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The Obese Christ
By Sheila Fischman, Larry Tremblay. 2014
The asocial, sexually repressed Edgar, kneeling in grief at his mother's graveside, turns abruptly to witness a terrifying and life-altering…
event: the brutal rape of a young woman. Compelled by muddled instinct (and ingrained religious conviction), our hero bears the unconscious victim home, solemnly pledging to care for her - and to act as her saviour. As winter closes in, the captor's neuroses are revealed and his behaviour becomes increasingly violent, allowing the victim only one escape.With The Obese Christ, Larry Tremblay squarely situates himself within the realm of Hitchcock, Polanski, and Stephen King. A brilliant exercise in unease and paranoia, The Obese Christ demonstrates Tremblay's powerful ability to evoke dead and fear, while immersing the reader in a wrapped and putrid world told from Edgar's sanctified point of view.In Absentia
By Morris Panych. 2012
Four seasons after her husband Tom's disappearance, Colette remains emotionally paralyzed, isolated in a country cottage. She waits in anguish,…
not knowing whether he is dead or alive, but clinging to hope. A young stranger in a jean jacket waves to her from the frozen lake - a sign? She emerges to give him her husband's parka - strangely, the boy has a likeness to Tom.What is the stranger's connection to her geologist husband, kidnapped more than a year before by leftist guerrillas in Colombia? How does this slyly seductive young stranger happen to show up at her home in rural Ontario, thousands of miles away? He seems to know more about Colette than he should, and as he slowly insinuates himself into her life, Colette's attentive sister, Evelyn, and her helpful neighbor Bill become increasingly alarmed.Part mystery, part moving story of vanished love, In Absentia explores the notion of disappearance, articulated in very personal terms. Through the tough, time-shifting action of the play, Colette reflects on her marriage and past love, offering rich associative memories while also uncovering the hidden and inaccessible - that which is made to disappear from view.Guilt and grief, infidelity and infertility, loss and longing are the deeper subjects Panych explores here. At the same time, the play examines the desire to make connections in life - thoughts to deeds, intentions to outcomes - in scenes often enlivened by the playwright's trademark humor.Cast of 3 men and 2 women.A Quiet Place
By Seicho Matsumoto, Louise Heal Kawai. 2016
"A master crime writer . . . Seicho Matsumoto's thrillers dissect Japanese society."-The New York Times Book Review"A stellar psychological…
thriller with a surprising and immensely satisfying resolution that flows naturally from the book's complex characterizations.Readers will agree that Matsumoto (1909-1992) deserves his reputation as Japan's Georges Simenon.-Publishers Weekly.While on a business trip to Kobe, Tsuneo Asai receives the news that his wife Eiko has died of a heart attack. Eiko had a heart condition so the news of her death wasn't totally unexpected. But the circumstances of her demise left Tsuneo, a softly-spoken government bureaucrat, perplexed. How did it come about that his wife-who was shy and withdrawn, and only left their house twice a week to go to haiku meetings-ended up dead in a small shop in a shady Tokyo neighborhood?When Tsuneo goes to apologize to the boutique owner for the trouble caused by his wife's death he discovers the villa Tachibana near by, a house known to be a meeting place for secret lovers. As he digs deeper into his wife's recent past, he must eventually conclude that she led a double life... Seicho Matsumoto was Japan's most successful thriller writer. His first detective novel, Points and Lines, sold over a million copies in Japan. Vessel of Sand, published in English as Inspector Imanishi Investigates in 1989, sold over four million copies and became a movie box-office hit.Fugitive Kind
By Tennessee Williams, Allean Hale. 2001
Social outcasts, misfit survivors, dangerous passions—Tennessee Williams fleshed out the characters and themes that would dominate his later work in…
