“Twenty-five writers discuss attachments they formed for certain movies— ET , Shane and Rosemary's Baby acquire new significance and resonance after reading these inspired pieces of narrative nonfiction.”—John McFarland for Shelf Awareness Feminist critic and award-winning fiction writer Masha Tupitsyn and filmmaker/writer Brian Pera edit this dynamic collection of essays, short stories and poetry that plays with the trope that life imitates art by asking: if movie-watching has become in itself a primary source of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating? A diverse group of acclaimed thinkers, including Lynne Tillman, Rebecca Brown, Wayne Koestenbaum and Stephen Beachy, address topics ranging from the public death of gay porn star Joey Stefano to classic Hollywood Westerns, E.T. and Josef Von Sternberg. Life As We Show It provides a provocative and thoughtful perspective on the relationship between film and watcher and the experience of viewing life through screen-colored glasses. Other contributors include: Stephen Beachy, Robert Gluck, Fanny Howe, David Trinidad, Lidia Yuknavitch, Veronica Gonzalez, Kevin Killian, Myriam Gurba, Abdellah Taïa and Dodie Bellamy. "These passionate, vibrant essays, fragments and meditations burrow energetically into a rich and underexplored subject-how movies intersect with and interfere with and alter and define and sometimes even become our autobiographies. Staking out its turf in the netherland where film criticism meets personal history, Life As We Show It is by turns poignant and raunchy, heartfelt and creepy, and almost always provocative and inspiring. You'll leave its pages with a long list of movies to watch and rewatch, and a wealth of new ways to look at them." -Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood --Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of The New Hollywood " Life as We Show It , an anthology of essays, screenplays, and stories about watching movies . . . has the virtue of not treating life and cinema as obvious antagonists . . . One of the pleasures of this collection is that writing about movie viewing produces a cheerful and salutary indifference to conventional judgements of a film's 'importance'. . . 'Phone Home,' [is] Dodie Bellamy's story of her preoccupation with E.T. when her mother was dying of lung cancer. To watch as cinema's most famous stranded alien becomes by turns a figure for the narrator's alienation from her mother's body through illness and age, the alienation of the able bodied from boys like Matthew De Meritt, the boy with no legs who helped bring E.T. to life by walking on his hands, and finally an opportunity to reflect on what alien technologies like cinema can do to repair these rifts--is to have one's own ideas about how and why films matter to us completely and productively overturned. " --Nicola Evans --Film Comment ". . . this isn't just a book on film and feelings, it's actually kind of haunting in strange and lingering ways, like a silent, but heavy presence in the room. . . It's all very surreal, and equally disconcerting and concrete. The pieces move like scenes and vignettes themselves, flickering and shimmering in the dark, shining in and out until one can almost hear the lead frames of the film monotonically whipping against the takeup reel in an otherwise silent room." -- Michael Louis, Fanzine --Michael Louis, Fanzine "In these smart essays, plus a few short stories, a poem and a screenplay, 25 entries in all, contributors-smitten by cinema both contemporary and classic-cast a personal eye on a universal medium. They aren't reviewing films, though. Instead, these writers muse on how film and life are intertwined, how they find themselves on screen and how those screens in turn reflect them. Settle in with a box of Twizzlers and revel in the provocative thinking collected in this fresh take on popular culture." --Richard Labonte, Bookmarks ". . . these writers muse on how film and life are intertwined, how they find themselves on screen and how those screens in turn reflect them. Settle in with a box of Twizzlers and revel in the provocative thinking collected in this fresh take on popular culture." -- Gay & Lesbian Times "The connection between the movie and the viewer has grown more intimate than ever in recent years. No longer forced to leave the house to experience the great pleasures of the genre, viewers can now watch films--then watch them again and again--at their leisure. This collection of short stories, essays, and poetry compiled by Pera ( Troublemaker ) and Tupitsyn ( Beauty Talk & Monsters ) examines what it means to experience the world through the cinema. Starting by considering what kind of movies our lives are imitating, 25 authors, including Lynne Tillman, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Robert Gluck, show that movies have influenced the image of self and that what humans fe