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The Haunted Life: and Other Writings
By Jack Kerouac Edited by Todd Tietchen. 2014
In late 1944, under rather mysterious circumstances, aspiring writer Jack Kerouac lost a novella-length manuscript titled The Haunted Life. …
Set in Galloway, a fictionalized version of Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, the coming-of-age story of Peter Martin--a character based on the author's recently departed friend Sebastian Sampas--tackles the pressing issues of the day. At home in the working-class town the summer before his sophomore year at Boston College, Peter finds himself conflicted. Like many Americans, Peter is unsure, suspended between the economic crisis of the previous decade and the impending US entry into World War II. In The Haunted Life, Peter struggles to define what he believes to be intellectually true and worthy of his life and talents. Skillfully edited by Todd F. Tietchen, assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell,The Haunted Life is rounded out by sketches, notes, and reflections Kerouac kept during the novella's composition as well as a revealing selection of correspondence with his father, Leo.That Summer
By David French. 2000
It's Memorial Day, 1990, and Margaret Ryan has returned from Vermont to the Ontario cottage country where, thirty-two years before,…
she had vacationed with her disintegrating family at a lakeside resort. For herself and her sister Daisy, it was a time of awakening, a time of discovery. Both of the girls fall in love with two of the local boys. Daisy, on the lookout for action, cruising the dances at the resort, can't deal with what she initiates, and falls victim to her own confusion and naiveté. Not even the neighbour, the eccentric, bourbon-drinking, cigar-smoking Mrs. Crump, who knows all the fairy-tale spells to capture the heart of a lover, can save Daisy from drowning in her own misadventure. At the same time, Margaret, bookish and withdrawn, inhabiting a universe defined by poets and novelists, is seduced in spite of herself. As Margaret, the narrator, watches Maggie, her younger self, relive the innocence and beauty of that summer, the play moves inexorably back to the heartbreak of a headlong surrender to experience, both won and lost in a single day. Cinematic in its feel and pacing, recalling the 1950s genre of Dirty Dancing and My American Cousin, That Summer is a meditation on what endures of fleeting moments over time. Cast of 5 women and 2 men.Kafka's Hat
By Chantal Bilodeau, Patrice Martin. 2013
Multiple plot lines interweave with twentieth-century literary allusions as hapless bureaucrat P. attempts to secure delivery of a valuable cultural…
relic. Patrice Martin's ticklish tip of the hat to the writing of Franz Kafka also evokes the literary techniques of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Paul Auster.Polymath Patrice Martin is a writer, musician, and politician who is a former clerk in Canada's House of Commons, and currently is a Gatineau city councilor. He confesses his working life in government bureaucracy helped shape this, his first novel.Chantal Bilodeau is a New York-based playwright and translator originally from Montreal, Quebec.Bordertown Café
By Kelly Rebar. 2003
Seventeen-year-old Jimmy faces the archetypal Canadian dilemma: stay home in Canada, with all its obvious flaws, or go south (young…
man) to the Land of Opportunity. Should he stay with his mother at the Bordertown Café or haul off with his trucker father? Family history is the border's story writ large. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby (The cambridge Edition Of The Works Of F. Scott Fitzgerald Ser.)
By F. Scott Fitzgerald. 1925
"Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's Trimalchio, an early and complete version of The Great Gatsby, is like listening to a familiar…
musical composition played in a different key and with an alternate bridge passage... There is a tradition in Fitzgerald studies that The Great Gatsby became a masterpiece in revision. This judgment is correct. Fitzgerald improved the novel in galleys; The Great Gatsby is a better novel than Trimalchilo. But Trimalchilo is a remarkable achievement, and different enough from Gatsby to merit consideration on its own. Trimalchilois a direct and straightforward narration of the story of Jay Gatsby, NIck Carraway, Jordan Baker, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, and Myrtle and George Wilson. The handling of plot details is sure-handed; the writing is graceful and confident. Trimalchilowill provide readers with new understanding of F. Scott Fitzgerald's working methods, fresh insight into his characters, and renewed appreciation of his genius." From the introduction.Twelve Angry Men: A Screen Adaptation, Directed By Sidney Lumet (Student Editions Ser.)
