Nor does his father, Tilden, a hulking former All-American footballer, or his uncle, who has lost one of his legs to a chain saw. Only the memory of an unwanted child, buried in an undisclosed location, can hope to deliver this family.

    From THE WHORE OF MENSA, to GOD (A Play), to NO KADDISH FOR WEINSTEIN, old and new Woody Allen fans will laugh themselves hysterical over these sparkling gems.

    This omnibus collection includes all of the author’s early poetry as well as the Four Quartets, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and the plays Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.

    What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away—a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, “The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It’s about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It’s about compassion, but it shows insensitivity.” In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end?The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson’s writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader. As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.

    The one house belongs to Flo Owens, who lives there with her two maturing daughters, Madge and Millie, and a boarder who is a spinster school teacher. The other house belongs to Helen Potts, who lives with her elderly and invalid mother. Into this female atmosphere comes a young man named Hal Carter, whose animal vitality seriously upsets the entire group. Hal is a most interesting character, a child of parents who ignored him, self-conscious of his failings and his position behind the eight ball. Flo is sensitively wary of temptations for her daughters. Madge, bored with being only a beauty, sacrifices her chances for a wealthy marriage for the excitement Hal promises. Her sister, Millie, finds her balance for the first time through the stranger's brief attention. And the spinster is stirred to make an issue out of the dangling courtship that has brightened her life in a dreary, minor way.

    And nowhere is his dramatic genius more apparent than in two of his probing early works, The American Dream and The Zoo Story.The New Yorker hailed The American Dream as "unique ... brilliant ... a comic nightmare, fantasy of the highest order." The story of one of America's most dysfunctoinal families, it is a ferocious, uproarious attack on the substitution of artificial values for real values-a startling tale of murder and morality that rocks middle-class ethics to its complacent foundations.The Zoo Story is a harrowing depiction of a young man alienated from the human race-a searing story of loneliness and the desperate need for recognition that builds to a violent, shattering climax. Together, these plays show men and women at their most hilarious, heartbreaking, and above all, human-and demonstrate why Edward Albee continues to be one of our greatest living dramatists.

    legal system. The play centers on Juror Eight, who is at first the sole holdout in an 11-1 guilty vote. Eight sets his sights not on proving the other jurors wrong but rather on getting them to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way not affected by their personal prejudices or biases. Reginald Rose deliberately and carefully peels away the layers of artifice from the men and allows a fuller picture to form of them—and of America, at its best and worst.   After the critically acclaimed teleplay aired in 1954, this landmark American drama went on to become a cinematic masterpiece in 1957 starring Henry Fonda, for which Rose wrote the adaptation. More recently, Twelve Angry Men had a successful, and award-winning, run on Broadway.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    This comprehensive collection includes all his most accomplished and best-known works: five novels, short stories, journalism, war correspondence, and his two completed books of poetry.Here are the classic novels he published in a span of five years: The Red Badge of Courage (1895), about a young and confused Union soldier under fire for the first time; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a vivid portrait of slum life and a young girl’s fall; George’s Mother (1896), about New York’s Bowery and its effect on a young workingman fresh from the country; The Third Violet (1897), the story of a bohemian artist’s country romance; and The Monster (1899), a novella about sacrifice and rescue, guilt and isolation.Among his short stories are such masterpieces as “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” His prose is at the same time dense and lean, suited to his description of the elusive forces that impinge upon his characters, and suited also to his desire not to circumscribe them with traditional moral and interpretive definition. Included here as well are the Whilomville stories of children and childhood in small-town America and the Sullivan County sketches of turn-of-the-twentieth-century rural life.As a journalist, Crane covered the Spanish-American War and the Greco-Turkish War, traveled through Mexico and the West, and reported on the seamier sides of New York City life; the best of his dispatches are gathered here. Also featured are both of Crane’s collections of epigrammatic free verse—The Black Riders (1895) and War is Kind (1899)—and selections from his uncollected poems. His poetry shows strong affinities to Emily Dickinson, while also anticipating the Imagist movement later in the twentieth century.This is the most substantial gathering of Crane’s work ever made available in one volume; it is an enduring testimony to his heroic achievement.

