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Showing 1 - 20 of 84 items
By Mary Hoffman. 2015
Emily Crawford, a young American wife and mother, seeks a long-overdue self-respect in this absorbing and dramatic portrait of an…
expatriate family experi-encing life in an exotic Arab culture at the start of the 1960s. Revelatory episodes unfold against the enter¬tainments of the well-to-do and influential, among the lives of ordinary citizens, and during explorations of ancient cities in the Holy Land and beyond.By Laurent Gounelle. 2012
At the end of a holiday in Bali Julian an unhappy schoolteacher decides to meet a renowned local…
healer Samtyang Through daily sessions at the wise man s house he begins to identify the source of his unhappiness as a series of simple questions and answers point to his own limiting beliefs and fears Day after day their dialogue is punctuated by live examples and challenges Julian is asked to experience on the island s mainland and its surroundings From international best-selling author Laurent Gounelle The Man Who Wanted to be Happy explores the world of new possibilities that are open to us when we discover how to break free of what prevents us from being truly happyBy 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. .By Michelle Latiolais. 2011
BELIEVER BOOK AWARD FINALIST"In prose shimmering with intelligence and compassion, Michelle Latiolais dissects the essentials of everyday life to find…
the heartbeat within."-Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones"Widow is a hymn to reverence, simultaneously heartbroken and celebratory. Michelle Latiolais has given us the rarest item, a splendidly articulated masterpiece." -William Kittredge"In this luminous collection of stories, the gifted Michelle Latiolais writes of loss in all its surprising manifestations. Widow is a devastation and a wonder." -Christine Schutt"There is something mysterious about this book, as there always is in the writing that matters most. It eludes explanation. It illumines terrifying realities. Only because these pages seem nakedly willing to take the imprint of every emotion, no matter how ugly, do they possess this great beauty." -Elizabeth TallentThe stories of Widow conjure the nuances of inner sensations as if hitting the notes of a song, deftly played across human memory. These meditations bravely explore the physiology of grief through a masterful interweaving of tender insight and unflinching detail-reminding us that the inner life is best understood through the medium of storytelling. Among these stories of loss are interwoven other tales, creating a bridge to the ineffable pleasures and follies of life before the catastrophe. Throughout this collection, Latiolais captures the longing, humor, and strange grace that accompany life's most transformative chapters.Michelle Latiolais is the author of Widow: Stories, a New York Times Editor's Choice selection, and two previous novels, including A Proper Knowledge, also published by Bellevue Literary Press. She is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California and an English professor and co-director of the Programs in Writing at the University of California at Irvine.By Howard Scott, Madeleine Gagnon, Phyllis Aronoff. 2012
Is an artist born, or rather, created by experience? From the moment in childhood when he is forced to take…
drastic action to defend his adoptive mother from a violent assault - the only maternal figure that he has ever known - it is evident that the life of Joseph Sully-Jacques is to be no ordinary life, and one marked by sorrow and adversity.Unable to cope with or even recognize the residual effects of his trauma in adolescence, Joseph retreats into an increasingly abstract world, one in which he must confront what he calls his "visions." And when he hears of the death of his natural mother, this brings to the surface memories he had hoped were buried deep within him, and precipitates the form of various crises to come, particularly as he discovers and makes use of the artistic abilities revealed to his family during his psychiatric evaluation.After many more hardships, the young man does find meaning to the absurdities of life, ironically in the asylum, where he meets a virtuoso pianist whose condition prevents her from continuing to exercise her talents. They heal together through their mutual love, which will soon subsist upon nothing but memory and absence. During mournful years of raising his son alone, in his extensive adversaria, Joseph sets out to reconcile the contradictory themes in his life, including abandonment, madness, love, and death.In spare, lucid prose, and in a style reminiscent of André Gide, Madeleine Gagnon invites the reader to experience the creation and development of an artist "in his own words" - Joseph's gelid journal entries that are to become emphatic poetic laments - in a novel that chronicles the extreme destitution of Quebec in the years before World War Two and in abstract developing forms of artistic expression after years of uncertainty and loss.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.By Charlie Quimby. 2013
