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Showing 1 - 20 of 181 items
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.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.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.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.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.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.By Stéphane Bourguignon. 2002
At forty-one, Eddy is in existential extremis. He once had an enviable life--a wife he adored, a young son, a…
cozy suburban house surrounded by carefully planted and sculpted gardens, the luxury to pursue his passion and become a professional horticulturalist. Now he's separated from his wife, estranged from his son, he's let his garden grow wild--like the rest of his life, it's totally out of control. When his son, Maxime, tired of being embarrassed by his father's dilapidated house, his garden gone to seed and his old beater of a car, decides to leave home and live with his cool, professional mother--who immediately demands twice the alimony--Eddy goes on a rampage, smashing his son's furniture and hurtling it and his possessions through windows he neglects to open first. Ending up in the hospital, the doctor diagnoses "a slight case of fatigue." As Eddy plunges deeper into despair, insomnia and self-destruction, frantically searching for a way to live an authentic life, punching out his boss and finally threatening his best friend with a gun, the narrative voice of the novel changes, and we begin to see Eddy, his parents, his childhood and his past loves through the eyes of his wife, friends and companions. Stéphane Bourguignon, the creator of the much-loved television series La vie, la vie, about a group of thirty-somethings in Montreal, has said that he wanted this book to look at the darker side of life. Written like a surrealist Camus on steroids, in multiple voices, with an uncanny eye and ear for graphic physicality and keen psychological insight, Bourguignon's examination of relationships between men and women, fathers and sons, past wounds and present possibilities is filled with a raucous warmth and humanity--but it is also intensely, darkly and almost unbearably humorous. Translated by Phyllis Aronoff & Howard ScottBy 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.By William Kent Krueger. 2014
“Mystery fans can count on William Kent Krueger for an absorbing book with lots of twists and turns” (Denver Post)…
and now you can enjoy three absorbing and suspenseful Cork O’Conner mysteries in one stunning collection.“Hold-your-breath suspense” (Booklist, starred review) Tamarack County: As a blizzard swells in Tamarack County, a car belonging to the wife of a retired local judge is discovered abandoned on the side of the road. Early on in the investigation of her disappearance, Cork O’Connor, ex-sheriff of Tamarack County, notices small details that tell a disturbing story. When a neighbor’s dog is found beheaded and Cork’s son is attacked, he realizes these ominous incidents throughout the area have a pattern: someone is spinning a deadly web, and Cork has only hours to stop it before his family and his friends will be forced to pay the ultimate price. “A punch-to-the-gut blend of detective story and investigative fiction” (Booklist, starred review) Windigo Island: When the body of a teenaged Ojibwe girl washes up on the shore of an island in Lake Superior, the residents of the nearby Bad Bluff reservation whisper that it was the work of a deadly mythical beast, the Windigo. Such stories have been told by the Ojibwe people for generations, but they don’t explain how the girl and her friend, Mariah Arceneaux, disappeared a year ago. At the request of the Arceneaux family, Cork O’Connor takes on the case and he learns that the old port city of Duluth is a modern-day center for sex trafficking of vulnerable women, many of whom are young Native Americans. As the investigation deepens, so does the danger. Yet Cork is resolute in his vow to find Mariah, with only the barest hope of saving her from men whose darkness rivals that of the legendary Windigo, Cork prepares for an epic battle that will determine whether it will be fear, or love, that truly conquers all. “[A] gripping thriller” (Minneapolis Star Tribune) Manitou Canyon: Cork O’Connor is uneasy when his daughter chooses November as the month to set the date for her wedding. Since the violent deaths of his wife, father, and best friend all occurred in previous Novembers, Cork O’Connor has always considered it to the cruelest of months. His concern comes to a head when a man camping in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area goes missing. Although the wedding is fast approaching and the weather looks threatening, Cork ventures into the vast wilderness to search. With an early winter storm on the horizon, it is a race against time as Cork’s family struggles to uncover the mystery behind these disappearances. Little do they know, not only is Cork’s life on the line, but so are the lives of hundreds of others.By V. C. Andrews. 2017
Book One of the Girls of Spindrift. From the New York Times bestselling author of the Flowers in the Attic…
and My Sweet Audrina series, now Lifetime movies, here begins a haunting new series featuring highly intelligent teenage girls who struggle to survive a specialized high school and find their place in a world that doesn’t understand them. Such is the burden of being brilliant.Corliss is not like the other girls at her Los Angeles high school. Incredibly intelligent, shy, and a loner, she has difficultly in fitting in. What’s worse, a clique of girls is out to get her because she’s not down with their games. On the night of a school party, her refusal to take drugs with the girls leads them to take matters into their own hands—spiking her drink. Quickly, Corliss’s entire life is turned upside down and no one—not even the handsome valedictorian who had agreed to go out with her—looks at her the same way. Just when she’s wondering if she’ll be able to return to her high school, someone mentions a new place: Spindrift. Could that be her way out? Note: The four Girls of Spindrift e-novellas together form a prequel for Bittersweet Dreams—available now!By V. C. Andrews. 2017
Book Two of the Girls of Spindrift. From the New York Times bestselling author of the Flowers in the Attic…
