The Museum of Atheism.

It is Christmas Eve in a mountainous, isolated prison community, the day of the baby beauty pageant. Ava is the star attraction. She's six years old. Ava's older brother Jonny hears strange noises in the attic and sees his father go out late at night with a gun with their lodger, prison warden Leo. Daniel, a man who repairs sex dolls for a living, has just moved into the area and he is Ava's biggest fan. There are rabid, wild foxes roaming the area, terrorising the community. The action culminates in a bizarre fetish party at the local strip club, a fox cull and the death of Ava. Finally, the secrets of her life are revealed.

Writing Violence: the legal, moral and aesthetic Implications of creative non-fiction.

This essay began as a hybrid critical/creative paper that was presented as part of an all-female panel discussing the intersections between writing and extreme violence. My own paper was on the relationship between my creative nonfiction novel The Museum of Atheism and the real life murder of six-year-old beauty queen, JonBenet Ramsey. This essay is an attempt to represent the writing process of the creative nonfiction author, and to consider the ways in which critical theory can be used to highlight, or conversely obscure, fictional writing. In addition to considering the effect of using a real story, a true crime, as the basis for a semi-fictional work, this essay will also consider the relationship I had as a writer to my publisher, editor and agent, and their interventions in the writing process to ensure that facts were deliberately skewed or warped in order to avoid litigation. Finally, I will consider my own relationship to the material, and the impact that this had on the writing process.

Reproducing violence: Rihanna, Chris Brown and the aestheticisation of the Ciudad Juarez Femicides.

When Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte worked with MAC to create their Autumn/Winter 2010 makeup collection and based their ideas on the murdered women of Ciudad Juarez, there was a public and industry outcry which led to the withdrawal of cosmetics with names such as ‘Factory’ ‘Juarez’ and ‘Ghost Town’. Rodarte tapped into the borderland mythologies of Juarez and crated an illusory fantasy world which sought to simultaneously obliterate and venerate the dead women. One eyeshadow, ‘Bordertown’, appears to look like chunks of rotting flesh streaked with blood. The models for their catwalk show had hollow blackened eyes, green-white pallor and lips that had been bloodlessly ‘lip-erased’ with a product specifically designed for the purpose. In Spanish, maquillar is to make up, to assemble. The women in the factories are asked to repeat simple mechanical operations thousands of times a day to make up the products which will be sold by global corporations. At the same time their images are being assembled, made up and aestheticized to create a cosmetic erasure of the crimes which they are subject to. When two American women and a global company make profit from this dangerous cosmetic erasure in order to sell products, the borders between bodies, countries, art and crime become leaky through the act and the illusion of symbiosis between the women of Ciudad Juarez and the products they inspired is threatened by the haunting of exploitation. Since then, the situation has become more complex. Chris Brown got a neck tattoo, based, he says, on the promotional material produced by MAC for the Rodarte sisters campaign. The image, which is of a skull, bears a striking resemblance to the police photographs of his ex, and now current, girlfriend, superstar Rihanna. The controversy over gendered violence, race and exploitation, begun by Rodarte and MAC, came back, haunting, once again. This paper seeks to address these connections, and ask what happens when domestic violence collides with globalism, fashion and murder.

The 1969 Edition of Ulysses: the making of a Penguin Classic.

The status of Ulysses as a classic in the United Kingdom, and, more specifically, its adoption within the academic canon, resulted from its first publication as a paperback by the Penguin Press in 1969. The decisions that Penguin made about price, size, design, additional matter, and marketing were directed towards enhancing that status. This represented an abandonment of the previous markets for the novel: the avant-garde (and its two subsidiaries—the aspirant high-culture consumer and the fine-book collector) and the pornographic. A discussion of the nature of these markets is integrated with evidence drawn from archival sources.