The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterward


Whit Stillman - 2000
    Now, twisting the film novelization genre in an entirely new direction, Stillman has produced something equally fresh and surprising: a novel based on the characters and events touched on in The Last Days of Disco—the movie The New York Times called “deft, funny and improbably touching”—with results that are even defter, funnier, and more improbably poignant.Jimmy Steinway, the “Dancing Adman” of The Last Days of Disco (and, we later discover, a frustrated, desk-drawer novelist), gets his lucky break when Castle Rock Entertainment, unable to find anyone else to write a novelization of the movie, reluctantly gives the assignment to him. Jimmy struggles to bring to light the true origins of the story at Kate Preston’s party in Sag Harbor and the fast, then slow, then fast again unfolding of his love for Alice Kinnon, the boyfriendless social failure from Hampshire College whose quite charm detonated a bitter rivalry between him and four of his Harvard classmates. (He also sets the record straight about the beautiful, passionate, painfully candid Charlotte Pingree.)Set primarily in Manhattan in the early 1980s—but spanning two continents and two decades—The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards redresses the wrongs done these characters and this period, while helping to ameliorate the comic novel shortage in the world today.

Children of a Lesser God


Mark Medoff - 1980
    As Sarah says, It is a silence full of sound.

Cyrano de Bergerac: in a free adaptation


Martin Crimp - 2019
    While Roxane is in love with the beautiful but inarticulate Christian.Cyrano's generous offer to act as go-between sets in motion a poignant and often hilarious love-triangle, in which each character is torn between the lure of physical attraction and the seductive power of words.Martin Crimp's adaptation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac premiered at the Playhouse Theatre, London, in November 2019.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape


Steven Soderbergh - 1990
    Illustrated.

Lulu on the Bridge


Paul Auster - 1998
    It is the story of Izzy and Celia, two lonely, wounded, and mismatched strangers, transformed into soul mates by the uncanny powers of a phosphorescent stone. Destiny, as well as some bizarre and near-tragic circumstances, conspire to keep the lovers apart. But the audience and reader are privy to a grand and surprising finale that explains all. Thought-provoking, intriguing, and utterly romantic, Lulu on the Bridge offers a lyrical meditation on what distinguishes chance from fate, reality from illusion, and life from death. Following on the success of the screenplay cornpanion to Smoke and Blue in the Face, this book contains the shooting script; an interview with Paul Auster by Rebecca Prime; interviews with the producer, costume designer, editor, director of photography, and production designer; and stills from the film.

A View from the Bridge


Arthur Miller - 2016
    Eddie Carbone is a Brooklyn longshoreman, a hard-working man whose life has been soothingly predictable. He hasn't counted on the arrival of two of his wife's relatives, illegal immigrants from Italy; nor has he recognized his true feelings for his beautiful niece, Catherine. And in due course, what Eddie doesn't know?about her, about life, about his own heart?will have devastating consequences.

Lazarus And His Beloved, A One Act Play


Kahlil Gibran - 2009
    

Plays Unpleasant


George Bernard Shaw - 1898
    Warren's Profession-Shaw challenges his audiences' moral complacency in the face of serious social problems and inequities.Author Bio: George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the most prolific writers of the modern theater. He invented the modern comedy of ideas, expounding on social and political problems with a razor-sharp tongue, yet never sacrificing the comic vitality that ensures regular revivals of his plays. He also wrote several important political works, including The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Dan H. Lawrence, edited Shaw's Collected Letters, his Collected Plays with their Prefaces, and Shaw's Music and (with Daniel Leary) The Complete Prefaces. He is Series Editor for the works of Shaw in Penguin.David Edgar is a playwright, critic, and professor of Playwriting Studies at the University of Birmingham.

L.A. Confidential: The Screenplay


Brian Helgeland - 1997
    

The Hours


David Hare - 2002
    Dalloway -- a postmodern masterpiece whose minimal action takes place on a single June day in postwar London. The Hours progresses in fuguelike fashion: First we meet Clarissa Vaughan, a New York book editor dubbed "Mrs Dalloway" by her longtime friend and former lover Richard. Next, Cunningham presents Woolf herself, beginning work in 1923 on what is to become Mrs. Dalloway. And finally we are introduced to Laura Brown, a California housewife who is avidly reading Woolf's novel. Scenes from these three narratives are presented in recurrent identical succession: "Mrs. Dalloway," Mrs. Woolf, Mrs. Brown -- all bristling with connections and startling parallels. The "Mrs. Dalloway" strand is particularly rich, filled as it is with one-to-one correspondences to Woolf's novel. But the deepest and most important thing that The Hours shares with Mrs. Dalloway is "the feeling," as Woolf called it, "that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day." Cunningham's three women proceed through the day, through the hours, trying to keep themselves psychologically intact, like someone carrying a glass of water filled to the brim through a crowd and endeavoring not to spill it. They hesitate before plunging into the day because they know how hard it is to live in the world and remain identical with oneself. And they puzzle over a universal dilemma: how to bring the self into the world without its getting broken in the process. In The Hours, Michael Cunningham has explored this dilemma with an impressive and moving subtlety worthy of his great precursor. Benjamin Kunkel

Plays, Prose Writings and Poems


Oscar Wilde - 1991
    The scope of his genius is indicated in this volume by the inclusion of the period’s most scintillating comedy – The Importance of Being Earnest; its most notorious novel – The Picture of Dorian Gray; and its most haunting elegy – The Ballad of Reading Gaol; together with a selection of his most acclaimed essays and stories. This expanded new edition now includes the complete version of De Profundis and Wilde’s teasing parable about Shakespeare, The Portrait of Mr. W.H.Introduction by Terry Eagleton

Lorca Plays: One: Blood Wedding, Doña Rosita the Spinster, and Yerma


Federico García Lorca - 1935
    Blood Wedding tells the story of a couple drawn irresistibly together in the face of an arranged marriage; Doña Rosita the Spinster follows the appalling fate of a young woman beguiled into the expectation of marriage and left stranded for a lifetime whilst Yerma is possibly Lorca's harshest play following a woman's Herculean struggle against the curse of infertility. Set in and around his home territory, Granada, the plays return again and again to the lives of passionate individuals, particularly women, trapped by the social conventions of narrow peasant communities. The plays appear here in new playable translations.

The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay


Harlan Ellison - 1977
    Yet the fiction books in the Borealis imprint certainly belong to a world other than our own. This line encompasses our science fiction, fantasy and horror novels and anthologies.

A Few Good Men


Aaron Sorkin - 1990
    The Navy lawyer, a callow young man more interested in softball games than the case, expects a plea bargain and a cover up of what really happened. Prodded by a female member of his defense team, the lawyer eventually makes a valiant effort to defend his clients and, in so doing, puts the military mentality and the Marine code of honor on trial.

Clerks & Chasing Amy


Kevin Smith - 1997
    Clerks was the independent film success story of 1994, winning the Prix de la Jeunesse and the International Critics Week Award at Cannes, and the Filmmakers' Trophy at Sundance. Set in the everyday world of a New Jersey QuickStop and its adjacent video store, the film revolves around the obsessions, love lives, and friendships of the clerks. Janet Maslin of the New York Time called it "a buoyant comedy...and exuberant display of ingenuity," and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times raves, "Clerks is boisterous and irreverently funny...an example of what is best and most hopeful about the American independent film scene."