Fugitive Kind, one of his earliest plays. Fugitive Kind, one of Tennessee Williams's earliest plays, is one of his richest in dramatic material. Written in 1937 when the playwright was still Thomas Lanier Williams, Fugitive Kind introduces the character who will inhabit most of his later plays: the marginal man or woman who, through no personal fault, is a misfit in society but who demonstrates an admirable will to survive. Signature Tennessee Williams' characters, situations, and even the title (which was used as The Fugitive Kind for the 1960 film based on Orpheus Descending) have their genesis here. At age twenty-six, Williams was still learning his craft and this, his second full-length play, shows his debt to sources as diverse as thirties gangster films (The Petrified Forest, Winterset) and Romeo and Juliet. Fugitive Kind, with its star-crossed lovers and big city slum setting, takes place in a flophouse on the St. Louis waterfront in the shadow of Eads Bridge, where Williams spent Saturdays away from his shoe factory job and met his characters: jobless wayfarers on the dole, young writers and artists of the WPA, even gangsters and G-men. Fugitive Kind was also Williams's second play to be produced by The Mummers, a St. Louis theatre group devoted to drama of social protest. Called "vital and absorbing" by a contemporary review in The St. Louis Star-Times, this play reveals the young playwright's own struggle between his radical-socialist sympathies and his poetic inclinations, and signals his future reputation as our most compassionate lyric dramatist.Spring Storm
By Tennessee Williams, Dan Isaac. 1999
"A crucible of so many elements that would later shape and characterize Williams's work."--World Literature Today When Tennessee Williams read…
Spring Storm aloud to his playwriting class at the University of Iowa in 1938, he was met with silence and embarrassment. His professor, the renowned E. C. Mabie, remarked as he got up and dismissed the seminar, "Well, we all have to paint our nudes!" Tom's earlier comment in his journal that the play "is well-constructed, no social propaganda, and is suitable for the commercial stage" seems accurate enough in 1999, but woefully naive deep in the Depression when the play's sexual explicitness--particularly its matter-of-fact acceptance of a woman's right to her own sexuality--would have been seen as not only shocking but also politically radical. Spring Storm would later be disavowed by the author as "simply a study of Sex--a blind animal urge or force (like the regenerative force of April) gripping four lives and leading them into a tangle of cruel and ugly relations." But the solid and deft characterizations of the four young people whose lives intertwine--the sexually alive Heavenly Critchfield, her earthy lover Dick Miles, Heavenly's wealthy but tongue-tied admirer Arthur Shannon, and the repressed librarian Hertha Nielson who loves Arthur--are archetypes of characters we will meet again and again in the Williams canon. Epic in scope, a bit melodramatic in execution, tragic in outcome, Spring Storm created a wave of excitement among theatre insiders when it was given a staged reading at The Ensemble Studio Theatre's Octoberfest '96. This edition has been prepared, with an illuminating introduction, by Dan Isaac, who initiated the Octoberfest production.Clothes for a Summer Hotel: Play
By Tennessee Williams. 1983
This late play by Tennessee Williams explores the troubled relationship between F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The late Tennessee Williams's…
Clothes for a Summer Hotelmade its New York debut in 1980. Here Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, often seen as symbols of the doomed youth of the jazz age, become two halves of a single creative psyche, each part alternately feeding and then devouring the other. Set in Highland Hospital near Asheville, North Carolina, where Zelda spent her last confinement, this "ghost play" begins several years after Scott's death of a heart attack in California. But the past is "still always present" in Zelda, and Williams's constant shifting of chronology and mixing of remembrance with ghostly re-enactment suggest that our real intimacy is with the shadow characters of our own minds. As Williams said in the Author's Note to the Broadway production: "Our reason for taking extraordinary license with time and place is that in an asylum and on its grounds liberties of this kind are quite prevalent: and also these liberties allow us to explore in more depth what we believe is truth of character." Williams poses the inevitable, unanswerable questions: Did Scott prevent Zelda from achieving an independent creativity? Did Zelda's demands force Scott to squander his talents and turn to alcohol? Whose betrayal--emotional, creative, sexual--destroyed the other? But he poses these questions in a new way: in the act of creation, Zelda and Scott are now aware of their eventual destruction, and the creative fire that consumed two artists combines symbolically with the fire that ended Zelda's life.Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws & Other One-Act Plays
