To find the bird, Mytyl and Tyltyl quest through the Land of Memory to the Palace of Night. The children get help from the good fairy Bérylune.

    His own libretto to the operas, translated by Andrew Porter, is an intricate system of metric patterns, imaginative metaphors and alliteration,combining to produce the music in text.'Andrew Porter's utterly natural, often poetic, faithfully rendered English text should be a revelation...The immediacy of instant comprehension gives the entire drama an added dimension.'--The New York Times

    Containing many "lost" pieces, it is a compendium of suspense from the pulp magazines of the '20s to his last efforts in the '70s. Fine.

    It was inspired by a real Italian family, the Cencis (especially Beatrice Cenci). Due to its theme of incest the play was considered unperformable in its day, and it was not performed in London until 1922. Later it was included in the Harvard Classics as one of the most important and representative works of the western canon

    Selected by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, these novel excerpts, stories, and memoirs illuminate wonderful writing by authors often overlooked in the West. Chronologically arranged to reveal the development of Indian literature in English, this volume includes works by Jawaharlal Nehru, Nayantara Sahgal, Saadat Hasan Manto, G.V. Desani, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Kamala Markandaya, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Ved Mehta, Anita Desai, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Satyajit Ray, Salman Rushdie, Padma Perera, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Rohinton Mistry, Bapsi Sidhwa, I. Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor, Sara Suleri, Firdaus Kanga, Anjana Appachana, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Githa Hariharan, Gita Mehta, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Ardashir Vakil, Mukul Kesavan, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai.

    After the murder of her daughter Iphegenia by her husband Agamemnon, Klytaimestra exacts a mother’s revenge, murdering Agamemnon and his mistress, Kassandra. Displeased with Klytaimestra’s actions, Apollo calls on her son, Orestes, to avenge his father’s death with the help of his sister Elektra. In the end, Orestes, driven mad by the Furies for his bloody betrayal of family, and Elektra are condemned to death by the people of Argos, and must justify their actions—signaling a call to change in society, a shift from the capricious governing of the gods to the rule of manmade law.Carson’s accomplished rendering combines elements of contemporary vernacular with the traditional structures and rhetoric of Greek tragedy, opening up the plays to a modern audience. In addition to its accessibility, the wit and dazzling morbidity of her prose sheds new light on the saga for scholars. Anne Carson’s Oresteia is a watershed translation, a death-dance of vengeance and passion not to be missed.

    The tragicomedy of race, class, manners and naivete of liberalism.

    And yet, argues Mays in his stimulating and informative introduction, several of these works not only occupy a pivotal position in Joyce's career; they are also magnificently assured achievements in their own right. Chamber Music is 'an extraordinary début', fusing the styles of the nineties and the Irish Revival with irony and characteristic verbal exuberance. Pomes Penyeach and Exiles (highly acclaimed in Harold Pinter's 1970 staging) were written when Joyce had published Dubliners and was completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both confront painfully personal issues of adultery, jealousy and betrayal and so pave the way for the more detached and fully realized treatment in Ulysses. Joyce's occasional verse includes 'Ecce Puer' for his new-born grandson, juvenilia, satires, translations, limericks and a parody of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. All are brought together in this scholarly, fully annotated yet accessible new edition.

    Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Justice has been hailed by his contemporary Anthony Hecht as “the supreme heir of Wallace Stevens.” In poems that embrace the past, its terrors and reconciliations, Justice has become our poet of living memory. The classic American melancholy in his titles calls forth the tenor of our collective passages: “Bus Stop,” “Men at Forty,” “Dance Lessons of the Thirties,” “The Small White Churches of the Small White Towns.” This master of classical form has found in the American scene, and in the American tongue, all those virtues of our literature and landscape sought by Emerson and Henry James. For half a century he has endeavored, with painterly vividness and plainspoken elegance, to make those local views part of the literary heritage from which he has so often taken solace, and inspiration.School Letting Out(Fourth or Fifth Grade)The afternoons of going home from schoolPast the young fruit trees and the winter flowers.The schoolyard cries fading behind you then,And small boys running to catch up, as thoughIt were an honor somehow to be near—All is forgiven now, even the dogs,Who, straining at their tethers, used to bark,Not from anger but some secret joy.From the Hardcover edition.

    In its fifth edition, THE WADSWORTH ANTHOLOGY OF DRAMA broadens its scope to offer even more plays than ever before.

    In brilliant rhymed couplets Wilbur renders into English not only the form and spirit of Molière's language but also its substance.The Misanthrope, one of Molière's most popular plays, is a searching comic study of falsity, shallowness, and self-righteousness. The misanthrope in this case is Alceste, a man whose conscience and sincerity are too rigorous for his time. In Tartuffe the title character, a wily opportunist and swindler, affects sanctity and gains complete ascendancy over Orgon, a rich bourgeois who in his middle years has become a bigot and prude. Only when Orgon actually witnesses Tartuffe's attempt to seduce his wife does he come to his senses. Richard Wilbur won a share of the Bollingen Translation Prize for his much-acclaimed translation of this satiric turn on religious hypocrisy.

    Using the fair as a symbolic representation of religious, social, and political conflicts in Jacobean England, Jonson satirizes Puritans, fortune hunters, country bumpkins, and inept representatives of the justice system, along with sharpsters and con men who inhabit the fair. This edition is the first to use the findings of feminist scholarship in examining the play's concern with forced marriage, pregnancy, sexual commerce, and widowhood.

    Like The Recruiting Officer, the play is set in a provincial town and its plot is slight:Aimwell and Archer, two impecunious London gentlemen, arrive in Lichfield looking for an heiress to marry. Aimwell, posing as his elder brother, falls in love with his 'prey' Dorinda and confesses his imposture to her; his 'man-servant' Archer arouses the wistful interest of the unhappily married Mrs Sullen. The introduction to this edition discusses the play for its theatrical merits and argues that it dramatises the ills of marriage in early modern England, shown by Farquhar to be more injurious to the wife than to the husband, and calls for a reform of the divorce laws.

    Based on John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera, the play is set in Victorian England's Soho but satirizes the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic through its wry love story of Polly Peachum and "Mack the Knife" Macheath. With Kurt Weill's music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz into the theater, it became a popular hit throughout the Western world.Commissioned and authorized by the Brecht estate, Arcade's definitive edition contains the acclaimed translation by Ralph Manheim and John Willett that was first staged at the York Theatre Royal and subsequently at Lincoln Center in New York. Willett and Manheim, the joint editors of Brecht's complete dramatic work in English, also provide Brecht's own notes and discarded songs, as well as extensive editorial commentary on the genesis of his play.

    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.