By Reginald Rose. 1997
The Penguin Classics debut that inspired a classic film and a current Broadway revival Reginald Rose's landmark American drama was…
a critically acclaimed teleplay, and went on to become a cinematic masterpiece in 1957 starring Henry Fonda, for which Rose wrote the adaptation. A blistering character study and an examination of the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check, Twelve Angry Men holds at its core a deeply patriotic belief in the U. S. legal system. The story's focal point, known only as Juror Eight, is at first the sole holdout in an 11-1 guilty vote. Eight sets his sights not on proving the other jurors wrong but rather on getting them to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way not affected by their personal biases. Rose deliberately and carefully peels away the layers of artifice from the men and allows a fuller picture of America, at its best and worst, to form. .In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
By Marcel Proust, William C. Carter. 2015
Edited and annotated by leading Proust scholar William Carter, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is the second…
volume of one of the twentieth century's great literary triumphs.  It was this volume that won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, affirming Proust as a major literary figure and dramatically increasing his fame. Here the narrator whose childhood was reflected in Swann's Way moves further through childhood and into adolescence, as the author brilliantly examines themes of love and youth, in settings in Paris and by the sea in Normandy. The reader again encounters Swann, now married to his former mistress and largely fallen from high society, and meets for the first time several of Proust's most memorable characters: the handsome, dashing Robert de Saint-Loup, who will become the narrator's best friend; the enigmatic Albertine, leader of the "little band" of adolescent girls; the profoundly artistic Elstir, believed to be Proust's composite of Whistler, Monet, and other leading painters; and, making his unforgettable entrance near the end of the volume, the intense, indelible Baron de Charlus.  Permeated by the "bloom of youth" and its resonances in memories of love and friendship, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower takes readers into the heart of Proust's comic and poetic genius. As with Swann's Way, Carter uses C. K. Scott Moncrieff's beloved translation as the basis for this annotated and fully revised edition. Carter corrects long-standing errors in Scott Moncrieff's otherwise superlative translation, bringing it closer than ever to the spirit and style of Proust's original text--and reaching English readers in a way that the Pléiade annotations cannot. Insightful and accessible, Carter's edition of Marcel Proust's masterwork will be the go-to text for generations of readers seeking to understand Proust's remarkable bygone world.Two Old Women
By Velma Wallis. 1993
Based on an Athabascan Indian legend passed along for many generations from mothers to daughters of the upper Yukon River…
Valley in Alaska, this is the suspenseful, shocking, ultimately inspirational tale of two old women abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine. Though these women have been known to complain more than contribute, they now must either survive on their own or die trying. In simple but vivid detail, Velma Wallis depicts a landscape and way of life that are at once merciless and starkly beautiful. In her old women, she has created two heroines of steely determination whose story of betrayal, friendship, community, and forgiveness "speaks straight to the heart with clarity, sweetness, and wisdom" (Ursula K. Le Guin).A Feeling for Books
By Janice A. Radway. 1967
Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study…
of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird. Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading.Rodney's Wife
By Richard Nelson. 2006
"A full emotional geography of a family . . . Seemingly light conversation scrapes the skins of the characters in…
this sharply etched study of dislocation, loneliness and sexual betrayal."--Ben Brantley, The New York Times"Nelson is a master of the quiet detail, of the oblique rhythm that transforms emotional diffidence into fascinating character."--Linda Winer, Newsday"The early scenes proceed with the closely observed simplicity of Chekhov, whereas the later more wrenching moments evoke the eloquent bitterness of Albee."--David Cote, TimeOut New YorkA new work by leading American playwright Richard Nelson, who for more than 25 years has written prolifically, and with fine detail, on the perplexities of everyday living. In Rodney's Wife, a fading American actor in Rome for the filming of a 1960s spaghetti Western gathers with family and friends at a rented villa. Over the course of one booze-soaked summer night, jealousies and secrets are revealed that crumble the foundations of their relationships. Inspired by Euripides, the play is a tragedy of exiles who continue to need each other, even as they push away.Richard Nelson won Britain's Olivier Award for Best Play for Goodnight Children Everywhere, and the Tony Award for Best Book for his musical James Joyce's The Dead. His plays have been widely produced in the U.S. and Great Britain. He is an Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Chair of the Playwriting Department at the Yale School of Drama.Junk: A Play
By Ayad Akhtar. 2017
