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4 books match the query 'Kill'

cover of How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters

How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters

Saúl Hernández

University of Wisconsin Press, 2024

One is never sure who the monsters are in these poems, only that the narrator desperately doesn’t want to be one. In his brilliant debut collection, Hernández explores grief, loss, identity, lineage, and belonging with grace, insight, and compassion. 

These pages are infused with comfort, with desire, with heartache. Never absent is love, family. Hernández—hyperaware of American society’s dismissal or hatred of people who look like him—writes with a refreshing confidence, a sure knowledge of who he is and where he comes from. Transcending any particular experience, this volume will continue to resonate with multiple readings.
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cover of Kill the Overseer!: The Gamification of Slave Resistance

Kill the Overseer!

The Gamification of Slave Resistance

Sarah Juliet Lauro

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

Explores the representation of slave revolt in video games—and the trouble with making history playable

Kill the Overseer! profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and “gamify” slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing plantation labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like tool-breaking or working slowly. Others dramatically stage the slave’s choice to flee enslavement and journey northward, and some depict outright violent revolt against the master and his apparatus. In this work, Sarah Juliet Lauro questions whether the reduction of a historical enslaved person to a digital commodity in games such as Mission US, Assassin’s Creed, and Freedom Cry ought to trouble us as a further commodification of slavery’s victims, or whether these interactive experiences offer an empowering commemoration of the history of slave resistance. 

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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cover of Reimagining "To Kill a Mockingbird": Family, Community, and the Possibility of Equal Justice under Law

Reimagining "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Family, Community, and the Possibility of Equal Justice under Law

Austin Sarat

University of Massachusetts Press, 2013

Fifty years after the release of the film version of Harper Lee's acclaimed novel To Kill a Mockingbird, this collection of original essays takes a fresh look at a classic text in legal scholarship. The contributors revisit and examine Atticus, Scout, and Jem Finch, their community, and the events that occur there through the interdisciplinary lens of law and humanities scholarship.

The readings in this volume peel back the film's visual representation of the many-layered social world of Maycomb, Alabama, offering sometimes counterintuitive insights through the prism of a number of provocative contemporary theoretical and interpretive questions. What, they ask, is the relationship between the subversion of social norms and the doing of justice or injustice? Through what narrative and visual devices are some social hierarchies destabilized while others remain hegemonic? How should we understand the sacrifices characters make in the name of justice, and comprehend their failures in achieving it?

Asking such questions casts light on the film's eccentricities and internal contradictions and suggests the possibility of new interpretations of a culturally iconic text. The book examines the context that gave meaning to the film's representation of race and how debates about family, community, and race are played out and reframed in law.

Contributors include Colin Dayan, Thomas L. Dumm, Susan Sage Heinzelman, Linda Ross Meyer, Naomi Mezey, Imani Perry, and Ravit Reichman.
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cover of To Kill a Spy: Everyday Nationalism and Political Violence in Fin-de-Siecle Europe

To Kill a Spy

Everyday Nationalism and Political Violence in Fin-de-Siecle Europe

Zachary Mazur

Central European University Press, 2026

On an August afternoon in 1910, a Polish nationalist gunned down an alleged Russian spy on the streets of Kraków. Afterward the murderer claimed that he had done a great deed for “Poland,” though no such country existed at the time. The press lionized the assassin, justifying his act as necessary for the defense of the nation. When the defendant stood trial, a jury composed of local citizens acquitted him, and he walked free.
How does an ordinary, working-class man transform into a political executioner? And how does a society reach the tipping point where premeditated murder is celebrated as a civic duty?
This gripping historical investigation unravels the environment and conditions of radicalization in fin-de-siècle Europe. Societal shifts, mass political movements, the popular press and espionage paranoia all contributed to a fearful community, wary of outsiders and ready to do anything to defend itself.
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