By Tennessee Williams, Thomas Keith. 1982
"The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays--like firecrackers in a rope." --Tennessee Williams This new collection of…
fantastic, lesser-known one-acts contains some of Williams's most potent, comical and disturbing short plays?Upper East Side ladies dine out during the apocalypse in Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws, while the poet Hart Crane is confronted by his mother at the bottom of the ocean in Steps Must Be Gentle. Five previously unpublished plays include A Recluse and His Guest, and The Strange Play, in which we witness a woman's entire life lived within a twenty-four-hour span. This volume is edited, with an introduction and notes, by the editor, acting teacher, and theater scholar Thomas Keith.Belleville
By Amy Herzog. 2014
"A quietly devastating play... Both a perceptive drama depicting the sudden fraying of a young marriage and a nail-biting psychological…
thriller... Belleville is among the most suspenseful plays I've seen in years." - Charles Isherwood, New York Times"Masterly... Among the new crop of young American playwrights, Herzog is in a class by herself." - Richard Zoglin, TimeAbby and Zack, young American newlyweds, have abandoned a comfortable postgraduate life in the states for Belleville, a bustling, bohemian, multicultural Parisian neighborhood. But as secrets both minor and monumental are revealed, their fraught relationship begins to unravel. Belleville examines the limits of trust and dependency in a world where love can turn pathological and our most intimate relationships may not be what they seem.AMY HERZOG's plays include 4,000 Miles (Pulitzer Prize finalist), After the Revolution and The Great God Pan. Ms. Herzog is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Whiting Writers' Award, an Obie Award and the Helen Merrill Award for Aspiring Playwrights.Summer Rain - Back to you
By Charlotte Forsdick, Anna Winter / Anna Faye. 2016
The young Skyler Montrose turned her back on her hometown Bozeman years ago. Back then a scandal had shaken the…
sleepy Montana town. A scandal in which Skyler’s family was involved. But the events of the past still cast their shadows on another person: Mark Chastain. The one time star quarterback has become a successful businessman. When Skyler returns to Bozeman it is not only the old secrets of a youthful indiscretion that boil up again, but also a few old unrequited feelings.Cassie Has a New Secret Admirer
By Gabriella Regina. 2018
On Valentine's Day week, Cassie got an anonymous romantic message through her college's radio program. The message gave her a…
few hurdles she needed to go through so she could get her admirer's number and get in touch with him. So she could have a date on Valentine's Day -- a chance that, according to her admirer, Cassie couldn't waste. Any other girl in Cassie's situation -- single and with no romantic prospects - would have been excited with the possibility of having a date to the most dramatic day of the year, just this weekend. But Cassie is not one of those girls. She has a history, and that history includes a stalker that was after her for a long time, and that anonymous message left her frightened with the possibility that, maybe, he's back in her life. Tthis time, to stay. So, Cassie goes after the one person that can help her find out who her secret admirer really is, before she has to go through the steps and face him, something that may end up being fatal for her.The Cat of Yule Cottage: A Magical Tale of Romance, Christmas and Cats
By Lili Hayward. 2016
A magical tale of Christmas and cats, perfect for everyone who loves A Street Cat Named Bob and Alfie the…
