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The golden age of murder: the mystery of the writers who invented the modern detective story
By Martin Edwards. 2015
Study of an elite, mysterious social network of crime writers called the Detection Club, which began in 1930, and the…
group's continuing influence on print and film storytelling. Founding members Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Julian Symons presided over the club for nearly forty years. 2015The cook, the crook, and the real estate tycoon: a novel of contemporary China
By Howard Goldblatt, Sylvia Li-chun Lin, Liu Zhenyun. 2015
Liu Yuejin, a worksite cook and a thief, has his pack with money stolen. While searching for it, he discovers…
another bag which contains a USB card detailing corruption of high officials and putting him in danger. Translated from the original 2007 Chinese edition. Violence, strong language, and some explicit descriptions of sex. 2015Un buen hijo de p: una fá́bula (Vintage español)
By Ismael Cala. 2014
El periodista y presentador del programa "CNN en Español" presenta una fábula moderna a través de la historia y conversaciones…
de dos personajes, Arturo y Chris. Cala postula que sólo nosotros mismos tenemos el poder para transformar nuestras vidas, y que a través de las tres pes--pasión, paciencia y perseverancia--todo es posibleTroubled daughters, twisted wives: stories from the trailblazers of domestic suspense
By Sarah Weinman. 2013
Collection of fourteen previously published stories of crime fiction by women from the 1940s to the 1970s. Includes "The Heroine"…
by Patricia Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley (DB 50315), where a young woman is hired to be a nanny and dreams of being more. Some violence. 2013Haiti noir (Akashic Noir)
By Edwidge Danticat, Madison Smartt Bell, Mark Kurlansky, Katia D. Ulysse, Évelyne Trouillot, Rodney Saint-Éloi, Yanick Lahens, Gary Victor, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Ibi Aanu Zoboi, Marie Lily Cerat, M. J. Fievre, Josaphat-Robert Large, Nadine Pinede, Patrick Sylvain, Marie Ketsia Theodore-Pharel, Marvin Victor. 2011
Edwidge Danticat is both editor and contributor in this anthology of eighteen stories written around the time of Haiti's devastating…
2010 earthquake. In Ibi Aanu Zoboi's "The Harem" a playboy tends to his three lovers amid the destruction. Violence, strong language, and some explicit descriptions of sex. 2011A family settles into a Cape Cod home with an unusual subterranean tropical garden. Thousands of miles away in the…
Brazilian jungle, an explorer makes a disturbing offer to an isolated tribe. Ancient evil finds a high tech host in this gripping thriller. Violence, some strong language, and some descriptions of sexBoth flesh and not: essays
By David Foster Wallace. 2012
Both Flesh and Not gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays. Wallace turns his critical eye toward subjects such as Roger…
Federer, Jorge Luis Borges, and the nature of being a fiction writer. BestsellerZuckerman bound: The Ghost Writer / Zuckerman Unbound / The Anatomy Lesson / The Prague Orgy (Library of America Philip Roth Edition #4)
By Philip Roth, Ross Miller. 1985
Novels featuring writer Nathan Zuckerman. In The Ghost Writer (1979) Nathan meets someone who claims she's Anne Frank. In Zuckerman…
Unbound (1981) Nathan is hounded after publishing his autobiography. The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and The Prague Orgy (1985) continue aging Nathan's adventures. Strong language and some descriptions of sex. 2007The Mrs. Dalloway reader
By Virginia Woolf, Francine Prose. 2003
Selection of critical essays exploring the evolution and impact of Virginia Woolf's 1925 classic novel Mrs. Dalloway and the companion…
piece, "Mrs. Dalloway's Party." Includes the two works, Woolf's journal entries and letters regarding the works' creation, and various writers' commentary. Includes editor's introduction. 2003Single white female
By John Lutz. 2011
After a messy breakup, Allie Jones posts an ad for a roommate. Hedra Carlson seems like the perfect match. But…
when Hedra starts interfering with Allie's life and imitating Allie's looks and mannerisms, Allie realizes danger is closer than she ever imagined. Basis for 1992 movie. Violence, strong language, and some explicit descriptions of sex. 1990You will know the truth: A Thriller
By Leslie T Thornton, Leslie Thornton. 2021
DC Public Defender Nicki Jo Lewis is assigned a gruesome murder case. The further she digs into the case, the…
more secrets she encounters, including ones that lead to the back doors of the White House. Violence, strong language, and some descriptions of sex. 2021Uncivil liberties: a novel
By Bernie Lambek. 2018
Collection of fifty of the author's humorous and satirical columns first appearing in the "Nation" magazine between 1978 and 1981.…
Pokes fun at diverse subjects ranging from First Family antics to contemporary mores and considers important questions of the day, such as why employees of health food stores always look so unhealthy. Adult. UnratedThe king in the tree: three novellas
By Steven Millhauser. 2003
Three novellas centering on illicit love. In the title piece, the king's counselor deplores the queen's affair but doesn't tell…
her husband. In Revenge a widow remembers her husband's infidelities and wants to punish his mistress. In An Adventure of Don Juan, the Spanish rake discovers unrequited love in England. Strong language. 2003Kafka'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.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.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.Bob Stevenson
By Richard Wiley. 2016
"A witty, roller-coaster ride of uncertain identity set against the gritty certainties of New York City. In compelling, unadorned prose,…
Richard Wiley gives us a bewitching and ultimately moving tale." -Caryl Phillips, author of A Distant Shore and The Lost ChildDr. Ruby Okada meets a charming man with a Scottish accent in the elevator of her psychiatric hospital. Unaware that he is an escaping patient, she falls under his spell, and her life and his are changed forever by the time they get to the street.Who is the mysterious man? Is he Archie B. Billingsly, suffering from dissociative identity disorder and subject to brilliant flights of fancy and bizarre, violent fits? Or is he the reincarnation of Robert Louis Stevenson, back to haunt New York as Long John Silver and Mr. Edward Hyde? Her career compromised, Ruby soon learns that her future and that of her unborn child depend on finding the key to his identity. With compelling psychological descriptions and terrifying, ineffable transformations, Bob Stevenson is an ingenious tale featuring a quirky cast of characters drawn together by mutual fascination, need, and finally, love.Richard Wiley is the author of eight novels including Soldiers in Hiding, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and Ahmed's Revenge, winner of the Maria Thomas Fiction Award. Professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he divides his time between Los Angeles, California and Tacoma, Washington.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.