You can be whoever you want, they said. Well, "they" were wrong. Getting old sucks and I’m cranky from the unexpected changes. After fighting off the doldrums of an empty nest, I dreamed of getting a fresh start with my husband. Maybe David and I could fly off somewhere and rekindle our relationship with a second honeymoon.Flip the script to an EPIC FAIL that ended in a near-fatal car accident, and after six weeks in a coma, David flushed me and our marriage of over two decades down the toilet I’d been scrubbing for years.Now a single divorcée with chump change in my pocket, I’m forced to move into my childhood home. And to make matters worse, the place seems to be haunted. Or maybe I’m just having a nervous breakdown over the mystery of my brother’s suicide.His creepy journals have been certainly keeping me awake at night. I could swear a strange entity is floating through my midst.But hey, at least the hot handyman, helping me fix up the place, won’t stop walking around the property half dressed.Geez, between the menopausal hormones and getting the house ready to sell, my muscles are twinging in places I didn’t know existed. If my therapist was right, and life is a do-over, then why is everything such a crisis? Midlife or not, I could swear I was cursed. Guess I’m in charge of my own happy ending. -----------------Join Brooke Durand and her magical midlife crisis in the quirky town of Eerie, Indiana. Read Book 1 in this new hot-flash genre of Paranormal Women's Fiction. A Series of Midlife Curses is written by the dynamic duo of award-winning author AJ Nuest and USA Today bestselling author Arial Burnz. Perfect for fans of K.F. Breene, Deanna Chase, Melinda Chase, Victoria Danann, Jana DeLeon, Heloise Hull, Elizabeth Hunter, Darynda Jones, Shannon Mayer, Kristen Painter, Robyn Peterman, Denise Grover Swank, Brenda Trim, and paranormal women's fiction.

    

    The first of the plays, The Real Inspector Hound, is the longer of the two; here the author has created a looking glass comedy of great suspense and intrigue about two drama critics. The second play, After Magritte, is 'a surrealist comedy in detective form-or is it a comedy in surrealist form? A husband and wife argue whether the figure they saw in the street was a one-legged football player with the ball under his arm, or a man in pajamas with a tortoise under his arm. The play shows that Stoppard is as amusing and clever as always.'

    GOOD GRIEF follows Nkechi, or N- a med-school dropout, a first generation Nigerian, a would-be goddess- as she navigates first loves and losses, and tries to find answers in her parents, the boy next door, and the stars.

    What Rebecca Gilman makes of this familiar scenario is something startlingly real and compelling, delving deeply into the small space that can divide a feeling of hope from one of hopelessness, as Curt and Sandy both try to get a foothold in the American dream of a house, a job, a life, a relationship with another human being.Gilman's previous play, Boy Gets Girl, was acclaimed by Time magazine as the best play of 2000, saying that "with Spinning into Butter, her play about race relations on campus, Rebecca Gilman gave notice that she was a playwright to watch. And with this intense drama of a woman's encounter with a stalker, she became one to hail . . . It's not just a gripping play but also an important one." Marked by Gilman's characteristically sharp delineation of character, pitch-perfect dialogue, and effortless use of humor that is both biting and silly, Blue Surge is a worthy successor to these plays--an intimate look at the class struggle in America today as well as a brilliant example of the dramatic craft from one of today's most accomplished practitioners. It will have its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in the spring of 2001.