and My Sweet Audrina series, now Lifetime movies, continues a haunting new series featuring highly intelligent teenage girls who struggle to survive a specialized high school and find their place in a world that doesn’t understand them. Such is the burden of being brilliant.Being gifted is not something Donna ever wanted. It’s difficult enough to have a Latino father and Irish mother, and her genius only separates her even more from the other girls. They don’t say it, but they blame her for everything that goes wrong, just because she’s different. And on the precise day she tries her hardest to fit in, everything turns out a disaster. A fight breaks out, and somehow Donna ends up in the middle. It’s not her fault, but it’s her word against theirs, and this time, the other girls aren’t going to stay quiet. The only solution might be to escape to the mysterious school her counselor is telling her about: Spindrift. The four Girls of Spindrift novellas together form a prequel for Bittersweet Dreams—available now!By Isabel Ashdown. 2019
'Had me gripped throughout.' IAN RANKIN'Satisfying on every level.' ELLY GRIFFITHSYou trust your family. They love you. Don't they?When 17-year-old…
Eva Olsen awakes after a horrific accident that has left her bedbound, her parents are right by her side. Devoted, they watch over her night and day in the attic room of their family home in the forests of Norway.But the accident has left Eva without her most recent memories, and not everything is as it seems. As secrets from the night of the accident begin to surface, Eva realises - she has to escape her parents' house and discover the truth. But what if someone doesn't want her to find it?An edge-of-your-seat, atmospheric psychological thriller for fans of Lucy Clarke and Erin Kelly.Praise for LAKE CHILD:'Fiendishly clever' Red magazine 'Beautifully crafted and satisfying' Mari Hannah 'Tense, edgy and nerve-wracking' Helen FieldsBy Robert Thomas. 2014
Bridge is a collection of linked-stories about a troubled young woman?Alice?who works at a San Francisco law firm. Alice goes…
through despair and occasional rapture as she struggles with simultaneously real and hallucinated relationships with her co-worker David (of the romantic variety) and her supervisor Fran. Passionate, whip-smart, furious, and perceptive, Alice contemplates both suicide and murder as she struggles to find meaning in the day-to-day interactions of her life.Robert Thomas holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. He lives in Oakland, California, and works as a legal secretary in San Francisco.By Tim MacGabhann. 2020
Life is finally on the right track for reporter and recovering addict Andrew: he is slowly coming to terms with…
the murder of his photographer boyfriend Carlos, pursuing sobriety and building a new home with a new partner. Andrew has almost forgotten about the story that ruined his life - but that story hasn't forgotten about him, and a series of deadly threats forces him into helping the very man whose gang murdered his boyfriend and left him homeless.A literary take on the classic chase movie, HOW TO BE NOWHERE is the sequel to Tim MacGabhann's genre-busting and critically-acclaimed debut CALL HIM MINE, and a blistering thrill-ride deep into the fog of Central America's murky present and tragic future.By Karen Dionne. 2020
'The Wicked Sister is massively thrilling and altogether unputdownable' KARIN SLAUGHTERA startling novel of psychological suspense, as two generations of…
sisters try to unravel their tangled relationships between nature and nurture, guilt and betrayal, love and evil.You have been cut off from society for fifteen years, shut away in a mental hospital as punishment for the terrible thing you did when you were a child.But what if nothing about your past is as it seems?For a decade and a half, Rachel Cunningham has chosen to lock herself away in a psychiatric facility, tortured by gaps in her memory and the certainty that she is responsible for her parents' deaths. But when she learns new details about their murders, Rachel returns, in a quest for answers, to the place where she once felt safest: her family's sprawling log cabin in the remote forests of Michigan.As Rachel begins to uncover what really happened on the day her parents were murdered, she learns - as her mother did years earlier - that home can be a place of unspeakable evil, and that the bond she shares with her sister might be the most poisonous of all...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...?By Elizabeth Kay. 2020
'A hugely exciting new voice in crime fiction' Lucy Foley 'The new face of domestic noir' Evening Standard 'One of…
the most compelling narrators I've ever encountered' Shari Lapena 'A protagonist to rival Villanelle' Cosmopolitan ___________________________________HAVE YOU READ THE MOST EXPLOSIVE DEBUT THRILLER OF THE YEAR? 'Chilling and original' CLARE MACKINTOSH'A tense nerve-shredder' VAL McDERMID'The perfect pscyh thriller - smart, dark and morally ambiguous' TAMMY COHEN'You NEED to read this one' LESLEY KARA'Toxic friendships don't get more toxic than this' PRIMA 'Breathtakingly good' T.M. LOGANCOSMOPOLITAN'You won't want to put this one down' CARA HUNTER'This is going to be the next massive thriller' PANDORA SYKES'You'll be turning the pages deep into the night' HARLAN COBEN'Shockingly intimate and scarily insidious' LISA GARDNER'The new face of domestic noir' EVENING STANDARD'Brilliantly twisty' MICHELLE FRANCES'A clever, deliciously dark pageturner' ALICE FEENEY'Takes the idea of the unreliable narrator and spins it on its head' ARAMINTA HALL'Brilliantly plotted' ALI LAND'You won't be able to put it down' CHRISTINA DALCHER'I read this book with obsession - I loved everything about it.' ASHLEY AUDRAIN___________________________________ It all started with one little lie . . . Jane and Marnie have been inseparable since they were eleven years old. They have a lot in common. In their early twenties they both fell in love and married handsome young men.But Jane never liked Marnie's husband. He was always so loud and obnoxious, so much larger than life. Which is rather ironic now, of course.Because if Jane had been honest - if she hadn't lied - then perhaps her best friend's husband might still be alive . . .This is Jane's opportunity to tell the truth, the question is: Do you believe her?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...?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 WeeklyBy 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.