Results by title

5 books match the query 'Hunter'

cover of A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti

A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey

Popular Music and Power in Haiti

Gage Averill

University of Chicago Press, 1997

The history of Haiti throughout the twentieth century has been marked by oppression at the hands of colonial and dictatorial overlords. But set against this "day for the hunter" has been a "day for the prey," a history of resistance, and sometimes of triumph. With keen cultural and historical awareness, Gage Averill shows that Haiti's vibrant and expressive music has been one of the most highly charged instruments in this struggle—one in which power, politics, and resistance are inextricably fused.

Averill explores such diverse genres as Haitian jazz, troubadour traditions, Vodou-jazz, konpa, mini-djaz, new generation, and roots music. He examines the complex interaction of music with power in contexts such as honorific rituals, sponsored street celebrations, Carnival, and social movements that span the political spectrum.

With firsthand accounts by musicians, photos, song texts, and ethnographic descriptions, this book explores the profound manifestations of power and song in the day-to-day efforts of ordinary Haitians to rise above political repression.
[more]
cover of Shadow of the Hunter

Shadow of the Hunter

Richard K. Nelson

University of Chicago Press, 1983

Shadow of the Hunter is a collection of stories based upon Richard Nelson's experiences in an Eskimo village of the Tareogmiut, or "people of the sea." The stories follow a group of hunters and their families through the cycle of an arctic year. Each chapter takes the reader into a different realm of the Eskimo world—from the quiet moments of families in far-flung camps to the intensity and passion of the hunt; from the times of fear and danger to those of security, triumph, and celebration.
[more]
cover of The Hunter: A Parker Novel

The Hunter

A Parker Novel

Richard Stark

University of Chicago Press, 1962

Where it all begins: The first book in the action-packed classic crime series starring Parker, the heister who can't be stopped

Richard Stark's Parker novels are the hardest of hard-boiled, classic crime novels where the heists are huge, the body counts are high, and the bad guys usually win. 

The Parker novels have been a huge influence on countless writers and filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino, Stephen King, George Pelecanos, Colson Whitehead, Lucy Sante, John Banville, and many more. Their stripped-down language and hard-as-nails amorality create an unforgettable world where the next score could be the big one, but your next mistake could also be your last. There's nothing else like them.

The Hunter is where it all begin. It opens with Parker's woman shooting him just above the belt and leaving him for dead. She and his partner torch the house, with Parker in it, and take the money he had helped them steal. It all went down just the way they'd planned, except for one thing: Parker didn't die.

From there, our ruthless antihero roars into New York City, seeking revenge on the woman who betrayed him and on the man who took his money, stealing and scamming his way to redemption. The volume that kickstarted Parker's half-century career of larceny—and inspired the classic 1967 motion picture Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin—The Hunter is as thrilling today as it was when it was first published. Pick up your first Parker novel and you won't stop until you're read them all.
[more]
cover of The Life of a Hunter

The Life of a Hunter

Michelle Robinson

University of Iowa Press, 2005

Part detective novel, part cinematic saga, part street-smart narrative, the poems in The Life of a Hunter form a document of expedition that couples individual discovery with communal transformation. Michelle Robinson's characters are consigned to particular mechanisms of survival to various forms of physical and psychological evolutions--as a reaction to their search for an acceptable spiritual condition. The multiple identities of her pressured characters are susceptible to physical transformations that provide “a brief jolt of anesthesia, / instead of the cold tenderness of interruption.” Robinson uses the culture of film and fiction as an analogy for the world just out of reach and the world already at hand; preoccupied with what precision “sounds like,” the figures in her poems respond to the possibility of future change as well as the fact that change is a constant in their lives. “Don't misunderstand. It was the most cynical year of our era / and anything would have been better than to have been asked / to find something beautiful.” Robinson's is a strong young voice, detached and observant yet disturbingly present.
[more]
cover of The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film

The Night of the Hunter

A Biography of a Film

Jeffrey Couchman

Northwestern University Press, 2009

Reaching simultaneously into the realms of film and literature, this detailed exploration of The Night of the Hunter examines the genesis and the eclectic form of each work and the process of transformation by which the novel became a motion picture. It provides the first major study of the long-lost first-draft screenplay by James Agee and confronts a fifty-year controversy about the authorship of the film. This is a story of artistic convergence on many levels--of novelist and director, director and actor, and cinematic form and tastes. The novel, a 1953 debut from Davis Grubb, was a popular and critical success, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for four months. Hollywood responded to its atmospheric lyricism, and in the hands of first time director Charles Laughton, the book became a film that is equal parts thriller, allegory, and fever dream, filled with slow, inexorable suspense. On the set, Laughton functioned both as an auteur and a collaborator to create his vision of the book, mixing cinematic flourishes both realistic and abstract in sometimes tense situations. The talents that clashed or came together along the road from book to movie make the final film a product of rich stylistic contradiction and rewarding complexity. Through biography, production history, and critical analysis of the novel and film, author Jeffrey Couchman makes the case that this initially overlooked cinematic gem is a prismatic work that continually reveals new aspects of itself.

[more]