Leonard Self has spent a year unwinding his ranch, paying down debts, and fending off the darkening. Just one thing…
left: taking his wife's ashes to her favorite overlook, where he plans to step off the cliff with her into a stark and beautiful landscape. But Leonard finds he has company on a route that intertwines old wounds and new insights that make him question whether his life is over after all."Part modern western, part mystery, this first novel will appeal to fans of Louise Erdrich and Kent Haruf. Quimby's prose reads so true, it breaks the heart."-BOOKLIST, starred review"The Colorado setting and the author's simple style of prose perfectly complement the complexity of the human spirit in this superb debut."-PUBLISHERS WEEKLY"Monument Road is so rich with landscape, character and event that such a small telling cannot begin to do it justice. Read this exquisite story; it is a joy and a wonder and a tour de force of authorship."-SHELF AWARENESS"Quimby's storytelling, his humane impulses and his lyrical passages on the meaning of love and time, and on the history, geology and botany of the region, will surely impress readers."-MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE"Quimby uses words as spare as Colorado's landscape to describe characters who range from endearing to crusty, wise to foolish, spiritual to downright evil. The folks who live near Monument Road aren't just descriptions in a book; they're complex people readers will care about."--FOREWORD REVIEWS"Not to be overlooked is the love, humor and friendship among pain and loss, which makes it a book far more about the richness of life than the finality of death."-GRAND JUNCTION DAILY SENTINEL"Monument Road is a wonderful novel full of wit and wisdom, generosity and malice."-GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS"Quimby's writing is sensitive and graceful; he has a talent for revealing slowly blossoming characters who are beautifully flawed and realistic."-THE DESERET NEWS"While not exactly a happy novel, Monument Road is beautiful and real, full of landscape imagery of the American Southwest as a poignant and sometimes haunting metaphor of our connections to the land."-15 BYTES"This is a novel with size and scope and generosity, with an acute understanding of human nature and a deep appreciation for the ways people face change and work out their lives in relation to each other."-Kent Meyers, author of Twisted Tree and The Work of Wolves"In prose that might have been chiseled from the magnificent landscape he describes, Charlie Quimby has written a great big American Novel. Full of pathos and humor and sadness, you won't reach the end of this book without feeling fuller and wiser. What a gift Charlie has given us."-Peter Geye, author of The Lighthouse Road and Safe from the Sea"Monument Road is a legitimate modern western, complete with an impressively authentic and aging rancher, heartache, ghosts, low-lifes, a rural landscape undergoing radical transformation, a glut of evangelical churches, and the ancient, powerful cliffs and mesas that surround it all, in southwestern Colorado. The narrative is likewise unpredictable and wild! A pleasure to read."-Bonnie Nadzam, author of Lamb"The landscape and characters of Monument Road ring true. Charlie Quimby has created a story that is hard to forget. His attention to the details of a fading life and life style are spot on and will be a window to any reader's understanding of the central phenomenon of the New West."-Dan O'Brien, author of Stolen Horses and Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch"Monument Road is a big-hearted novel chock full of memorable characters, a pleasure to read."-David Rhodes, author of Jewelweed and DriftlessBy 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." --TimeBy K. E. Semmel, Naja Marie Aidt. 2015
"The emotions unleashed in this tale . . . are painfully universal. Yet you know exactly where in the universe…
you are. This is the hallmark of great short stories, from Chekhov's portraits of discontented Russians to Joyce's struggling Dubliners."-Radhika Jones, TimeNaja Marie Aidt's long-awaited first novel is a breathtaking page-turner and complex portrait of a man whose life slowly devolves into one of violence and jealousy.Rock, Paper, Scissors opens shortly after the death of Thomas and Jenny's criminal father. While trying to fix a toaster that he left behind, Thomas discovers a secret, setting into motion a series of events leading to the dissolution of his life, and plunging him into a dark, shadowy underworld of violence and betrayal.A gripping story written with a poet's sensibility and attention to language, Rock, Paper, Scissors showcases all of Aidt's gifts and will greatly expand the readership for one of Denmark's most decorated and beloved writers.Naja Marie Aidt was born in Greenland and raised in Copenhagen. She is the author of seven collections of poetry and five short story collections, including Baboon (Two Lines Press), which received the Nordic Council's Literature Prize and the Danish Critics Prize for Literature. Rock, Paper, Scissors is her first novel.K. E. Semmel is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in Ontario Review, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. His translations include books by Karin Fossum, Erik Valeur, Jussi Adler-Olsen, and Simon Fruelund.By Anne Fadiman, Marina Keegan. 2014
