Metro Movies: Cinematic Urbanism in Post-Mao China takes readers on a comprehensive tour of the urbanization of Chinese cinema. Focusing primarily on movies from the end of the twentieth century, it is the first single-authored work to explore the relationship between the changes in Chinese society—caused in part by the advent of postsocialism, the growth of cities, and globalization—and the transformation of Chinese cinema. Author Harry H. Kuoshu examines such themes as displacement, cinematic representation, youth subculture, the private emotional lives of emerging urbanites, raw urban realism, and the allegorical contrast of the city and the countryside to illustrate the artistic richness and cultural diversity of this cinematic genre.

Kuoshu discusses the work of director Huang Jianxin, whose films follow and critique China’s changing urban political culture. He dedicates a chapter to filmmakers who followed Huang and attempted to redefine the concept of art films to regain the local audience. These directors address Chinese moviegoers’ disappointment with the international adoption of Chinese art films, their lack of interest in conventional Chinese films, and their fascination with emerging audio-video media. A considerable amount of attention is given to films of the 1990s, which focus on the social changes surfacing in China, from the trend of hooliganism and the Beijing rock scene to the arrival of an urban pop culture lifestyle driven by expansionist commerce and materialism. Kuoshu also explores recent films that confront the seedier aspects of city life, as well as films that demonstrate how urbanization has touched every fiber of Chinese living.

Metro Movies illustrates how cinematic urbanism is no longer a genre indicator but is instead an era indicator, revealing the dominance of metropolitan living on modern Chinese culture. It gives new insight into contemporary Chinese politics and culture and provides readers with a better understanding of China’s urban cinema. This book will be an excellent addition to college film courses and will fascinate any reader with an interest in film studies or Chinese culture.

Broadway, the main street that runs through Robert Pinsky’s home town of Long Branch, New Jersey, was once like thousands of other main streets in small towns across the country. But for Pinsky, one of America’s most admired poets and its former Poet Laureate, this Broadway is the point of departure for a lively journey through the small towns of the American imagination. Thousands of Broadways explores the dreams and nightmares of such small towns—their welcoming yet suffocating, warm yet prejudicial character during their heyday, from the early nineteenth century through World War II.

The citizens of quintessential small towns know one another extensively and even intimately, but fail to recognize the geniuses and criminal minds in their midst. Bringing the works of such figures as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, and Preston Sturges to bear on this paradox, as well as reflections on his own time growing up in a small town, Pinsky explores how such imperfect knowledge shields communities from the anonymity and alienation of modern life. Along the way, he also considers how small towns can be small minded—in some cases viciously judgmental and oppressively provincial. Ultimately, Pinsky examines the uneasy regard that creative talents like him often have toward the small towns that either nurtured or thwarted their artistic impulses.

Of living in a small town, Sherwood Anderson once wrote that "the sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people." Passionate, lyrical, and intensely moving, Thousands of Broadways is a rich exploration of this crucial theme in American literature by one of its most distinguished figures.