New Books in Performing Arts

Sinéad O'Connor, renowned for her angelic voice and activism, overcame a tumultuous upbringing to become a global protest singer and advocate for social justice. O'Connor achieved worldwide success as an angel-voiced, shaven-headed Irish singer of heartfelt songs, but she was far more than just a pop star - she was also an activist and a survivor. Reeling from a troubled childhood at the hands of her violent mother, she spent 18 months living in a former Magdalene Laundry due to her truancy and shoplifting, and suffered her mother's death in a car crash - all by the age of 18. Her pain, anger and compassion would turn her into one of the world's greatest protest singers and activists. She would release ten studio albums during her 36-year music career - the second of which (I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got) would reach number 1 across the world and earn her ten million pounds, half of which she gave to charity. During this time, she would also advocate for survivors of child abuse and racism, and stand up for the LGBT community and women's reproductive rights. Most notably, she would tear up a picture of Pope John Paul II during an episode of Saturday Night Live in order to protest at child sex abuse within the Catholic church, creating headlines around the world and derailing her career. The Real Sinéad O'Connor (White Owl, 2024) features six exclusive interviews with friends and peers who knew her, this is the true story of her extraordinary and courageous journey. Ariane Sherine’s website. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, Fall 2025). Bradley on Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Few towns in America are as famous as Woodstock, New York—although Woodstock may be most famous for an event that happened many miles away! Long before the 1969 Woodstock festival put the town on the map, it had been a center for artists and free thinkers who found refuge in its rural setting. Longtime citizens were often shocked by the arrival of these newcomers who brought new values and attitudes to their once-isolated village. From the transformative arrival of artists in the early twentieth century to the influx of musicians and young people in the 1960s, Woodstockers worked and struggled to balance everyday life in a small, rural community with the attention and notoriety the outside world brought to it.  Presented chronologically, Woodstock: From World War to Culture Wars (SUNY Press, 2024) examines the nature of change within Woodstock's uncommon story as it emerges from the Great Depression, confronts the realty of World War II, moves through the 1950s and into an unimagined and unintended future with the arrival of the Sixties through today. At its core, this is a story of how Woodstock's cultural and political institutions, its citizens, and its physical landscape met the ever-changing challenges of changing times. It is a story of community, resilience, conflict, and transition into a world its early settlers could not have imagined. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

The names are iconic and familiar to anyone in Minnesota with an interest in dance: the Andaházy School of Classical Ballet, Minnesota Dance Theatre, James Sewell Ballet, Saint Paul City Ballet, and many more. Minnesota dance insider Georgia Finnegan, with a decades-long career as a professional ballet dancer and administrator of several dance companies in the Twin Cities, has compiled for the first time a comprehensive and long overdue history of ballet in Minnesota. In a lively writing style that features entertaining and moving personal stories as well as factual accounts about ballet companies, dance schools, artistic visionaries, and the supporters who helped to make it possible, Finnegan has created a remarkable resource on this particular art form in a state renowned for its commitment to art and culture. From the international love story of Lorand and Anna Andaházy, to the Houltons and their beloved Nutcracker tradition, to the innovative Ballet of the Dolls, which brought new audiences to the dance performances, Grace & Grit introduces the major figures during more than eighty years of ballet in Minnesota, including companies and schools in Duluth, Rochester, Grand Rapids, and throughout the state as well as significant academic dance programs at several Minnesota colleges. Through numerous interviews and enhanced by her own experience and extensive connections, Finnegan presents her substantial in-depth research in a dynamic text that finally captures the successes, challenges, accomplishments, transitions, memorable performances, and fascinating people involved with the establishment and flourishing of ballet in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

ART! TRASH! TERROR! Adventures in Strange Cinema (Headpress 2025) by Chris Alexander is a treasure trove of in-depth essays and edifying interviews that celebrate some of the most eccentric and unforgettable movies in cult cinema history. From recognized classics (George A. Romero's Dawn Of The Dead, David Lynch's The Elephant Man) to misunderstood masterpieces (Michael Mann's The Keep, Boris Sagal's The Omega Man) to unfairly maligned curios (Kostas Karagiannis' Land Of The Minotaur, Brett Leonard's Hideaway), the author takes an alternately serious and playful but always personal look at several strains of international horror, dark fantasy, and exploitation film -- motion pictures that transform, transgress, challenge, infuriate, shock, and entertain. Connecting these passionate and critical essays are insightful interviews with revered talents, such as John Waters (writer/director, Cecil B. Demented), Michael Winner (director, The Sentinel), Nicolas Cage (actor, Vampire's Kiss), Gene Simmons (co-founder/bassist, KISS), William Crain (director, Blacula), William Lustig (director, Maniac), Werner Herzog (director, Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht) and many more, as well as witty, heartfelt memoirs charting the author's oddball experiences on the fringes of Hollywood and beyond. Illustrated with more than 200 startling photographs! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge. Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore. But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore? Post-Comedy (Polity, 2025) argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered. Alfie Bown is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at Kings College London. His research focuses on psychoanalysis, digital media and popular culture. He has also worked as a journalist, writing for The Guardian, Paris Review, New Statesman, Tribune, and others. His books include The Playstation Dreamworld, Post-Memes, and Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships. He is the founder of Everyday Analysis which publishes pamphlets and essay collections with contemporary social and political issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