An affecting and hope-filled posthumous collection of essays and stories from the talented young Yale graduate whose title essay captured…
the world's attention in 2012 and turned her into an icon for her generation. Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, "The Opposite of Loneliness," went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord. Even though she was just twenty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assemblage of Marina's essays and stories that, like The Last Lecture, articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.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: NPBy 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.By Jack Kerouac, Todd Tietchen, Jean-Christophe Cloutier. 2016
In On the Road and other iconic works, Jack Kerouac created a quintessentially American voice and a revolutionary prose style.…
This remarkable gathering of previously unpublished writings reveals as never before the extraordinary literary journey that led to his phenomenal success—a journey with deep roots in the language and culture of Kerouac’s French Canadian childhood.Edited and published with unprecedented access to the Kerouac archives, The Unknown Kerouac presents two lost novels, The Night Is My Woman and Old Bull in the Bowery, which Kerouac wrote in French during the especially fruitful years of 1951 and 1952. Discovered among his papers in the mid-nineties, they have been translated into English for the first time by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, who incorporates Kerouac’s own partial translations.Also included are two journals from the heart of this same crucial period. In Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log, Kerouac recounts a brief stay in Denver—where he works on an early version of On the Road, reads dime novels, and even rides in a rodeo—and shows him contemplating writers like Chaucer and Joyce and playing with riddles and etymologies. Journal 1951, begun during a stay in a Bronx VA hospital, charts, in ecstatic, moving, and self-revealing pages, the wave of insights and breakthroughs that led Kerouac to the most singular transformation of American prose style since Hemingway. This landmark volume is rounded out with the memoir Memory Babe, a poignant evocation of childhood play and reverie in a robust immigrant community, in which Kerouac uncannily retrieves and distills the subtlest sense impressions. And finally, in an interview with his longtime friend and fellow Beat John Clellon Holmes and in the late fragment Beat Spotlight Kerouac reflects on his meteoric career and unlooked for celebrity.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.By Katharine Dion. 2018
One of TIME magazine's best summer reads, a "wise" (Entertainment Weekly) and "resplendent" (O, The Oprah Magazine) debut that follows…
a new widower confronting the truth about his long marriageOne of the best books of the summer: TIME, Entertainment Weekly, O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Brit + Co."A fine debut, full of intelligent writing . . . This book pleases on many levels." --Jeffrey Eugenides"The Dependents is a big book, one that grapples with important questions through generations...Dion's intelligence and ambition truly shine through sentence after sentence." --Kate Walbert, National Book Award finalist and author of A Short History of WomenAfter the sudden death of his wife, Maida, Gene is haunted by the fear that their marriage was not all it appeared to be. Alongside Ed and Gayle Donnelly, friends since college days, he tries to resurrect happy memories of the times the two couples shared, raising their children in a small New Hampshire town and vacationing together at a lake house every summer. Meanwhile, his daughter, Dary, challenges not only his happy version of the past but also his view of Maida. As a long-standing rift between them deepens, Gene starts to understand how unknown his daughter is to him--and how enigmatic his wife was as well. And a lingering suspicion seizes his mind that could upend everything he thought he knew. Katharine Dion's assured debut moves seamlessly between Gene's present-day journey and the long history of a marriage and friendship. Rich and wonderfully alive, The Dependents is the most moving kind of drama, an intimate glance into the expanse of family life and the way we must all eventually bridge the chasm between what we want to believe and what we know to be true.By John Dermot Woods. 2014
Praise for John Dermot Woods:"Poignant and unsettling, and much like a good short story collection these tales resonate long after…