Doorstep Cat.It's nearly Christmas, and Jessamine Pike needs a serious life overhaul.Jess moves into Enysyule, a centuries-old cottage in Cornwall, and begins the process of renovating the rundown house by day and finishing her novel by night, planning to have both finished in time for the holidays. She's got good company: a beautiful, arrogant tomcat stalks around like he owns the place, and seems very skeptical of Jess' tenancy. But there's magic in the air... Local legends tell of a spirit that inhabits the area, and an ancient standing stone that keeps watch over the valley. As Christmas comes closer and closer, Jess uncovers treasures from Enysyule's past, and becomes involved in a fight for its future. For Jess has stumbled into a story that's been going on for five hundred years. A story about land, love, friendship, the Yuletide... and one remarkable cat.The Débutante
By F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2012
Andrea: Enchanted Aleutian Pricess
By Robert Algeri. 2020
I met Andrea Altiery in 1981; the first thing she asked was, “Do you like the rock band Aerosmith?” I…
responded, “Yes.” She smiled and slapped me on my left shoulder telling me, “Dream on my friend.” Later that year Andrea was taken from us by the most notorious serial killer to ever hunt in the state of Alaska. Get ready to collectively ride an emotional ride through urban Alaska while looking through a steamy window for lost love; love that's never found and love that maybe never was. I can only imagine the helplessness; the complete feeling of being alone these women had; Andrea must have had, preyed upon all of their spirit's gathering together now. Victims of circumstance; none of these women deserved to be mistreated like Andrea; dehumanized, erased from our minds. One last chance to give Andrea a voice, each woman asking us can you hear me, do you see me now?Black Widows: An Observer Crime Pick of the Month
By Cate Quinn. 2020
The only thing the three women had in common was their husband. And, as of this morning, that they're each…
accused of his murder.Blake Nelson moved into a hidden stretch of land - a raw paradise in the wilds of Utah - where he lived with his three wives:Rachel, the chief wife, obedient and doting to a fault.Tina, the other wife, who's everything Rachel isn't.And Emily, the youngest wife, who knows almost nothing else.When their husband is found dead under the desert sun, the questions pile up. What are these women to each other now that their husband is dead? Will the police uncover the secrets each woman has spent her life hiding? And is one of them capable of murder...?Black Widows: An Observer Crime Pick of the Month
By Cate Quinn. 2020
The only thing the three women had in common was their husband. And, as of this morning, that they're each…
accused of his murder.Blake Nelson moved into a hidden stretch of land - a raw paradise in the wilds of Utah - where he lived with his three wives:Rachel, the chief wife, obedient and doting to a fault.Tina, the other wife, who's everything Rachel isn't.And Emily, the youngest wife, who knows almost nothing else.When their husband is found dead under the desert sun, the questions pile up. What are these women to each other now that their husband is dead? Will the police uncover the secrets each woman has spent her life hiding? And is one of them capable of murder...?Saving Meghan: the chilling thriller about Munchausen's by proxy syndrome...
By D. J. Palmer. 2019
Can a mother love her daughter to death?Some would say Becky Gerard is a devoted mother. Others, including her husband,…
would say she's obsessed with her daughter. Fifteen-year-old Meghan is constantly, inexplicably ill. Her doctors are starting to suspect Munchausen syndrome by proxy - they believe Meghan's mother is seeking medical help for symptoms that don't exist. But when Meghan's illness takes a sharp turn, it is no longer clear whether her mother is lying, or if something even more sinister is at hand...Becky must race against time to prove her daughter is in danger. But first, she must confront secrets that threaten to not only upend her life... but destroy it.Praise for Saving Meghan: 'Plenty of twists...will keep you turning the pages as you guess...and guess again.' -Lisa Scottoline, New York Times bestselling author of After Anna'An acute, sensitive portrayal of family love under extreme stress...[with] a touch of Hitchcock.' -William Landay, New York Times bestselling author of Defending Jacob'Palmer's take on a dark and fascinating topic will keep the reader wondering to the very end.' Publishers WeeklyEscape on a round-the-world trip with Lucy Vine's hilarious novel about FOMO, #findingthefun and losing yourself - longlisted for the…