     The Kingmaker. Seize the Crown. Born to Rule DESTINED TO DIE. BORN TO RULE. “One of the best premises I have come across in the fantasy world.” YA Books Central “If you’re a fan of YA lit with courageous young ladies and mysteries, read this book today!” The Book Nerd Girl “I am sixteen years old and I will die on the morning of my seventeenth birthday. As tradition dictates, I will be sacrificed and my life’s blood will determine which one of my two brothers will be King. My blood will kill one and crown one. My name is Everleigh and I am the Kingmaker.” Terrified of her fate but resigned to her death, Everleigh has less than a week to live. The legend of the Kingmaker goes back millions of years and Everleigh would never dare to question her deadly inheritance. Kingmakers are special; their magic chooses the rightful King of the Realm and they all die on their seventeenth birthday. Except this one. Saved from the inevitable, Everleigh learns that she is the Kingmaker who will live, the Kingmaker who will rule, the Kingmaker who will be Queen. But not everyone agrees with an age-old prophecy that says that a girl will rule the Realm and soon Everleigh is locked in a deadly battle for the throne. Can she escape her blood-thirsty enemies and live long enough to be crowned Queen? Seize the Crown “If I am not the Kingmaker, who am I? If I am not Queen, who am I?” Believing her first love is dead, devastated by her brother’s actions, and cruelly denied of the crown she believes is her own, Everleigh faces the fight of her life in the second book of The Kingmaker Trilogy. Millards’s deadly ambition sees him wear the crown that should rightfully be on her head. Everleigh is determined to avenge her loved ones and seize the crown and if a fight is what it takes to rule, she will fight or die trying, in this fantastic follow up to The Kingmaker. Seize the Crown follows Everleigh on her quest for revenge and the throne, as she battles against her brother and his murderous tyranny. Born to Rule Maddeningly, the crown still eludes Everleigh as we begin the breath-taking conclusion to The Kingmaker Trilogy. In a hugely welcome turn of events, her first love is back at her side, the crown is almost on her head and she is ready to rule. But with Millard on the run and attacks being made ‘in the name of the King’, Everleigh must put a stop to her brother before her Kingdom is in ruins and if, as Queen, she must slay her own sibling, she will gladly do it. The Kingmaker Trilogy is a magical young adult fantasy, packed with fantastical twists, heart-stopping action and fabulously feisty females. If you enjoy reading Sarah J. Maas, Victoria Aveyard and Melissa Meyer then you’ll love The Kingmaker Trilogy. Pick up your copy today!

    An introductory note on each poet tells something of her life and of the historical and literary context in which she wrote. The poems themselves--approximately four hundred in number and translated from languages as diverse as Byzantine Greek, Sanskrit, Old French, Hindi, Gaelic, Vietnamese, and Maori--cut across the barriers of time and culture to take their rightful place among the wealth of the world's literature. (Penguin Books)'In America, as everywhere else, women have been and are among our major poets, and here they all are, the familiar elbowing the exotic in endless variety of form, subject, temperament. From Sappho to Judith Wright--by way of Li Ching-chao, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Emily Dickinson, and Anna Akhmatova--this anthology can be read straight through as a dizzying world tour, and returned to as a solid work of reference'--Ellen Moers, author of Literary Women

    She writes of the world's beauty, but fears that it may be deceptive, even deadly. She is a religious poet, but much of her work is driven by uncertainty. Her poems are restrained, even secretive, but they seek nothing less than the mystery of Life and Death.This edition contains Rossetti's strongest and most distinctive work: poetry (including 'Goblin Market', 'The Prince's Progress', and the sonnet sequence 'Monna Innominata'), stories (including the complete text of Maude), devotional prose (with nearly fifty entries from the 'reading diary' Times Flies), and personal letters. Those poems which Rossetti published, and those which she withheld from publication, are here brought together in chronological order, allowing the reader to observe her poetic trajectory. This edition also records the major revisions made by Rossetti when preparing her poems for publication. It brings together the fullest range of Rossetti's poetry and prose in one volume, and is an indispensable introduction to this entrancing writer.

    Her stories are clear-eyed, hard-edged, beautifully formed. In the title story, "Funny Once," a couple held together by bad behavior fall into a lie with their more responsible friends. In "The Village," a woman visits her father at a nursing home, recalling his equanimity at her teenage misdeeds and gaining a new understanding of his own past indiscretions. In another, when a troubled girl in the neighborhood goes missing, a mother worries increasingly about her teenage son's relationship with a bad-news girlfriend. In the novella "Three Wishes," siblings muddle through in the aftermath of their elder brother's too-early departure from the world.The landscape of this book is the wide open spaces of Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. Throughout, there is the pervasive desire to drink to forget, to have sex with the wrong people, to hit the road and figure out later where to stop for the night. These characters are aging, regretting actions both taken and not, inhabiting their extended adolescences as best they can. And in Funny Once, their flawed humanity is made beautiful, perfectly observed by one of America's best short story writers.

