Book picks similar to
Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century by Fiona Ritchie
z-écrivain_william-shakespeare
18th-century-research
criticism
drama
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Marina Lewycka - 2005
Lewycka tells the side-splittingly funny story of two feuding sisters, Vera and Nadezhda, who join forces against their father's new, gold-digging girlfriend.Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcée. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth.But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe's darkest history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget . . . .
You Are One of Them
Elliott Holt - 2013
Ten years later, Sarah is about to graduate from college when she receives a mysterious letter from Moscow suggesting that Jenny's death might have been a hoax. She sets off to the former Soviet Union in search of the truth, but the more she delves into her personal Cold War history, the harder it is to separate facts from propaganda.You Are One of Them is a taut, moving debut about the ways in which we define ourselves against others and the secrets we keep from those who are closest to us. In her insightful forensic of a mourned friendship, Holt illuminates the long lasting sting of abandonment and the measures we take to bring back those we have lost.
Doomed to Fail
J.J. Anselmi - 2020
Anselmi covers the bands and musicians that have impacted those styles most―Black Sabbath, Candlemass, Melvins, Eyehategod, Godflesh, Neurosis, Saint Vitus, and many others―while diving into the cultural doom that has spawned such music, from the bombing of Birmingham and hurricane devastation of New Orleans to glaring economic inequality, industrial alienation, climate change, and widespread addiction. Along the way, Anselmi interweaves the musical experiences that have led him to proudly identify as one of the doomed.
The Paying Guests
Sarah Waters - 2014
Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa—a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants—life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the “clerk class,” the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances’s life—or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be.
Emma: An Audible Original Drama
Anna Lea - 2018
Before she began writing, Jane Austen wrote, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like' and thus introduces the handsome, clever, rich - and flawed - Emma Woodhouse. Emma is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage; nothing, however, delights her more than matchmaking her fellow residents of Highbury. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protegee Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. This lively comedy of manners, with its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, is often seen as Jane Austen's masterpiece.Public Domain (P)2018 Audible, Ltd.
A History Of Indian English Literature
M.K. Naik - 1998
It is literature written originally in English by authors Indian by birth, ancestry or nationality. It is no part of English literature any more than American literature or Australian literature can be said to be a branch of English literature. It is legitimately a part of Indian literature since it's differentia is the expression in it of Indian ethos. Sahitya Akademi has accepted Indian English Literature as the most suitable applellation for this body of writing. The term emphasises two significant ideas: First that this literature constitutes one of the many streams that join the great ocean called Indian literature, which though written in different languages has an unmistakable unity: Secondly, that it is an inevitable product of the nativization of the English language to express the India sensibility. Professor Naik traces the course of this history from it's beginnings to recent times, dividing it into convenient periods, in an analytical, critical and engaging style.
Plays 1: 'Art' / Life x 3 / The Unexpected Man / Conversations After a Burial
Yasmina Reza - 2005
In this sly critique of contemporary relationships, Reza skillfully picks apart the friendship of three men via a bowl of olives and a white-on-white painting. Now translated into more than 30 languages, Art continues to be performed worldwide, even as Reza's other plays have garnered similar acclaim. Life x 3, Reza's most recent offering, again highlights her satirical wit as two couples face off in three different versions of the dinner from hell. Praised as "compact, cool and clever" by Christopher Isherwood of Variety, Reza uses the acidic exchanges of her characters to illuminate their inner desire for love and acceptance. Also included in this edition are two earlier plays, The Unexpected Man and Conversations After a Burial. Each elucidates the startling difference between public and private life, be it in the confines of a train compartment or a country estate in the aftermath of a loved one's passing.
My Life in Middlemarch
Rebecca Mead - 2014
After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself.
