Best of
Drama

1957

West Side Story


Leonard Bernstein - 1957
    The complete vocal score to one of the most beloved American musicals of all time. Includes complete cast list, vocal ranges, instrumentation list plus an introduction about the famous collaboration that worked together on this project: Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Robbins.

Novels and Other Writings : The Dream Life of Balso Snell / Miss Lonelyhearts / A Cool Million / The Day of the Locust / Letters


Nathanael West - 1957
    Along with the four novels for which he is famous, this authoritative collection gathers his work in other genres, including stories, poetry, essays and plays, film scripts and treatments, and letters.When West died in a California highway accident in 1940 at the age of thirty-seven, his originality and brilliance were little known outside an intensely admiring circle of fellow writers: William Carlos Williams, Edmund Wilson, S. J. Perelman, and others. Not until West’s four novels were reissued in the late 1950s was he acknowledged as one of the most gifted writers of his generation. His masterpieces Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, with their blending of manic farce and despairing compassion, and their vision of an America awash in its own mass-produced fantasies, read like a prophecy of much that was to come in American literature and life.Each of West’s novels is distinct in style and theme. In the Dada-inspired The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), he freely mixes high-flown literary and religious allusions with erotic and scatological humor. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) presents, in a series of grotesque, starkly etched episodes, the spiritual breakdown of a newspaper columnist overwhelmed by his readers’ suffering. By contrast, A Cool Million (1934) reduces the eternal optimism of Horatio Alger’s novels to a brutal, cartoonish farce. In his last work, The Day of the Locust (1939), West renders with hallucinatory precision the reverse side of the Hollywood dream, as he choreographs a cast of failures, has-beens, and deluded glamour-seekers in what becomes an apocalyptic dance of death.Also included is a generous sampling of West’s other surviving work, ranging from freewheeling improvisations and grotesque comic tales to more mainstream work written with Hollywood or Broadway in mind, and including his anti-war satire Good Hunting and his adaptation of Francis Ile’s famous crime novel Before the Fact. The uncollected West shows him as a writer who embodied the contradictions and crazy-quilt exuberance of American culture—and raises the question of how he might have developed had his career not been cut short. Selected correspondence with William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Cowley, Bennett Cerf, and others rounds out the volume and sets West’s literary life in fuller context.

Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose


Wallace Stevens - 1957
    It included many poems missing from Stevens's Collected Poems, along with Stevens's characteristically inventive prose and pieces for the theater. Now Milton J. Bates, the author of the acclaimed Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, has edited and revised Opus Posthumous to correct the previous edition's errors and to incorporate material that has come to light since original publication. A third of the poems and essays in this edition are new to the volume. The resulting book is an invaluable literary document whose language and insights are fresh, startling, and eloquent.

Teahouse


Lao She - 1957
    Teahouse spans fifty years in modern Chinese history from the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the Republican Revolution to the birth of the People's Republic. The play brings together over sixty characters, representing all walks of life in change. It is noted for its vivid portrayal of characters and lively use of Beijing dialect, but its main thrust lies in Lao She's vision of history, which is prophetic of later political movements and its disastrous effects on the average Chinese people. Teahouse is a rare masterpiece of the contemporary Chinese theatre. It has been performed in Japan, Europe and North America, and translated into major foreign languages.

The Most Dangerous Game And Other Stories of Adventure


Richard Connell - 1957
    In THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME a professional hunter finds out what it feels like to be hunted as a wild animal- for he is the prey? In TO BUILD A FIRE a trapper fights desperately against stark fear in the cruel Arctic night... In LEININGEN VERSUS THE ANTS a settler battles for his very life against a teeming horde of millions of deadly ants...These are only a few of the thrilling stories you'll read in this fascinating book.

Two Screenplays: The Blood of a Poet and The Testament of Orpheus


Jean Cocteau - 1957
    Includes: The Blood of the Poet and The Testament of Orpheus.

Plays: The Importance of Being Earnest/An Ideal Husband/Lady Windermere's Fan/A Woman of No Importance/Salome


Oscar Wilde - 1957
    A Penguin Books collection of five of Oscar Wilde's best-known plays.