*Now on Broadway at Lincoln Center starring Steven Pasquale* From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced, a fast-paced economic thriller…
that exposes the financial deal making behind the mergers and acquisitions boom of the 1980s.Set in 1985, Junk tells the story of Robert Merkin, resident genius of the upstart investment firm Sacker Lowell. Hailed as "America's Alchemist," his proclamation that "debt is an asset" has propelled him to a dizzying level of success. By orchestrating the takeover of a massive steel manufacturer, Merkin intends to do the "deal of the decade," the one that will rewrite all the rules. Working on his broadest canvas to date, Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar chronicles the lives of men and women engaged in financial civil war: insatiable investors, threatened workers, killer lawyers, skeptical journalists, and ambitious federal prosecutors. Although it's set 40 years in the past, this is a play about the world we live in right now; a world in which money became the only thing of real value.The Captain's Daughter: And Other Stories
By Alexander Pushkin, Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler. 1957
Famous for his enormously influential poetry and plays, Alexander Pushkin is also beloved for his short stories. This collection showcases…
his tremendous range, which enabled him to portray the Russian people through romance, drama, and satire. The sparkling humor of the five "Tales of Belkin" contrasts with a dark fable of gambling and obsessive greed in "The Queen of Spades" and the masterful historical novella, "The Captain's Daughter," a story of love and betrayal set during a rebellion in the time of Catherine the Great.Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
By Michael Henry Heim, Bohumil Hrabal, Adam Thirlwell. 1964
Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal's rambling, rambunctious masterpiece Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in…
Age is all these and more. Speaking to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roué tells the story of his life--or at least unburdens himself of a lifetime's worth of stories. Thus we learn of amatory conquests (and humiliations), of scandals both private and public, of military adventures and domestic feuds, of what things were like "in the days of the monarchy" and how they've changed since. As the book tumbles restlessly forward, and the comic tone takes on darker shadings, we realize we are listening to a man talking as much out of desperation as from exuberance. Hrabal, one of the great Czech writers of the twentieth century, as well as an inveterate haunter of Prague's pubs and football stadiums, developed a unique method which he termed "palavering," whereby characters gab and soliloquize with abandon. Part drunken boast, part soul-rending confession, part metaphysical poem on the nature of love and time, this astonishing novel (which unfolds in a single monumental sentence) shows why he has earned the admiration of such writers as Milan Kundera, John Banville, and Louise Erdrich.Fuenteovejuna
By Lope De Vega. 2010
Lope de Vega "single-handedly created the Spanish national theatre," writes Roberto González Echevarría in the introduction to this new translation…
of Fuenteovejuna. Often compared to Shakespeare, Molière, and Racine, Lope is widely considered the greatest of all Spanish playwrights, and Fuenteovejuna (The Sheep Well) is among the most important Spanish Golden Age plays. Written in 1614, Fuenteovejuna centers on the decision of an entire village to admit to the premeditated murder of a tyrannical ruler. Lope masterfully employs the tragicomic conventions of the Spanishcomediaas he leavens the central dilemma of the peasant lovers, Laurencia and Frondoso, with the shenanigans of Mengo, thegraciosoor clown. Based on an actual historical incident,Fuenteovejuna offers a paean to collective responsibility and affirmation of the timeless values of justice and kindness. Translator G.J. Racz preserves the nuanced voice and structure of Lope de Vega's text in this first English translation in analogical meter and rhyme. Roberto González Echevarría surveys the history ofFuenteovejuna, as well as Lope's enormous literary output and indelible cultural imprint. Racz's compelling translation and González Echevarría's rich framework bring this timeless Golden Age drama alive for a new generation of readers and performers.The Country House
By Donald Margulies. 2015
"Margulies is literate and intellectually stimulating. His ideas and language hold our attention and earn our respect."--New York"Donald Margulies has…
an unerring sense of language and the ability to penetrate deeply into the darkness of tangled human emotions."--VarietyGathering in their Berkshire home, a family of actors wrestles with fame, art, and (as always) each other. Brought back together for a melancholy purpose, the solemnity is quickly undercut by restless egos and inflamed temperaments. When the events of the weekend go off-script, secrets are spilled and bonds are broken. Inspired by--and often directly referencing -Chekhov's pastoral comedies, this witty and compelling new comedy unfolds in a fragile old home brimming with memories, new love, and discarded dreams.A funny and poignant comedy about a family of actors, from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies.Donald Margulies has won a Lucille Lortel Award, an American Theatre Critics Award, two Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards, two Obie Awards, two Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Awards, one Tony Award nomination, six Drama Desk Award nominations, two Pulitzer Prize nominations, and one Pulitzer Prize. His works have been performed on and off Broadway, and at major theaters across the United States, as well as a host of international cities.Death of a Salesman