Wench
Dolen Perkins-Valdez - 2009
from Middle English "wenchel," 1 a: a girl, maid, young woman; a female child.Tawawa House in many respects is like any other American resort before the Civil War. Situated in Ohio, this idyllic retreat is particularly nice in the summer when the Southern humidity is too much to bear. The main building, with its luxurious finishes, is loftier than the white cottages that flank it, but then again, the smaller structures are better positioned to catch any breeze that may come off the pond. And they provide more privacy, which best suits the needs of the Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their black, enslaved mistresses. It's their open secret.Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are regulars at Tawawa House. They have become friends over the years as they reunite and share developments in their own lives and on their respective plantations. They don't bother too much with questions of freedom, though the resort is situated in free territory–but when truth-telling Mawu comes to the resort and starts talking of running away, things change.To run is to leave behind everything these women value most–friends and families still down South–and for some it also means escaping from the emotional and psychological bonds that bind them to their masters. When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, the women of Tawawa House soon learn that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable and that love exists even in the most inhuman, brutal of circumstances–all while they are bearing witness to the end of an era.An engaging, page-turning, and wholly original novel, Wench explores, with an unflinching eye, the moral complexities of slavery.
The Biscuit Girls
Hunter Davies - 2014
To those who didn’t know, the biscuit factory that towered over Carlisle might look like just another slice of the industrial North, a noisy and chaotic place with workers trooping in and out at all hours. For the biscuit girls it was a place where they worked hard, but also where they gossiped, got into scrapes and made lifelong friends. Outside the factory walls there might be difficult husbands or demanding kids, and sometimes even heartbreak and tragedy, but they knew there would always be an escape from their troubles at Carr's. Some, like Barbara, only applied because she needed the extra cash, until things got a bit easier at home. Her supervisor cross examined her about who would be looking after the kids while she was at work, but let her have the job. Like many of the women who joined up ‘temporary’ Barbara went on to stay at Carrs for 32 years.Beginning in the 1940s, these heartwarming and vividly-remembered stories have all been told by the women themselves to Hunter Davies.
Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse
Faith Sullivan - 2015
A complicated marriage to a boorish husband; an early widowhood spent longing for her congressman lover; the loss of her child, a shell shocked WWI hero — her road has not been easy. But somehow she manages to find moments of grace, more often than not through the genial voice of P.G. Wodehouse, the beloved British novelist. Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse celebrates the power of great novels — from Austen to Chekhov — to transform, console, and teach us the value of friendship and love.We first traveled to Harvester, Minnesota, twenty-five years ago in the bookclub favorite and New York Times best-selling novel, The Cape Ann. This new book, which brings us home to that small town on the prairie along with all of the wonderful characters who live there, is sure to be a classic.
The Glass-Blowers
Daphne du Maurier - 1963
'If you marry into glass' Pierre Labbe warns his daughter, 'you will say goodbye to everything familiar, and enter a closed world'. But crashing into this world comes the violence and terror of the French Revolution, against which the family struggles to survive.Years later, Sophie Duval reveals to her long-lost nephew the tragic story of a family of master craftsmen in eighteenth-century France. Drawing on her own family's tale of tradition and sorrow, Daphne du Maurier weaves an unforgettable saga of beauty, war, and family.
The Woman Who Waited
Andreï Makine - 2004
Near the end of World War II, 19-year-old Boris Koptek leaves the village to join the Russian army, swearing to the 16-year-old love of his life, Vera, that as soon as he returns they will marry. Young Boris, who with his engineering battalion fights his way almost to Berlin, is reported killed in action crossing the Spree River. But Vera refuses to believe he is dead, and each day, all these years later, faithfully awaits his return.Then one day the narrator arrives in the village, a 26-year-old native of Leningrad who is fascinated by both the still-beautiful woman and her exemplary story, and little by little falls madly in love with her. But how can he compete with a ghost that will not die?Beautifully, delicately, but always powerfully told, Andre� Makine delineates in masterly prose the movements and madness that constitute the dance of pure love.
Thirty Girls
Susan Minot - 2014
Jane is an American journalist who has traveled to Africa, hoping to give a voice to children like Esther and to find her center after a series of failed relationships. In unflinching prose, Minot interweaves their stories, giving us razor-sharp portraits of two extraordinary young women confronting displacement, heartbreak, and the struggle to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways. With mesmerizing emotional intensity and stunning evocations of Africa's beauty and its horror, Minot gives us her most brilliant and ambitious novel yet.