The place is a small town in rural England, and the setting a snow-laden winter. A small troupe of actors accompanied by Nicholas Barber, a young renegade priest, prepare to play the drama of their lives. Breaking the longstanding tradition of only performing religious plays, the groups leader, Martin, wants them to enact the murder that is foremost in the townspeoples minds. A young boy has been found dead, and a mute-and-deaf girl has been arrested and stands to be hanged for the murder. As members of the troupe delve deeper into the circumstances of the murder, they find themselves entering a political and class feud that may undo them. Intriguing and suspenseful, Morality Play is an exquisite work that captivates by its power, while opening up the distant past as new to the reader.

     James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare’s staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599, bringing together the news and the intrigue of the times with a wonderful evocation of how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman, and playwright. The result is an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history.

    With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer’s original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.

    Here, Tempest shows how the old myths still live on in our everyday acts of violence, bravery, sacrifice and love – and that our lives make tales no less dramatic and powerful than those of the old gods.

    Lyly took up the story of two young women, Galatea (or Gallathea) and Phillida who are dressed up in male clothes by their fathers so that they can avoid the requirement of the god Neptune that every year "the fairest and chastest virgin in all the country be sacrificed to a sea-monster." Hiding together in the forest, the two maidens fall in love, each supposing the other to be a young man. "Galatea" has become the subject of considerable feminist critical study in recent years. "Midas" (1590) uses mythology in quite a different way, dramatizing two stories about King Midas in such a way as to fashion a satire of King Philip of Spain (and of any tyrant like him) for colossal greediness and folly. In the wake of the defeat of Philip's Armada fleet and its attempted invasion of England in 1588, this satire was calculated to win the approval of Queen Elizabeth and her court.

    A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich.

    The 'scholars' are a cross-section of the local community, from a semi-literate young farmer to and elderly polygot autodidact who reads and quotes Homer in the orginal.In a nearby field camps a recently arrived detachment of the Royal Engineers, engaged on behalf of the Britsh Army and Government in making the first Ordnance Survey. For the purposes ofr cartography, the local Gaelic place names have to be recorded and transliterated - or translated - into English, in examining the effects of this operation on the lives of a small group of people, Irish and English, Brian Friel skillfully reveals the unexperctedly far-reaching personal and cultural effects of an action which is at first sight purely administrative and harmless. While remaining faithful to the personalities and relationshiops of those people at that time he makes a richly suggestive statement about Irish - and English - history.

    The good wit of bad manners, elegantly spiced with irony and deftly controlled malice, has made Saki stories small, perfect gems of the English language. Here for the first time, are the collected writings of Saki--including all of his short stories ("Reginald", "Reginald in Russia", "The Chronicles of Clovis", "Beasts and Super-Beasts" "The Toys of Peace", and "The Square Egg"), his three novels (THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON, WHEN WILLIAM CAME and THE WESTMINSTER ALICE), and three plays (THE DEATHTRAP, KARL-LUDWIG'S WINDOW and THE WATCHED POT. You are invited to meet once again Clovis, Reginald, the Unbearable Bassington, and the other memorable characters etched so superbly by the pen of H.H. Munro. "In all literature, he was the first to employ successfully a wildly outrageous premise in order to make a serious point. I love that. And today the best of his stories are still better than the best of just about every other writer around."--Roald Dahl. Introduction by Noel Coward.(less)

    Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice must journey to the underworld, where she reunites with her father and struggles to remember her lost love. With contemporary characters, ingenious plot twists, and breathtaking visual effects, the play is a fresh look at a timeless love story.

    David Hare's play, which details the struggle of four clergymen to make sense of their mission in South London, opened to universal acclaim.

    G. Wells' acclaimed tale, a stranded mountaineer encounters an isolated society in which his apparent advantage, sight, since all the people are blind, proves less than valuable.

    

    The fairy tale-based works of the tortured confessional poet, whose raw honesty and wit in the face of psychological pain have touched thousands of readers.

    G. Wells' The Time Machine. A lavish feast of exotica brought vividly to life with art commissioned specifically for this volume, The Book of Imaginary Beings will delight readers of classic fantasy as well as Borges' many admirers.