    After his death, he revealed to Leo the real purpose of his life, as a spiritual guide who taught others by confounding their assumptions and expectations. And he began to share with Leo a new perspective on everything from the nature of good and evil to the concept of timelessness to the notion that the universe is, fundamentally, an act of love.Christopher’s wisdom was revealed to Leo over the course of a year, coalescing into three themes, which Leo calls the Gift of the Opposite, the Gift of Presence, and the Gift of Timelessness. Leo quickly came to realize that these gifts were not for him alone: they contain ancient wisdom, held sacred in many traditions, that Chris intended him to share with others. He has written this book, under Chris’s direction, to do just that.Already Here presents a unique dialogue in which an analytical, scientific mind tries to comprehend truths from another plane of existence—one that, nonetheless, is inseparable from our own. Chris describes Heaven and Earth, spirit and matter, as unified opposites that cannot exist without each other and cannot be separated from human consciousness. The book takes its title from Christopher’s final message to Leo, in which he describes Heaven as an “eternal present” where everyone is together, even those of us still living earthly lives. “Lighten up,” Christopher says to his father. “You’re already here, you know.”

    "By a mile, the best new play of the season>"--John Heilpern, New York Observer.

    Scenery: A bare stageThe six teenage characters communicate only via the internet. Conversations range in subject from Britney Spears to Willy Wonka to - suicide: Jim is depressed and talks of ending his life and Eva and William decide to do their utmost to persuade him to carry out his threat. From this chilling premise is forged a funny, compelling and uplifting play that tackles the issues of teenage life head-on and with great understanding.

    The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."—Toni Morrison, from the ForewordThe Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965�2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965�1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize�winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career.On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America."mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days):all that I am asking isthat you see me as somethingmore than a common occurrence,more than a woman in her ordinary skin.

    However, celebrations come to an abrupt end when the host suffers an horrific accident.As the victim lies in a coma, an almost unthinkable plan starts to take shape: could her suffering be their next work of art? The group is ecstatic in its new found project until things slip out of their control and, to the surprise of all, the patient awakes?pool (no water) is a visceral and shocking new play about the fragility of friendship and the jealousy and resentment inspired by success.Citizenship is a bittersweet comedy about growing up, following a boy's frank and messy search to discover his sexual identity. It was developed as part of the National Theatre Shell Connections 2005 Programme

    They represent the crowning achievements of his career.O’Neill described Ah, Wilderness! as “the way I would have liked my boyhood to have been.” Set in the summer of 1906, it affectionately depicts the warm, close family of 16-year-old Richard Miller and the innocence with which he faces the trials of first love, strong drink, and sexual temptation.John Loving, hero of Days Without End, is split by his lack of faith into two selves: John and his Mephistophelian double Loving, who wears John’s death mask and plots his destruction. Burdened by guilt but desperately wanting to love, John struggles with Loving’s nihilistic hatred in what O’Neill termed his “modern miracle play.”In A Touch of the Poet, Irish tavern-keeper Con Melody is drawn by his proud past as a Byronic cavalry hero of the Napoleonic Wars toward a fatal confrontation with his wealthy Yankee neighbors, the Harfords.Throughout More Stately Mansions, the idealistic yet cunning Simon Harford, his wife, Sara Melody Harford, and his mother, Deborah, continually shift roles and alliances as they engage in an eerie psychological and sexual battle for possession of each other and their own maddeningly elusive dreams. This volume presents the never-before-published complete text of the revised typescript for this unfinished play.The derelict inhabitants of Harry Hope’s saloon in The Iceman Cometh find solace in their comradeship until their drifting calm is destroyed by the visiting salesman Theodore Hickey, who insists that they abandon all “pipe dreams” and face the truth about their lives. O’Neill carefully orchestrates the voices of over a dozen characters to form a chorus of overwhelming despair and surprising compassion.Hughie is a one-act dialogue between a reminiscing gambler and a weary hotel night clerk about the promise and loneliness of city life.Long Day’s Journey into Night unsparingly dissects the pain, rage, guilt, and love that drive a wounded family apart and bind it together. In their summer home the four Tyrones—James, a proud actor haunted by poverty, his devout, morphine-addicted wife, Mary, and their sons, Jamie, a cynical drunkard, and Edmund, an aspiring poet—slowly unveil the truth about their lives until they can no longer hope either to save or to escape one another. Published and produced posthumously, it won O’Neill his fourth Pulitzer Prize.In its elegiac coda, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Jamie Tyrone seeks the peace that has long eluded him in the arms of sharp-tongued Josie Hogan.The volume concludes with “Tomorrow” (1917), O’Neill’s only published short story.