New Books in Film

Glasses are among the oldest and most commonplace prosthetics we have
invented. But what does it mean to wear glasses? There is more to the
answer than correcting vision. Glasses alter, enhance, and shield the
way that we view the world, and the way the world sees us.

Everyone has encounters with glasses, passively or actively, from
reading glasses to sunglasses. At times they are the main identifiers in
a face (think John Lennon), and they signify extremes from nerdy and
brainy to cool and sleazy. They are alternately the most mundane of
things on our bodies and potentially the most glamorous.

In this edition of the Object Lessons series, Glasses (Bloomsbury,
2026) by Adam Geczy explores this most pervasive and accessible
accessory and shows that it is both a conduit to and a barrier between
ourselves and the world outside.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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NB: This episode contains a discussion of suicide and
may not be appropriate for all listeners. If you are thinking about
hurting yourself, help is always available at 988 in the United States.

Suicide in Popular Media and Culture: Studies in Framing a Social Catastrophe
(Bristol University Press, 2026) brings together scholars from across
disciplines to examine how suicide is mythologized, politicized, and
challenged across film, TV, young adult literature, digital platforms,
online communities, and more. From news coverage of celebrity suicide to
social media interventions with at-risk youth, this wide-ranging
collection explores suicide’s intersections with class, gender, chronic
illness, and cultural identity.

The book is co-edited by Mike F. Alvarez (Assistant
Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire), Warren
J. Bareiss (Professor of Communication at the University of South
Carolina Upstate), and Jolane Flanigan (Professor of Communication
Studies at Rocky Mountain College and a licensed mental health
counselor).

Some Crisis Resources

*Note: some of these may utilize emergency services or law
enforcement to conduct wellness/welfare checks or active rescues. Ask if
these are possibilities at any point during your conversation.

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline

Website

Dial 988

The Trevor Project

Website

Provides support for LGBTQ+ youth facing crisis

1-866-488-7386

Text: 678678

Chat: Here

Crisis Text Line

Text HOME to 741-741

Trans Lifeline

1-877-565-8860 (U.S.)

1-877-330-6366 (Canada)

Warmline.org

Website

Contains links to warmlines in every state

Provides peer support

Find a Helpline

Website

For those not in the U.S. Search for links to crisis centers worldwide
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Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination
(MIT Press, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies
classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about
advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech,
military weaponry, and surveillance culture. Technothriller is
about the changing imagination of technology within an American context
and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of
modern life.

Soraya Murray
is a Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work explores the visual
culture of innovation, advanced computation, and its imaginaries as
imaged in popular American films, for which technology assumes a central
role. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback 2021), examines popular video games like Assassin’s Creed, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand Theft Auto as visual culture. She currently serves as Provost of Porter College, UCSC.
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Today’s guest, Krzysztof Rowiński, is the author of Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption: Twentieth Century Literature and Film
(Routledge, 2026). This book focuses on the concept of non- redemptive
failure, a type of failure that is not part of a larger narrative of
success or narrative redemption, with attention to how the concept
functions between literature, critical theory, and other fields.
Examining literature and film from mid- twentieth- century Poland,
Italy, and the United States, it traces productive effects of failure
which cannot survive into the future, yet have an important,
transformative impact in the moment in which they occur. The book
engages with the work of John Williams, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bruno
Jasieński, proposing a theory of failure at the intersection of literary
study, performance theory, and political thought. In discussing these
examples, the book examines the place of failure in the broader context
of modern and contemporary US American, Italian, and Polish literary and
cultural traditions.

Because of its interdisciplinary potential, this study might appeal
to readers in art history, philosophy, political theory, and other
fields within the humanities and social sciences. Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption
offers a framework that could not only spotlight the contribution of
literary studies to the topic, in the form of narrative analysis but
also become part of the theoretical apparatus for further research in
these fields.

Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance.
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Only a few Westerns contain explicitly Jewish stories or themes, and very rarely do Old West tales involve identifiably Jewish
characters. Yet Jewish contributors have shaped the Western—once
Hollywood's most popular genre—ever since the silent era, both onscreen
and offscreen, and some filmmakers have sought to infuse the genre with a
distinctly Jewish sensibility. In Chai Noon: Jews and the Cinematic Wild West (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), Friedmann
engages with larger themes of Jewish identity in popular film,
including depictions of race, ethnicity, and foreignness. He also
identifies similar concerns within the invention and creation of the
imaginary West writ large in American culture. The juxtapositions prove
to be both unexpected and intuitively understandable.
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