Look Whos Morphing

Tom Cho's collection of fictions and fantasies is all about morphing and transformation. Through the shape-shifting, we follow the narrator on his surreal adventures, which include dirty dancing with Johnny Castle, a rambunctious encounter with TV's Dr Phil, a job as Whitney Houston's bodyguard and another as a Muppet, a period in service with the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music, a totally destructive outing as Godzilla, and that high octane performance as a Gulliver-sized cock rock singer, complete with cohort of tiny adoring girls. As these fantasies of identity, sexuality and power ...

First published to acclaim in Australia, Look Who's Morphing by Asian Australian writer Tom Cho is a funny, fantastical, often outlandish collection of stories firmly grounded in popular culture. Often with his family, the book's central character undergoes a series of startling physical transformations, shape-shifting through figures drawn from film and television, music and books, porn flicks and comics. He is Godzilla, a Muppet, a gay white male stud, and Whitney Houston's bodyguard; the Fonz, a robot, the von Trapp family's caretaker, a Ford Bronco 4x4—and in the book's lavish climax, a one-hundred-foot-tall guitar-wielding rock star performing for an adoring troupe of fans in Tokyo. Throughout the stories, there is a pervasive questioning of the nature of identity, whether cultural, racial, sexual, gender, or all of the above, and the way it is constructed in a world filled with the white noise of pop culture. Look Who's Morphing is a stylish, highly entertaining literary debut in which nothing—not even one's body—can be taken for granted. Tom Cho is a trans writer who began writing fiction in his mid teens in Australia, where he was influenced by the YA series Sweet Valley High. His stories have appeared in publications in Australia and elsewhere, and he has performed at events and festivals around the world, including in the award-winning show Hello Kitty, which combines literature with power ballads. Look Who's Morphing is his first book.

Morphing Wings Technologies: Large Commercial Aircraft and Civil Helicopters offers a fresh look at current research on morphing aircraft, including industry design, real manufactured prototypes and certification. This is an invaluable reference for students in the aeronautics and aerospace fields who need an introduction to the morphing discipline, as well as senior professionals seeking exposure to morphing potentialities. Practical applications of morphing devices are presented—from the challenge of conceptual design incorporating both structural and aerodynamic studies, to the most promising and potentially flyable solutions aimed at improving the performance of commercial aircraft and UAVs. Morphing aircraft are multi-role aircraft that change their external shape substantially to adapt to a changing mission environment during flight. The book consists of eight sections as well as an appendix which contains both updates on main systems evolution (skin, structure, actuator, sensor, and control systems) and a survey on the most significant achievements of integrated systems for large commercial aircraft. Provides current worldwide status of morphing technologies, the industrial development expectations, and what is already available in terms of flying systems Offers new perspectives on wing structure design and a new approach to general structural design Discusses hot topics such as multifunctional materials and auxetic materials Presents practical applications of morphing devices

An intoxicating, provocative novel of appetite, identity, and self-construction, Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland tells the story of an outsider, trapped between a painful past and a tenebrous future, in Europe's brightest and darkest city. Jed—young, gay, black, out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicago—flees to the city of his fantasies, a museum of modernism and decadence: Berlin. The paradise that tyranny created, the subsidized city isolated behind the Berlin Wall, is where he's chosen to become the figure that he so admires, the black American expatriate. Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and Auden, Jed arrives to chase boys and to escape from what it means to be a black male in America. But history, both personal and political, can't be avoided with time or distance. Whether it's the judgment of the cousin he grew up with and her husband's bourgeois German family, the lure of white wine in a down-and-out bar, a gang of racists looking for a brawl, or the ravaged visage of Rock Hudson flashing behind the face of every white boy he desperately longs for, the past never stays past even in faraway Berlin. In the age of Reagan and AIDS in a city on the verge of tearing down its walls, he clambers toward some semblance of adulthood amid the outcasts and expats, intellectuals and artists, queers and misfits. And, on occasion, the city keeps its Isherwood promises and the boy he kisses, incredibly, kisses him back.

Fans of Netflix's On My Block and readers of Elizabeth Acevedo and Angie Thomas will love this debut novel about a girl whose life is turned upside down after one local act of vandalism throws both her relationships and neighborhood into turmoil. Chinelo, or Nelo as her best friend Kate calls her, is all about her neighborhood Ginger East. She loves its chill vibe, ride-or-die sense of community, and the memories she has growing up there with her friends. Ginger East isn't what it used to be though. After a deadly incident at the local arcade, most of her friends' families moved away. Kate, whose family owns the local corner store, is still there and as long as that stays constant, Nelo's good. When Kate's parent's store is vandalized and the vandal still at large, Nelo is shaken to her core. And then the police and the media get involved and more of the outside world descends upon Ginger East with promises to "fix the neighborhood." Suddenly, Nelo finds herself in the middle of a drama unfolding on a national scale. Worse yet, Kate is acting strange. She's pushing Nelo away at the exact moment they need each other most. Now Nelo's entire world is morphing into something she hates and she must figure out how to get things back on track or risk losing everything--and everyone--she loves.

Two thousand years ago, Ovid asked his readers to imagine metamorphoses in which men and women became flowers and beasts. Today, before our cinema-savvy eyes, people melt and re-form as altogether new creatures: they "morph." This volume explores what digital morphing means -- both as a cultural practice specific to our times and as a link to a much broader history of images of human transformation. Meta-Morphing ranges over topics that include turn-of-the-century "quick-change" artists, Mesoamerican shamanic transformation, and cosmetic surgery; recent works such as Terminator 2, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Heavenly Creatures, and Forrest Gump; and the transformations imagined by Kafka, Proust, and Burroughs. The contributors look not only at the technical wizardry behind digital morphing, but also at the history and cultural concerns it expresses.

The first novel from the beloved actor and director. A baby is born with a coin in her hand. An orphan crafts a mysterious wooden object. The CEO of a large corporation is under extraordinary pressure. And on a remote island, a medicine man understands the meaning of all these events.

"A collection of ten short stories that all take place in the same day about kids walking home from school"--

AliOCOs father is a Turkish circus musician performing in Kabul when AliOCOs mother, a young pediatrician from Melbourne, meets him in a bar. He plays the trumpet, the saz, the flute, hears voices that urge him to violence, sees angels in the skies and djinns in the street, inscribes prayers and invocations on the walls of his room, and across the suburb. lgezer offers a remarkable portrait of this crazed visionary, a madman and a mystic, intoxicated with hashish and Sufism, who wrecks the family, but is also an enchanted being. AliOCOs mother has grown up on AustraliaOCOs outback frontiers OCo their courtship takes them from Afghanistan across Iran to Turkey and then to London where Ali is born. The novel is AliOCOs coming to terms with this meeting of two cultures that are at once so similar and so separate."

The volume explores the various intersections and interconnections of the self and popular music in fiction; it examines questions of musical taste and identity construction across decades, spaces, social groups, and cultural contexts, covering a wide range of literary and musical genres.