By Arthur Miller, Gerald Weales. 1977
The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman's deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of…
a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity--and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room."By common consent, this is one of the finest dramas in the whole range of the American theater." --Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times"So simple, central, and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it." --TimeComplete Works of William Shakespeare: The Cambridge Text From The Latest Edition Of William Aldis Wright... (Leather-bound Classics)
By William Shakespeare, Michael A. Cramer. 2014
Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth-the works of William Shakespeare still resonate in our…
imaginations four centuries after they were written. The timeless characters and themes of the Bard's plays fascinate us with their joys, struggles, and triumphs, and now they are available in a special volume for Shakespeare fans everywhere.This Canterbury Classics edition of William Shakespeare's works includes all of his poems and plays in an elegant, keepsake edition. Whether for a Shakespeare devotee or someone just discovering him, this is the perfect place to experience the drama of Shakespeare's words. A scholarly introduction provides additional context and insight into the poems and plays.Lexile score: NPSeverina
By Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Chris Andrews. 2014
“Right from the start I picked her for a thief, although that day she didn’t take anything. . . .…
I knew she’d be back,” the narrator/bookseller of Severina recalls in this novel’s opening pages. Imagine a dark-haired book thief as alluring as she is dangerous. Imagine the mesmerized bookseller secretly tracking the volumes she steals, hoping for insight into her character, her motives, her love life. In Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s hands, this tale of obsessive love is told with almost breathless precision and economy. The bookstore owner is soon entangled in Severina’s mystery: seductive and peripatetic, of uncertain nationality, she steals books to actually read them and to share with her purported grandfather, Señor Blanco. In this unsettling exploration of the alienating and simultaneously liberating power of love, the bookseller’s monotonous existence is rocked by the enigmatic Severina. As in a dream, the disoriented man finds that the thin border between rational and irrational is no longer reliable. Severina confirms Rey Rosa’s privileged place in contemporary world literature.The Last Days of Mankind
By Karl Kraus, Edward Timms, Fred Bridgham. 2015
One hundred years after Austrian satirist Karl Kraus began writing his dramatic masterpiece, "The Last Days of Mankind "remains as…
powerfully relevant as the day it was first published. Kraus's play enacts the tragic trajectory of the First World War, when mankind raced toward self-destruction by methods of modern warfare while extolling the glory and ignoring the horror of an allegedly "defensive" war. This volume is the first to present a complete English translation of Kraus's towering work, filling a major gap in the availability of Viennese literature from the era of the War to End All Wars. Bertolt Brecht hailed "The Last Days" as the masterpiece of Viennese modernism. In the apocalyptic drama Kraus constructs a textual collage, blending actual quotations from the Austrian army's call to arms, people's responses, political speeches, newspaper editorials, and a range of other sources. Seasoning the drama with comic invention and satirical verse, Kraus reveals how bungled diplomacy, greedy profiteers, Big Business complicity, gullible newsreaders, and, above all, the sloganizing of the press brought down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the dramatization of sensationalized news reports, inurement to atrocities, and openness to war as remedy, today's readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction.August: Osage County
By Tracy Letts. 2008
Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama"A tremendous achievement in American playwriting: a tragicomic populist portrait of a tough…
land and a tougher people."--Time Out New York"Tracy Letts' August: Osage County is what O'Neill would be writing in 2007. Letts has recaptured the nobility of American drama's mid-century heyday while still creating something entirely original."--New York magazineOne of the most bracing and critically acclaimed plays in recent Broadway history, August: Osage County is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family at its finest--and absolute worst. When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed. After its sold-out Chicago premiere, the play has electrified audiences in New York since its opening in November 2007.Tracy Letts is the author of Killer Joe, Bug, and Man from Nebraska, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been performed throughout the country and internationally. A performer as well as a playwright, Letts is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where August: Osage County premiered.