the book is closed."-Largehearted Boy"An accomplished artist and writer, in addition to being an entertaining and often an electrifying one. John Woods does something very original in his combining of the arts in this collection, and my hat's off to him in his two-hat achievement."-Stephen Dixon"Like a lost season of The Wire directed by Richard Linklater, The Baltimore Atrocities beguiles, bemuses, often horrifies, and never fails to impress. John Woods renders small moments of intimacy and violence with remarkable compression and eerie calm; together they form a rich disturbing portrait of the city-as-zonked-out-slaughterhouse, its denizens both the butchers and the butchered."-Justin Taylor, author of FlingsThe Baltimore Atrocities is a mordant, deadpan collection of more than one hundred murders, betrayals, heartbreaks, suicides, and bureaucratic snafus-each with a half-page illustration by the author-that tells the story of a couple who spends a year in Baltimore in search of their respective siblings, who were abducted decades earlier as young children.John Dermot Woods is a writer and cartoonist living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of a collection of comics, Activities (Publishing Genius, 2013), and two previous illustrated novels, No One Told Me I Was Going to Disappear (with J.A. Tyler) and The Complete Collection of people, places & things. He and Lincoln Michel created the funny comic strip Animals in Midlife Crises for the Rumpus. He is a professor of English at Nassau Community College.By Arthur Miller. 1949
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." --TimeBy Arthur Miller, Christopher W. Bigsby. 1949
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." --Timeof 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." --Time For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.By Margo Catts. 2017
For fans of authors like Barbara Kingsolver and Leif Enger, a stunning new voice in contemporary literary fiction."Tragedy and blessing.…
Leave them alone long enough, and it gets real hard to tell them apart." Elena Alvarez is living a cursed life. From the deadly fire she accidentally set as a child, to her mother's abandonment, and now to an unwanted pregnancy, she knows better than most that small actions can have terrible consequences. Driven to the high mountains surrounding Leadville, Colorado by her latest bad decision, she's intent on putting off the future. Perhaps there she can just hide in her grandmother's isolated cabin and wait for something–anything–to make her next choice for her. But instead of escape, she finds reminders of her own troubles reflected from every side–the recent widower and his two children adrift in a changed world, Elena's own mysterious family history, and the interwoven lives within the town itself. Bit by bit, Elena begins to reconsider her role in the tragedies she's held on to and the wounds she's refused to let heal. But then, in a single afternoon, when threads of cause and effect tangle, Elena's fragile new peace is torn apart. It's only at the prospect of fresh loss and blame that she will discover the truth of the terrible burdens we take upon ourselves, the way tragedy and redemption are inevitably bound together–and how curses can sometimes lead to blessings, however disguised.Enduring Liturature Illuminated by Practical Scholarship Four of the most popular and profound works from the playwright known as the…
"father of modern theater." This Enriched Classic Edition includes: A concise introduction that gives readers important background information A chronology of the author's life and work A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations Detailed explanatory notes Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential. Series edited by Cynthia Brantley JohnsonBy Richard Paul Evans. 2014
A love story for Christmas from the #1 bestselling author of The Christmas Box and The Walk.Elise Dutton dreads the…
arrival of another holiday season. Three years earlier, her husband cheated on her with her best friend, resulting in a bitter divorce that left her alone, broken, and distrustful. Then, one November day, a stranger approaches Elise in the mall food court. Though she recognizes the man from her building, Elise has never formally met him. Tired of spending the holidays alone, the man offers her a proposition. For the next eight weeks--until the evening of December 24--he suggests that they pretend to be a couple. He draws up a contract with four rules: 1. No deep, probing personal questions2. No drama3. No telling anyone the truth about the relationship 4. The contract is void on Christmas Day The lonely Elise surprises herself by agreeing to the idea. As the charade progresses, the safety of her fake relationship begins to mend her badly broken heart. But just as she begins to find joy again, her long-held secret threatens to unravel the emerging relationship. But she might not be the only one with secrets.