Inspired by the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, Shelley's play serves as a sort of sequel, matching its Greek predecessor in stature and pure poetic power. It depicts its philanthropist hero's ultimate triumph over the superstition and bigotry of the gods. As Shelley himself stated in his Defence of Poetry, Prometheus Unbound awakens and enlarges the mind.

    When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear--they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya's girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky's long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time's vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.Finalist for the T. S. Eliot PrizeFinalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

    In a house just outside the village of Ballybeg live the five Mundy sisters, barely making ends meet, their ages ranging from twenty-six up to forty. The two male members of the household are brother Jack, a missionary priest, repatriated from Africa by his superiors after twenty-five years, and the seven-year-old child of the youngest sister. In depicting two days in the life of this menage, Brian Friel evokes not simply the interior landscape of a group of human beings trapped in their domestic situation, but the wider landscape, interior and exterior, Christian and pagan, of which they are nonetheless a part.

    One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. The book quickly became an international best-seller.Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. The poems he writes constitute some of the most beautiful writing featured in the novel.

    Increasingly enmeshed in the radical's political intrigue, he betrays the anarchist who had placed blind faith in him. The authorities then dispatch Razumov on a mission to spy on the revolutionary's sister and mother.A fascinating character study, Under Western Eyes hauntingly reveals Razumov's preoccupation with questions of decency and accountability when confronted by the equally powerful truths and values of human integrity and moral strength.

    She gives one of them away to wealthy Mrs Lyons and they grow up as friends in ignorance of their fraternity until the inevitable quarrel unleashes a blood-bath. 'Willy Russell is less concerned with political tub-thumping than with weaving a close-knit story about the working of fate and destiny … it carries one along with it in almost unreserved enjoyment" Guardian One of the longest-running and most successful ever West End musicals, Blood Brothers premiered at the Liverpool Playhouse in January 1983.

    Sagan's second novel tells the story of Dominique, a bored twenty-year-old law student at the Sorbonne in mid-1950's Paris, who embarks on a love affair with a middle-aged man.

    Losing her beloved husband after only seven years of marriage, heartbroken widow Nathalie steels herself against emotional attachments until she unexpectedly falls in for her offbeat, guileless co-worker, Markus, who represents the opposite of everything.

    Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny, and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time.Houellebecq's debut novel is painfully realistic portrayal of the vanishing freedom of a world governed by science and by the empty rituals of daily life.

    The story is a dark comedy about a suicidal young man named John Campbell who, after a failed suicide attempt, heads to Virginia to visit an aunt he hasn’t seen in ten years. But his rental car runs out of gas deep in the mountains. When he decides to walk in the middle of the night, he winds up in a town that is isolated from the rest of the world—Strangeville. Unable to leave, he meets an assortment of loveable oddball characters—the beautiful Delilah, Klemm Johnson, Clarissa Puddworthy, Biff Flannigan, Jeboriah Varmint, Cleetus McChoparooski, and others.

    Son of a blacksmith, political genius, briber, charmer, bully. A man with a deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Mike Poulton's two-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel's acclaimed novels 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies' is a thrilling and utterly convincing portrait of a brilliant man embroiled in the lethal, high-stakes politics of the court of Henry VIII. 'Wolf Hall' begins in England in 1527. Henry has been King for almost twenty years and is desperate for a male heir, but Cardinal Wolsey is unable to deliver the divorce he craves. Into this volatile court enters the commoner Thomas Cromwell, who sets out to achieve the King's desire, whilst methodically and ruthlessly pursuing his own reforming agenda. In 'Bring Up the Bodies', Anne Boleyn is now Queen, her path to Henry's side cleared by Cromwell. When the King begins to fall in love with Jane Seymour, Cromwell must negotiate within an increasingly perilous court to satisfy Henry, keep the nation safe, and advance his own ambitions. Hilary Mantel's novels are the most formidable literary achievements of recent times. She is the first writer to win the Man Booker Prize with consecutive novels.Adapted by Mike Poulton, the plays were premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in December 2013, directed by Jeremy Herrin. This edition contains a substantial set of notes by Hilary Mantel on each of the principal characters, offering a unique insight into the world of the plays and an invaluable resource to any theatre companies wishing to stage them.

