV programs and accessing 1930s and ‘40s movies hitting the small screen. His fan letters to admired performers led to unexpected correspondences, then to interviews and publication of his own fan magazine. Maltin’s career as a free-lance writer and New York Times-bestselling author as well as his 30-year run on Entertainment…
I grew up addicted to portal stories, where fantastical lands full of magic and adventure are accessible from our mundane world if you just know where to look. Stories like The Neverending Story, Labyrinth, Alice in Wonderland, and The Chronicles of Narnia. My first novel, The Between, is a portal story like those but written more for adults–at least, for adults who are still young at heart. If you, too, like to daydream about slipping from your work cubicle into someplace strange and weird–and perhaps a little dangerous–here are books I think you might love.
That antique rug on the floor over there. What if a secret world is hidden within its countless knots and dyed threads? What if a fraying corner lets lose a creature trapped within? What if you step on it just so… and slip into a hidden world?
I read Weaveworld back in high school, shortly after it came out. It was my first Clive Barker novel and first adult, Alice in Wonderland-style, hidden world novel. I picked it up on a whim, and that whim changed the course of my life in many ways. I began writing in my spare time, inspired by Barker’s brilliant twists of words and by his surreal and haunting worlds.
Originally published in 1988. Set in contemporary England, two friends discover a secret magical world and are drawn into a battle between good and evil. From the author of EVERVILLE.
I am a British crime writer and am the winner of the CWA Debut Dagger and have been longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. I have been reading crime thrillers for most of my life and while I love reading about cops and detectives, I seem to have a special liking for amateur detectives, criminals with good hearts, and ex-cons. In my own novels, two crime thrillers set in west London, my main character, Zaq Khan, is an ex-con who gets caught up in dangerous situations and, along with his best friend, tries to get out of them alive. The books I’ve recommended have all inspired and influenced what I write.
Edward Bunker didn’t just talk the talk, he walked the walk, spending over 25 years in prison for various crimes including armed robbery.
That experience of life in and out of prison meant he knew exactly what he was writing about and the authenticity drips from the page.
No Beast So Fierce is a blistering tale about an ex-con trying his damndest to go straight while the pull of the criminal life tugs harder and harder at him.
It captures that life in all its rawness and brutality. Not an easy read, it’s not for the faint-hearted.
Quentin Tarantino was such a fan of the book he gave Edward Bunker the role of Mr. Blue in his movie, Reservoir Dogs.
'No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity' - Richard III, Act 1, Scene 2
An angry and mercilessly suspenseful novel about an ex-con's attempt to negotiate the "straight world" and his swan dive back into the paradoxical security of crime. It is airtight in its construction, almost photorealistic in its portrayal of L.A. lowlife and utterly knowledgeable about the terrors of liberty, the high of the quick score and the rage that makes the finger tighten on the trigger of the gun.
No Beast So Fierce was Eddie Bunker's debut novel and has the searing intensity of…
I believe that H.P. Lovecraft, only now appreciated at his full stature, has spawned a whole generation of equally brilliant writers who make modern weird horror the most vibrant, confrontational, and relevant of all current genres. He looms over today’s literature and pop culture like Cthulhu looms over the sea, and his heirs include some of the best writers of their generation. As a much-travelled Scottish writer, I’ve needed tools to tackle the chaotic, disorienting contemporary experience, as well as the darkest, most imaginative strains of my own Celtic legacy. Lovecraftian horror—through HPL’s explicit mythos or simply his implicit sensibility—served up the palette I needed to do that.
Laird Barron may be the Robert E. Howard of modern horror and weird fiction—or its Dashiell Hammett. So hard-boiled you could break rocks with it, his prose is ferociously energetic, brutally unsettling, and consummately capable of crafting its own phantasmagoric world. If Melville was resurrected and took to writing plots for Quentin Tarantino, the result might be Laird Barron. The Imago Sequence is among his best collections, but almost any of them is equally strong.
To the long tradition of eldritch horror pioneered and refined by writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti comes Laird Barron, an author whose literary voice invokes the grotesque, the devilish, and the perverse with rare intensity and astonishing craftsmanship.
Collected here for the first time are nine terrifying tales of cosmic horror, including the World Fantasy Award-nominated novella "The Imago Sequence," the International Horror Guild Award-nominated "Proboscis," and the never-before-published "Procession of the Black Sloth." Together, these stories, each a masterstroke of craft and imaginative irony, form a shocking cycle of distorted evolution, encroaching chaos, and…
Having lost relatives in the Holocaust, and also a scholar of twentieth-century history, I have a special interest in attempting to understand how Germany turned from one of the most literate and advanced countries into the barbarism we call Nazi Germany. In the course of teaching and writing for the past 50 years, I have written/edited some nine books on modern Jewish history-including four on the Holocaust and hundreds of articles and reviews in such publications as Virginia Quarterly, Tablet, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, The Forward, Midstream, Commonweal, Congress Monthly, Choice, among many other publications.
In my many years of teaching the Holocaust, I discovered that many students learn about the Holocaust from films. The problem is that many films are not accurate and in our age of Holocaust denial it is imperative that films be as accurate as possible in their depiction of the SHOAH. Browning’s book is by far the best available guide to films—the good, the bad, and the inaccurate, that depict the Holocaust.
Holocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. In fact, from 1945 through 1991, half of all American Holocaust features were nominated. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been commercially successful. This book explores these trends-and many others-with a comprehensive guide to hundreds of films and made-for-television movies.
From Anne Frank to Schindler's List to Jojo Rabbit, more than 400 films are examined from a range of…
