The School for Scandal


Richard Brinsley Sheridan - 1777
    Often referred to as a "comedy of manners", "The School for Scandal" is one Sheridan's most performed plays and a classic of English comedic drama.

Selected Writings


Gertrude Stein - 1962
    It includes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in its entirety; selected passages from The Making of Americans; "Melanctha"from Three Lives; portraits of the painters Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso; Tender Buttons; the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; and poem, plays, lectures, articles, sketches, and a generous portion of her famous book on the Occupation of France, Wars I Have Seen.

Mushrooms on the Moor


F.W. Boreham - 1915
    Fascinating, entertaining, and insightful, these essays cover many subjects and are delivered with the gentle eloquence Boreham is famous for. A mustread for fans of Boreham's beautiful work and worthy of a place on any bookshelf. Contents include: “A Slice of Infinity”, “Readymade Clothes”, “The Hidden Gold”, “'Such a Lovely Bite'”, “Landlord and Tenant”, “The Corner Cupboard”, “With the Wolves in the Wild”, “Dick Sunshine”, “Forty!”, “A Woman's Reason”, “The Handicap”, “Gog and Magog”, “My Wardrobe”, “'Pity my Simplicity”, “Tuning From the Bass”, et cetera. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly rare and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, highquality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author. First published in 1919.

Yellow Face


David Henry Hwang - 2008
    The play begins with the 1990s controversy over color-blind casting for "Miss Saigon," before it spins into a comic fantasy, in which the character DHH pens a play in protest and then unwittingly casts a white actor as the Asian lead. "Yellow Face" also explores the real-life investigation of Hwang's father, the first Asian American to own a federally chartered bank, and the espionage charges against physicist Wen Ho Lee.

The Yeats Reader, Revised Edition: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose


W.B. Yeats - 1997
    His early poetry is memorable and moving. His poems and plays of middle age address the human condition with language that has entered our vocabulary for cataclysmic personal and world events. The writings of his final years offer wisdom, courage, humor, and sheer technical virtuosity. T. S. Eliot pronounced Yeats "the greatest poet of our time -- certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language" and "one of the few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." The Yeats Reader is the most comprehensive single volume to display the full range of Yeats's talents. It presents more than one hundred and fifty of his best-known poems -- more than any other compendium -- plus eight plays, a sampling of his prose tales, and excerpts from his published autobiographical and critical writings. In addition, an appendix offers six early texts of poems that Yeats later revised. Also included are selections from the memoirs left unpublished at his death and complete introductions written for a projected collection that never came to fruition. These are supplemented by unobtrusive annotation and a chronology of the life. Yeats was a protean writer and thinker, and few writers so thoroughly reward a reader's efforts to essay the whole of their canon. This volume is an excellent place to begin that enterprise, to renew an old acquaintance with one of world literature's great voices, or to continue a lifelong interest in the phenomenon of literary genius.

The Classic Fairy Tales


Maria Tatar - 1998
    The Classic Fairy Tales focuses on six tale types: "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Bluebeard," and "Hansel and Gretel," and presents multicultural variants and sophisticated literary rescriptings. Also reprinted are tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde."Criticism" gathers twelve essays that interpret aspects of fairy tales, including their social origins, historical evolution, psychological drama, gender issues, and national identities.A Selected Bibliography is included.

Piers Plowman


William Langland
    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.

Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Casebook


Joanne M. Braxton - 1998
    This exciting new series assembles key documents and criticism concerning these works that have so recently become central components of the American literature curriculum. Each casebook will reprint documents relating to the work's historical context and reception, present the best in critical essays, and when possible, feature an interview of the author. The series will provide, for the first time, an accessible forum in which readers can come to a fuller understanding of these contemporary masterpieces and the unique aspects of American ethnic, racial, or cultural experience that they so ably portray.Perhaps more than any other single text, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings helped to establish the mainstream status of the renaissance in black women's writing. This casebook presents a variety of critical approaches to this classic autobiography, along with an exclusive interview with Angelou conducted specially for this volume and a unique drawing of her childhood surroundings in Stamps, Arkansas, drawn by Angelou herself.

Father and Son


Edmund Gosse - 1907
    Father and Son remains one of English literature's seminal autobiographies. In it, Edmund Gosse recounts, with humor and pathos, his childhood as a member of a Victorian Protestant sect and his struggles to forge his own identity despite the loving control of his father. His work is a key document of the crisis of faith and doubt and a penetrating exploration of the impact of evolutionary science. An astute, well-observed, and moving portrait of the tensions of family life, Father and Son remains a classic of twentieth-century literature.This edition contains an illuminating introduction, and provides a series of fascinating appendices including extracts from Philip Gosse's Omphalos and Edmund Gosse's harrowing account of his wife's death from breast cancer.

I Ought to Be in Pictures


Neil Simon - 1981
    With Steffy, his sometime paramour, at his side, Herb decides to take another stab at fatherhood and hopefully this time, get it right.

A Whore Just Like The Rest: The Music Writings Of Richard Meltzer


Richard Meltzer - 2000
    His first book, The Aesthetics of Rock (acclaimed by Greil Marcus as "a disemboweling of rock's soft white underbelly"), became an instant cult classic when published in 1970. And for the next thirty years he fearlessly expanded the boundaries of music writing. Now he has collected the best of his prodigious output into a gonzo sampler of the reviews, profiles, interviews, and essays that form the heart of his rockwriter legacy. Traveling from psychedelia to the "dinosaur-rot early '70s" to the redeeming majesty of punk and the constant solace of jazz, this will stand as a remarkable document of an era by a singular voice in music writing.

The Mammary Plays: How I Learned to Drive / The Mineola Twins


Paula Vogel - 1997
    It is a delicately told tale of the sexual awakening of a young girl under the tutelage of her uncle. The Mineola Twins is an outrageous political satire set on suburban Long Island.

The Light’s On At Signpost


George MacDonald Fraser - 2002
    Now he shares his recollections of those encounters, providing a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes.Far from starry-eyed where Tony Blair Co are concerned, he looks back also to the Britain of his youth and castigates those responsible for its decline to "a Third World country … misruled by a typical Third World government, corrupt, incompetent and undemocratic".Controversial, witty and revealing – or "curmudgeonly", "reactionary", "undiluted spleen", according to the critics – The Light's on at Signpost has struck a chord with a great section of the public. Perhaps, as one reader suggests, it should be "hidden beneath the floorboards, before the Politically-Correct Thought Police come hammering at the door, demanding to confiscate any copies".

Closer


Patrick Marber - 1997
    Closer is hailed as one of the best plays of the nineties, and as the London Observer noted, it "has wired itself into the cultural vocabulary in a way that few plays have ever done."

The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1


Harold Clarke Goddard - 1951
    Goddard takes readers on a tour through the works of William Shakespeare, celebrating his incomparable plays and unsurpassed literary genius.