Comedy Women in Print Prize 2020'Made me scream laughing. I enjoyed it SO much' Marian Keyes'Have you ever messed up so badly you had to leave the country? This feelgood journey contains one of the best vagina jokes ever. We didn't want it to end' Heat MagazineAlice is turning thirty and is stuck in a rut. Her friends are all coupling up and settling down, while she's still working as a temp, trying (and failing) not to shag her terrible ex, getting thrown out of clubs, and accidentally sexting her boss...She decides to throw caution to the wind and jets off on a round-the-world adventure to #FindTheFun and find herself. Of course, she's no more likely to find the answer to true happiness on the beach in Thailand than she is at the electric beach in Tooting, but at least in Thailand there's paddleboard yoga.Can Alice find happiness on her travels? Or is she more likely to lose herself all over again...?'Really, really funny, but also kind of heart wrenching' Sophie Kinsella'Hilarious and touching' Louise O'Neill 'Warning: read this book and you will doubtless snort with laughter in inappropriate public places. Quite simply, #brilliant' Ella Dove'Her best work yet: it's funner, it's more tender . . . You need to have this in your beach bag' Laura Jane Williams'I tore through this quicker than a duty-free Toblerone . . . Wickedly funny and painfully perceptive' Lauren Bravo'Utterly addictive and utterly charming...her best yet' Daisy Buchanan'A bawdy breath of fresh air' Sunday MirrorFirefly: A story of the power of true love (Redemption Series)
By Molly McAdams. 2017
Firefly is the new novel from New York Times bestselling author, Molly McAdams, a dark, twisting story of redemption and…
true love against the odds, perfect for fans of J. B. Salsbury, Jamie McGuire, Sophie Jackson and Lisa Renee Jones.As the Princess of the Irish-American Mob, there's no shortage of men ready to help guard and protect me. Kieran Hayes has been saving me for as long as I can remember. It's in his blood, and one of the many reasons I fell in love with him. Until my favourite trait became his biggest flaw, making me resent the man I love. What I wasn't prepared for was Dare - the man who set my world on fire with just one touch. He saw straight through to my soul and silently demanded my heart from the beginning. And I didn't expect Dare to be Demitri Borello - the reason for so many deaths in my family. A man who will take my life the moment he finds out who I am. Despite it all, I'll love him until that moment comes.Don't miss Blackbird, another powerful romance of love in the darkness from Molly McAdams.Cowboy Up: Coming Home Book 3 (Coming Home #3)
By Harper Sloan. 2017
Cowboy Up is the third sultry novel in the Coming Home series from New York Times and USA Today bestselling…
author Harper Sloan. Perfect for fans of Kelly Elliott, Diana Palmer, Jennifer Ryan and Maisey Yates.As the eldest Davis, Clayton takes his job as head of the family businesses seriously. And after a disastrous end to his last relationship, he's just fine with his quiet, solitary life. Most of the time. Then he meets cute, quirky, shy bookstore owner, Caroline Michaels. After escaping an abusive ex, Caroline is finally living for herself - and that includes indulging in a one-night stand with Clay Davis. But when she falls on hard times, Clay comes to her rescue, and Caroline realizes it'll be impossible to stay away from him. All she has to do is convince him to let go a little... Will Clay be able to give up the reins and finally settle down? And, more importantly, will Caroline muster enough courage to lasso him up? Want more rugged, charismatic cowboys? Don't miss the rest of this sizzling Texas-set series which began with Lost Rider.Blood Wedding
By Pierre Lemaitre. 2016
Sophie is haunted by the things she can't remember - and visions from the past she will never forget.One morning,…
she wakes to find that the little boy in her care is dead. She has no memory of what happened. And whatever the truth, her side of the story is no match for the evidence piled against her. Her only hiding place is in a new identity. A new life, with a man she has met online. But Sophie is not the only one keeping secrets . . .For fans of Gone Girl and Lemaitre's own internationally bestselling Alex, Blood Wedding is a compelling psychological thriller with a formidable female protagonist.Translated from the French by Frank Wynne