Written in 1941, Blithe Spirit remained the longest-running comedy in British Theatre for years. Plotted around the central role of one of Coward's best loved characters, a medium Madame Arcati (originally played by Margaret Rutherford). Coward's play is a spirited charade about a man with 2 wives, one dead and another alive.

    E. Talbot Donaldson's translation of the text has been selected for this Norton Critical Edition because of its skillful emulation of the original poem's distinct alliterative verse. Selections of the authoritative Middle English text are also included for comparative analysis. Sources and Backgrounds includes a large collection of contemporary religious and historical documents pertaining to the poem, including selections from the Douai Bible, accounts of the plague, and legal statutes. Criticism includes twenty interpretive essays by leading medievalists, among them E. Talbot Donaldson, George Kane, Jill Mann, Derek Pearsall, C. David Benson, and Elizabeth D. Kirk. A Glossary and Selected Bibliography are also included.

     It's you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you'll go, betray me, strayfrom home.So better by far for me if you were stone.—from "Medusa"Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfriends of famous—and infamous—male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.

    Endgame, originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is now considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett's characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death.

    A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future.

    and was the sensation of that year's theatre season, making front-page headlines and outraging some critics who thought her premise that there was a connection between a rape in a Leeds hotel room and the hellish devastation of civil war was simply an attempt to shock audiences. The questions raised in this play about violence are at the heart of Kane's writing.

    This is the first edition to present the novel as it originally appeared, with indications of the changes Carlyle made to later editions.

    After devoting their energies and income for ten years to replacing a borrowed diamond necklace which they have lost, a woman and her husband learn the irony of their efforts.

    Includes "There's a certain slant of light," "Because I could not stop for death," "It was not death for I stood up."

    Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places.Often O'Hara, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal.

    Have you read 'A Clean Well-Lighted Place'?... It is masterly. Indeed, it is one of the best short stories ever written..."

    Emily is a member of a family in the antebellum Southern aristocracy; after the Civil War, the family has fallen on hard times.

    Her short story, "A Jury of Her Peers", was adapted from the play a year after its debut. It was first performed by the Provincetown Players at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts on August 8, 1916. In the original play, Glaspell played the role of one of the characters, Mrs. Hale. It is frequently anthologized in American literature textbooks. The play begins as the county attorney, the sherrif, Mr. Hale, Mrs. Peters, and Mrs. Hale enter the Wright's empty farm house. On prompting from the county attorney, Mr. Hale recounts his visit to the house the previous day, when he found Mrs. Wright behaving strangely and found her husband upstairs with a rope around his neck, dead. Mr. Hale notes that, when he questioned her, Mrs. Wright claimed that she was fast asleep when someone strangled her husband.Often hailed as one of the quintessential feminist plays, 'Trifles' earned Glaspell a Pulitzer Prize and renewed literary recognition.

    This deluxe gift edition carefully reproduces thity-four of Arthir Rackham's enchanting and exquisuute paintings.

    Their romantic excess and dark overstatement feed her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines in isolated settings. What could be more remote from the uneventful securities of life in the midland counties of England? Yet as Austen brilliantly contrasts fiction with reality, ordinary life takes a more sinister turn, and edginess and circumspection are reaffirmed alongside comedy and literary burlesque. Also including Austen's other short fictions, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, this valuable new edition shows her to be as innovative at the start of her career as at its close.