Book picks similar to
The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht
plays
drama
classics
german
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf - 1925
Virginia Woolf’s most autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse (1927) revolves around the Ramsay family and their life in the summer home situated at a distance from a lighthouse, in the Hebrides, Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920. Enjoying the summer with their eight children, the Ramsays host an assortment of guests—Charles Tansley, an admirer of Mr. Ramsay’s work as a philosopher; Lily Briscoe, a young artist, and William Bankes, an old friend of the Ramsays, among others. Six-year-old James Ramsay wants his father to take him to the lighthouse, but Mr Ramsay keeps delaying the trip. And when the summer ends, war and death alter many realities. The journey to the lighthouse is deferred. A book of childhood desires, conflicting adult relationships, philosophical introspection, and multiple subjectivities, To the Lighthouse, divided into three sections—The Window, Time Passes, The Lighthouse—is about many journeys and an evergreen classic."
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Stephen Sondheim - 1974
Dunstan's Church, just a few blocks away from the Royal Courts of Justice. On this site, they say, he robbed and murdered more than 150 customers. To dispose of their remains, he carried them through underground tunnels to the bakery of one Mrs. Lovett a few blocks away, where they supplied the stuffing for her meat pies, the favorite mid-day repast of the lawyers who worked nearby and got their shaves from Sweeney Todd. The man you lunched with yesterday could be your lunch today!The story first appeared in 1846 as a best-selling "penny dreadful", a sensational thriller published in installments. Before the final chapters even had a chance to hit the stands, the first stage version was packing them in at the Royal Britannia Saloon. Since then, there have been numerous stage and literary versions of the story.This script has been specially commissioned by Blackstone Audio, Inc., based on the original sources of the tale.
Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered
Ruth Klüger - 1992
Some of the lessons she imparts are surprising, as when she argues, against other historians, that the female camp guards were far more humane than their male counterparts, and when she admits that she has difficulty today queuing in line, a constant of camp life, "out of revulsion for the bovine activity of simply standing." Her memories of her youth are punctuated by sharp reflections on the meaning of the Shoah, and how it should best be memorialized in a time when ever fewer survivors are left to act as witnesses. Those reflections are often angry -- "Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps," she writes, recalling an argument with a naive German graduate student, "and he expects catharsis, purgation, the sort of thing you go to the theatre for?"But they are constantly provocative, too. Though readers will doubtless take issue with some of her conclusions, Kluger's insistent memoir merits a wide audience. --Gregory McNamee