Book picks similar to
For The Reckord by Barry Reckord
plays
world-literature
black-british-reads
latin-america
Terra Nostra
Carlos Fuentes - 1975
The title is Latin for "Our earth". Modeled on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Terra Nostra shifts unpredictably between the sixteenth century and the twentieth, seeking the roots of contemporary Latin American society in the struggle between the conquistadors and indigenous Americans. -Terra Nostra is the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist can see and say.- Milan Kundera
The Recognition of Śakuntalā
Kālidāsa
I shall release you -SAKUNTALA When?KING When?When, like a bee, I kiss the bud of your unbruised lipAnd flood my thirsting mouth with nectar.Kalidasa's play about the love of King Dusyanta and Sakuntala, a hermitage girl, their separation by a curse, and eventual reunion, is the supreme work of Sanskrit drama by its greatest poet and playwright (c.4th century CE). Overwhelmingly erotic in tone, in peformance The Recognition of Sakuntala aimed to produce an experience of aesthetic rapture in the audience, akin to certain types of mystical experience.The pioneering English translation of Sakuntala in 1789 caused a sensation among European composers and writers (including Goethe), and it continues to be performed around the world. This vibrant new verse translation includes the famous version of the story from the Mahabharata, a poetic and dramatic text in its own right and a likely source for Kalidasa. The introduction discusses the play in the aesthetic and cultural context of ancient India.
The Children
Lucy Kirkwood - 2016
They like to live by the sea.Two retired nuclear scientists in an isolated cottage by the sea as the world around them crumbles. Then an old friend arrives with a frightening request.Lucy Kirkwood's previous plays include Chimerica (winner of the Olivier Award for Best Play, the Evening Standard Award, the Critics' Circle Best New Play Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), small hours, NSFW, and it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now. The Children premiered at the Royal Court, London, in November 2016 and will receive its US premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club in the fall of 2017.
Pedro Páramo
Juan Rulfo - 1955
Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro Páramo - lover, overlord, murderer.Rulfo's extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions, and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. To read Pedro Páramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico back in 1955.
The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories
Julio Ortega - 2000
Surreal, poetic, naturalistic, urbane, peasant-born: All styles intersect and play, often within a single piece. There is "The Handsomest Drown Man in the World," the García Márquez fable of a village overcome by the power of human beauty; "The Aleph," Borges' classic tale of a man who discovers, in a colleague's cellar, the Universe. Here is the haunting shades of Juan Rulfo, the astonishing anxiety puzzles of Julio Cortázar, the disquieted domesticity of Clarice Lispector. Provocative, powerful, immensely engaging, The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories showcases the ingenuity, diversity, and continuing excellence of a vast and vivid literary tradition.
The Sugar Syndrome
Lucy Prebble - 2003
She's just 17, hates her parents, skives college and prefers life in the chatrooms. What she's looking for is someone honest and direct. Instead she finds Tim, a man twice her age, who thinks she is 11 and a boy.What seems at first to be a case of crossed wires, ends up as an unlikely, and unsettling friendship between the two, which culminates in a shocking, and morally challenging revelation.
People in the Room
Norah Lange - 1950
Intrigued, she begins to watch them. She imagines them as accomplices to an unknown crime, as troubled spinsters contemplating suicide, or as players in an affair with dark and mysterious consequences.Lange’s imaginative excesses and almost hallucinatory images make this uncanny exploration of desire, domestic space, voyeurism and female isolation a twentieth-century masterpiece. Too long viewed as Borges’s muse, Lange is today recognised in the Spanish-speaking world as a great writer and is here translated into English for the first time, to be read alongside Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras.
The Necessary Shakespeare
William Shakespeare - 2001
This anthology provides extensive introductions to the plays and poems-offering discussion topics, sources for each play, and the stage history of performances.
A House for Mr Biswas
V.S. Naipaul - 1961
Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning of his father, he yearns for a place he can call home. He marries into the Tulsi family, on whom he becomes dependent, but rebels and takes on a succession of occupations in a struggle to weaken their hold over him.
in the company of men
Neil LaBute - 1997
The story of two white-collar managers, Chad and Howard, who maliciously plot to jointly romance the lonely, deaf, beautiful office temp Christine before simultaneously dumping her, is cool and compelling in its depiction of the worst sorts of emotional abuse. What begins as a cat-and-mouse game of one-upmanship quickly escalates into full-scale psychological warfare. Only too late does this 'frat boy' prank reveal itself as deadly serious, with a struggle between the two men at the heart of the battle. The woman is only a means to an end, a pawn easily captured and tossed aside in a dark, wicked duel for corporate ascension.
Borges at Eighty: Conversations
Jorge Luis Borges - 1969
His stories often read like thoughtful essays, his essays like poems, and his poems like brief narrations. Borges in conversation similarly transcends and transmutes our expectations of the ordinary colloquy. In the wide-ranging dialogues presented in this volume, the author's thoughts are evoked through the perceptive questioning of Willis Barnstone, John Coleman, Alastair Reid, Dick Cavett, and others. The resulting interplay between Borges and his interview2ers makes fascinating reading, revealing him as perhaps the premier conversationalist of our time. Borges chats intimately with his audience. "A crowd is an illusion... I am talking to you personally," he tells one group. Candor, wit, and humorous self-disparagement mark his responses, as do the Socratic qualities of profound yet amusing meditation and retort. "When I wake up," he informs us, "I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself." With the haunting resonance and structure of a fugue, the pervasive themes of Borges' works (or "exercises" as he chooses to call them) are woven throughout these evocative conversations. The nightmares, labyrinths, mazes, and mystic experiences that are part of Borges' creative mythology similarly loom large in his conversations. Revealed here are the interests that have continued to engage the writer-Old English and Old Norse sagas, his favorite authors (notably Whitman, Poe, and Emerson), the Kabbalah-as well as his feeling of what it is like to be blind, and now, in his eighties, his thoughts on death. A dozen of Borges' poems are reproduced, both in Spanish and in English translation, followed by remarks on how he came to write them and what they mean. Willis Barnstone's remarkable photographs complete the sensitive word portrait that emerges in Borges at Eighty: Conversations.
Boeing-Boeing
Marc Camoletti - 1967
This 1960's French farce adapted for the English-speaking stage features self-styled Parisian lothario Bernard, who has Italian, German, and American fiancees, each beautiful airline hostesses with frequent "layovers." He keeps "one up, one down and one pending" until unexpected schedule changes bring all three to Paris and Bernard's apartment at the same time.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Manuel Puig - 1976
In the still darkness of their cell, Molina re-weaves the glittering and fragile stories of the film he loves, and the cynical Valentin listens. Valentin believes in the just cause which makes all suffering bearable; Molina believes in the magic of love which makes all else endurable. Each has always been alone, and always - especially now - in danger of betrayal. But in cell 7 each surrenders to the other something of himself that he has never surrendered before.