    a visionary work that bridges the history and culture of two worlds."--Frank Rich, New York TimesBased on a true story that stunned the world, and inspired by Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly, M. Butterfly was an immediate sensation when it premiered in 1988. It opens in the cramped prison cell where diplomat Rene Gallimard is being held captive by the French government--and by his own illusions. He recalls a time when Song Liling, the beautiful Chinese diva, touched him with a love as vivid, as seductive--and as elusive--as a butterfly.How could he have known that his true love was, in fact, a spy for the Chinese government--and a man disguised as a woman? The diplomat relives the twenty-year affair from the temptation to the seduction, from its consummation to the scandal that ultimately consumed them both.M. Butterfly is one of the most compelling, explosive, and slyly humorous dramas ever to light the Broadway stage, a work of unrivaled brilliance, illuminating the conflict between men and women, the differences between East and West, racial stereotypes--and the shadows we cast around our most cherished illusions.The original cast included John Lithgow as Gallimard and BD Wong as Song Liling. During the show's 777-performance run, David Dukes, Anthony Hopkins, Tony Randall, and John Rubinstein were also cast as Gallimard. Hwang adapted the play for a 1993 film directed by David Cronenberg, starring Jeremy Irons and John Lone.TEXT OF THE BROADWAY REVIVAL

    He wrote too much and what he did write is inaccessible and elitist. Right? Wrong. "Shakespeare on Toast" knocks the stuffing from the staid old myth of Shakespeare, revealing the man and his plays for what they really are: modern, thrilling and uplifting drama. Actor and author Ben Crystal brings the bright words and colourful characters of the world's greatest hack writer brilliantly to life, handing over the key to Shakespeare's plays, unlocking the so-called difficult bits and, astonishingly, finding Shakespeare's own voice amid the poetry.Told in five fascinating Acts, "Shakespeare on Toast" sweeps the cobwebs from the Bard - from his language, his life, his time - revealing both the man and his work to be relevant, accessible and full of beans. This is a book for everyone, whether you're reading Shakespeare for the first time, occasionally find him troublesome, think you know him backwards, or have never set foot near one of his plays but have always wanted to ...It's quick, easy and good for you. Just like beans on toast.

    Finally resorting to medication, he instantly falls into a deep sleep that lasts two hundred years. Upon waking in the twenty-second century to a strange and nightmarish place, he slowly discovers he is master of the world, revered by an adoring populace who consider him their leader. Terrified, he escapes from his chamber seeking solace—only to realize that not everyone adores him, some even wish to harm him.

    There are the usual inline tables of contents and links after each text/chapter to get back to the respective tables. The dates of first publication are noted.-------------Typee: A Romance of the South Seas. (1846)Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas. (1847)Mardi: and A Voyage Thither. (1849)Redburn: His First Voyage. (1849)White-Jacket: or, The World in a Man-of-War. (1850)Moby-Dick: or, The Whale. (1851)Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. (1852)Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. (1855)The Piazza Tales (1856): The Piazza, Bartleby, Benito Cereno, The Lightning-Rod Man, The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles, The Bell-TowerThe Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. (1857)Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. (1866)Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. (1876)John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea Pieces. (1888)Timoleon and Other Ventures in Verse. (1891)The Apple-Tree Table, and Other Sketches (1922): The Apple-Tree Table, Jimmy Rose, I and my Chimney, The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids, Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!, The Fiddler, Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs, The Happy Failure, The ’Gees.Billy Budd, and Other Prose Pieces (1924): Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), The Two Temples, Daniel Orme.Weeds and Wildings, With a Rose or Two. (1924)Essays: Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 1 & 2, Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, Authentic Anecdotes of “Old Zack,” Mr Parkman’s Tour, Cooper’s New Novel, A Thought on Book-Binding, Hawthorne and His Mosses.Uncollected Poems: Marquis de Grandvin at the Hostelry, Naples in the Time of Bomba, Immolated, Madam Mirror, The Wise Virgins to Madam Mirror, The New Ancient of Days, The Rusty Man, Thy Aim, Thy Aim?, The Old Shipmaster and his Crazy Barn, Camoens, Camoens in the Hospital, Montaigne and his Kitten, Falstaffs Lament over Prince Hal, Shadow at the Feast, Merry Ditty of the Sad Man, Honor, Fruit and Flower Painter, The Medallion, Time’s Long Ago!, In the Hall of Marbles, Gold in the Mountain, In Shards the Sylvan Vases Lie, In the Jovial Age of Old, A Spirit Appeared to Me, Give Me the Nerve, My Jacket Old, In the Old Farm-House, To ——, A Battle Picture, Old Age in his Ailing, Hearts-of-Gold, Pontoosuce, Epistle to Daniel Shepherd, Inscription for the Slain at Fredericksburgh, The Admiral of the White, To Tom, Suggested by the Ruins of a Mountain-Temple in Arcadia, Puzzlement, The Continents, The Dust-Layers, A Rail Road Cutting near Alexandria in 1855, A Reasonable Constitution, Rammon, Ditty of Aristippus, In A Nutshell, Adieu.