    The Library of America volume Novels 1956–1964 opens with Seize the Day, a tightly wrought novella that, unfolding over the course of a single devastating day, explores the desperate predicament of the failed actor and salesman Tommy Wilhelm. The austere psychological portraiture of Seize the Day is followed by an altogether different book, Henderson the Rain King, the ebullient tale of the irresistible eccentric Eugene Henderson, best characterized by his primal mantra “I want! I want!” Beneath the novel’s comic surface lies an affecting parable of one man’s quest to know himself and come to terms with morality; like Don Quixote, Henderson is, as Bellow later described him, “an absurd seeker of high qualities.”Henderson’s irrepressible vitality is matched by that of Moses Herzog, the eponymous hero of Bellow’s best-selling 1964 novel. His wife having abandoned him for his best friend, Herzog is on the verge of mental collapse and has embarked on a furious letter-writing campaign as an outlet for his all-consuming rage. Bellow’s bravura performance in Herzog launched a new phase of his career, as literary acclaim was now joined by a receptive mass audience in America.

    

    A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic-and ultimate authority on the western literary tradition-Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships: that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today.

    In this Library of America volume are presented the first two novels and a little-known collection of biographical sketches by the man about whom H. L. Mencken said, “American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin.”Dreiser grew up poor in a series of small Indiana towns, in a large German Catholic family dominated by his father’s religious fervor. At seventeen he moved to Chicago and eventually became a newspaper reporter there and in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York. Reaction to his first book, Sister Carrie (1900), was not encouraging, and after suffering a nervous breakdown, he went on to a successful career editing magazines. In 1910 he resumed writing, and over the next fifteen years published fourteen volumes of fiction, drama, travel, autobiography, and essays.“Dreiser’s first great novel, Sister Carrie …came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,” Sinclair Lewis declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1930. Carrie Meeber, an eighteen-year-old small-town girl drawn to bustling Chicago, becomes the passionless mistress of a good-humored traveling salesman and then of an infatuated saloon manager who leaves his family and elopes with her to New York. Dreiser’s brilliant, panoramic rendering of the two cities’ fashionable theaters and restaurants, luxurious hotels and houses of commerce, alongside their unemployment, labor violence, homelessness, degradation, and despair makes this the first urban novel on a grand scale.In a 1911 review, H. L. Mencken wrote, “Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn.” Beautiful, vital, generous, but morally naïve and unconscious of social conventions, Jennie is a working-class woman who emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her. There are no villains in this novel; in Dreiser’s view, everyone is victimized by the desires that the world excites but can never satisfy.Dreiser’s embracing compassion is felt in Twelve Men (1919), a collection of portraits of men he knew and admired. They range from “My Brother Paul” (Paul Dresser, vaudeville musical comedian and composer of “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “My Gal Sal”) to “Culhane, the Solid Man,” a sanatorium owner and former wrestler. Without sentiment but with honest emotion and respect for the bleak and unvarnished truth, Dreiser recalls these anomalous individuals and the twists of fate that shaped their lives.

    Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted.As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces—more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson’s children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother’s papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion.Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for, along with frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays about her large, boisterous family; and whimsical drawings. Jackson’s landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children’s games and neighborly gossip. But this familiar setting is also her most subversive: She wields humor, terror, and the uncanny to explore the real challenges of marriage, parenting, and community—the pressure of social norms, the veins of distrust in love, the constant lack of time and space.For the first time, this collection showcases Shirley Jackson’s radically different modes of writing side by side. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist, and a powerful feminist.This volume includes a foreword by the celebrated literary critic and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin.

    "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" (1941), her first book, includes many of her most popular stories, such as "A Worn Path, " "Powerhouse, " and the farcical "Why I Live at the P.O." "The Wide Net and Other Stories" (1943), in which historical figures such as Aaron Burr ("First Love") and John James Audubon ("A Still Moment") appear as characters, shows her evolving mastery as a regional chronicler. "The Golden Apples" (1949) is a series of interrelated stories about the inhabitants of the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi. It was Welty's favorite among her books. The stories of "The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories" (1955) are set both in the South and in Europe. Also included are two stories from the 1960s, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?," based on the shooting of Medgar Evers, and "The Demonstrators." A selection of nine literary and personal essays includes evocations of the Jackson of her youth that is essential to her work and cogent discussions of literary form.

    Whether he is describing his coming of age in America, his formative war experiences, or his life as an artist, this is Vonnegut doing what he does best: being himself. Whimsically illustrated by the author, A Man Without a Country is intimate, tender, and brimming with the scope of Kurt Vonnegut’s passions.