George M. Cohan was one of those rare Broadway figures who was a composer, lyricist, playwright, performer, director, theater owner, and star actor. He could, quite literally, do it all. In his day, he was famous as the "Yankee Doodle Boy" from his hit song and as the "Man Who Owned Broadway" from his musical of the same name. Cohan's songs and shows captured the spirit of an era when staggering social change gave new urgency to efforts to define Americanism.  Elizabeth Craft’s Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage (Oxford University Press, 2024) is not a conventional biography. Each chapter explores a different aspect of his life and career including Cohan’s approach to American nationalism, Irish American identity, celebrity, and the entertainment business along with defining what made Cohan’s shows unique. Craft finds songs and shows that serve as exemplars for each theme she highlights. The book ends with an examination of the 1942 biopic on Cohan and his enduring legacy. Yankee Doodle Dandy offers not only a fuller understanding of Cohan’s shows and career, but also new perspectives on fundamental debates about American identity and the performing arts in the early twentieth-century United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

The Royal Albert Hall: Building the Arts and Sciences (Brepols, 2024) by Dr. Simona Valeriani takes one of London’s most iconic buildings and deconstructs it to offer new insights into the society that produced it. As part of the new cultural quarter built in South Kensington on the proceeds from The Great Exhibition of 1851, the Royal Albert Hall was originally intended to be a ‘Central Hall of Arts and Sciences’. Prince Albert’s overarching vision was to promote technological and industrial progress to a wider audience, and in so doing increase its cultural and economic reach. Lighting, ventilation, fireproofing, ‘ascending rooms’, cements, acoustics, the organ, the record-breaking iron dome, and the organisation of internal spaces were all attempts to attain progress - and subject to intense public scrutiny. From iron structures to terracotta, from the education of women to the abolition of slavery, in the making of the Royal Albert Hall scientific knowledge and socio-cultural reform were intertwined. This book shows, for the first time, how the Royal Albert Hall’s building was itself a crucible for innovation. Illustrious techniques from antiquity were reimagined for the new mechanical age, placing the building at the heart of a process of collecting, describing, and systematising arts and practices. At the same time, the Royal Albert Hall was conceived as a ‘manifesto’ of what the Victorians thought Britain ought to be, at a crucial moment of its socio-economic history: a symbolic cultural hub for the Empire’s metropole. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hollywood Unions (Rutgers UP, 2024) is a unique collection that tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized motion picture and television labor: IATSE, the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, and the WGA. The Hollywood unions represent a wide swath of the workers making media: from directors and stars to grips and makeup artists. People today know some of these organizations from their glitzy annual awards celebrations, but the unions’ actual importance is in bargaining with the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on behalf of 331,000 workers in the motion picture and television industry. The Hollywood unions are not neutral institutions but rather have long histories of jurisdictional battles, competitions with rival unions, and industry-altering strikes. They have supported the industry’s workers through the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy era, the collapse of the studio system, the rise of television, runaway production, fights for gender parity, the digital revolution, and a global pandemic. The history of these unions has contributed to making media work sustainable in the long term and helped shape the conditions and production cultures of Hollywood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Successful cult films like The Host and Snowpiercer proved to be harbingers for Bong Joon Ho's enormous breakthrough success with Parasite. In Bong Joon Ho (U Illinois Press, 2024), Joseph Jonghyun Jeon provides a consideration of the director's entire career and the themes, ambitions, techniques, and preoccupations that infuse his works. As Jeon shows, Bong's sense of spatial and temporal dislocations creates a hall of mirrors that challenges us to answer the parallel questions Where are we? and When are we?. Jeon also traces Bong's oeuvre from its early focus on Korea's US-fueled modernization to examining the entanglements of globalization in Mother and his subsequent films. A complete filmography and in-depth interview with the director round out the book. Insightful and engaging, Bong Joon Ho offers an up-to-date analysis of the genre-bending international director. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

The future ain't what it used to be. Is nostalgia revitalizing or killing 21st-century culture? The concept of nostalgia has seeped into almost all aspects of modern-day media, none more so than horror culture and its borderlands of Hauntology, Folk Horror, and found footage film. From film and TV franchises building endlessly on past glories, to musicians whose work now spans decades, modern media borrows heavily from the past. Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia examines the use and effect of nostalgia in the Horror and Hauntological realms. It asks why these genres hold such a fascination in popular culture, often inspiring devoted fanbases. From Candyman to The Blair Witch Project, and Dark Shadows to American Horror Story, are the folk horror and found footage phenomena significant artistic responses to political, social, and economic conditions, or simply an aesthetic rebranding of what has come before? How has nostalgia become linked to other concepts (psychogeography, residual haunting) to influence Hauntological music such as Boards of Canada, The Rowan Amber Mill, Hawksmoor, or The Caretaker? What can the 'urban wyrd' or faux horror footage tell us about our idealized past? And how will these cultures of nostalgia shape the future? Combining the author's analysis with first-hand accounts of fans and creators, this book offers a critical analysis of our cultural quest to recognize, resurrect, and lay to rest the ghosts of past and present, also summoning up those spectres that may haunt the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts