Writing at a time when Athens was undergoing a crisis in its social attitudes, Aristophanes was undergoing a crisis in its social attitudes, Aristophanes was an eloquent opponent of the demagogue and the sophist, and his comedy reveals a deep sympathy and longing for the return of a peaceful and honest way of life.

    The first part of what has come to be known as the Mercer Series, Leaving Home tells the story of a Newfoundland family that has emigrated and lost all sense of its place in the world.Leaving Home was named one of the "100 Most Influential Canadian Books" by the Literary Review of Canada.

    Among her most famous and controversial works, these three novellas—The Time Is Night, Chocolates with Liqueur (inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”), and Among Friends—are modern classics that breathe new life into Tolstoy’s famous dictum, “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Together they confirm the genius of an author with a gift for turning adversity into art.

    "In fact, I'm very modern. Why do you look at me like that?"Left to her own devices in Biarritz, fourteen-year-old Russian Liza meets an older English boy, Cromwell, on a beach. He thinks he has found a magical, romantic beauty and insists upon calling her Isolde; she is taken with his Buick and ability to pay for dinner and champagne. Disaffected and restless, Liza, her brother Nikolai and her boyfriend Andrei enjoy Cromwell's company in restaurants and jazz bars after he follows Liza back to Paris - until his mother stops giving him money. When the siblings' own mother abandons them to follow a lover to Nice, the group falls deeper into its haze of alcohol, and their darker drives begin to take over.First published in 1929, Isolde is a startlingly fresh, disturbing portrait of a lost generation of Russian exiles by Irina Odoevtseva, a major Russian writer who has never before appeared in English.

    A family enters the apartment of a young man and announces that they will save him from his loneliness by living with him. Slowly, they destroy everything, in the cheerful psychotic name of "brotherly love".

    This is convincing proof that Manual Puig was one of our most talented writers - no matter what the medium. Puig is the author of seven novels, translated into fourteen languages.

    This edition contains the definitive versions of these works, a foreword in which Rabe examines the interwoven relationship of the plays, and an afterword in which he discusses the process of their construction.

    On the way he bestows upon angels, fellow passengers, and the world at large a magnificent monologue on alcohol, politics, society, alcohol, philosophy, the pains of love, and, of course, alcohol.

    As a woman, as an African-American, her artistic objectivity and sensitivity to history combine with, but do not overshadow, her capacity to dig for truth and present it flat out as she sees it – with a finger snap or a shout and sometimes with a wink. Among the most satisfying roles I’ve undertaken on stage is surely Miss Leah in Flyin’ West. She brings the bushel nuggets of drama and humor that capture the ear, the heart and the imagination. She’s devilish, too.” –Academy Award® Nominee Ruby Dee“Ms. Cleage writes with amazing grace and killer instinct.” –Alvin Klein, New York Times “Pearl Cleage is a brilliant storyteller. I am always engrossed in the drama and compassion she brings to her characters. Flyin’ West, Bourbon at the Border, Blues for an Alabama Sky, Late Bus to Mecca and Chain are marvelous examples of a playwright at the top of her form, bravely moving into the new century.” –Woodie King, Jr., Producing Director, New Federal TheatrePearl Cleage’s body of work for the stage provides us with a remarkable and penetrating look at the African-American experience over the last 100 years. This volume collects her major full-length plays and one-acts, including Flyin’ West, Blues for an Alabama Sky, Bourbon at the Border, Chain and Late Bus to Mecca.PEARL CLEAGE is an Atlanta-based writer whose recent plays have premiered at The Alliance Theatre Company with subsequent productions throughout the country. Her first novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day was a recent Oprah’s Book Club Selection and a national bestseller. She is a former columnist of the Atlanta Tribune and a contributor to Essence Magazine.

    It won the 1995 Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy and, the Writers' Guild for Best West End Play."An exceptionally accomplished first play . . . though I know nothing about poker, I testify to the compulsive grip this play exerts and to the accumulation of meanings it ignites in your head."—Financial Times"Patrick Marber's enthralling close-up of the demons which drive compulsive gamblers is among the finest new plays in many a year."—Daily Mail

    The story relates the formative experiences of Vadim at school and with women before he turns to drug abuse and the philosophical reflections to which it gives rise. Although Ageyev makes little explicit reference to the Revolution, the novel's obsession with addictive forms of thinking finds resonance in the historical background, in which "our inborn feelings of humanity and justice" provoke "the cruelties and satanic transgressions committed in its name.

    In the character of its protagonist, Pechorin, the archetypal Russian antihero, Lermontov's novel looks forward to the subsequent glories and passion of Russian literature that it helped, in great measure, to make possible.

    As the other man lies dying, the young soldier takes his horse and rides away. Years later, as a grown man in Paris whose life is still haunted by the murder he committed all that time ago, he comes across a story by a writer calling himself "Alexander Wolf", which recounts in astonishing detail the events of that day in 1919 from the dying victim's point of view. As he attempts to find the elusive writer, the narrator becomes involved in a series of strange encounters that lead him to question life, death and his own identity.Originally published in Russian in 1947-8 in the Russian-language New York periodical The New Review, and published now by Pushkin Press in its first new English translation since 1950, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf is an early postmodern classic that stands alongside the best work by Vladimir Nabokov and Paul Auster.

    

    A horribly deformed young man, who has been a freak attraction in traveling side shows, is found abandoned and helpless and is admitted for observation to Whitechapel, a prestigious London hospital. Under the care of a famous young doctor, who educates him and introduces him to London society, Merrick changes from a sensational object of pity to the urbane and witty favorite of the aristocracy and literati. But his belief that he can become a man like any other is a dream never to be realized.