These stories all deal with the common theme of the awakening of love at unpremeditated time and place, catching the victims off-guard. For the essential flavor of the tales, read Sunstroke, the story of a chance encounter on board ship; and A Night at Sea, perhaps the most unusual story of the group. Russian -- some about cultured people, some about peasants. The market is:- all who like exceptional short stories; all who are interested in getting the feel of one of the most famous writers.

    Or so they think.

    

    This adaptation offers readers the exquisite wordplay, beguiling comedy and fierce intelligence found in all of Kushner's work.The Illusion follows a contrite father, Pridamant, seeking news of his prodigal son from the sorcerer Alcandre. The magician conjures three episodes from the young man's life. Inexplicably, each scene finds the boy in a slightly different world: names change, allegiances shift and fairy-tale simplicity evolves into elegant tragedy. Pridamant watches, enthralled by the boy's struggles, but only as the strange tale reaches its conclusion does the father confront the ultimate-and unexpected-truth about his son. An enchanting argument for the power of theatrical imagination over reality, "The Illusion" weaves obsession and caprice, romance and murder, fact and fiction, into an enticing exploration of the greatest illusion of all-love.

    Splendid translations of the poems, with the Russian on a facing page, and a fresh, colloquial version of Mayakovsky's dramatic masterpiece, The Bedbug.

    is a series of women's monologues tackling many different aspects of the complex female psyche.

    'Ohio Impromptu...speaks poetically and with a stunning theatricality about a last love. Catastrophe...is a politically prescient black comedy about man's enslavement by the state. What Where, the most enigmatic of three pieces, is a cryptic gram of truth about the manipulation of man by man. A compelling triptych.' ---Mel Gussow, The New York Times

    The story of two white-collar managers, Chad and Howard, who maliciously plot to jointly romance the lonely, deaf, beautiful office temp Christine before simultaneously dumping her, is cool and compelling in its depiction of the worst sorts of emotional abuse. What begins as a cat-and-mouse game of one-upmanship quickly escalates into full-scale psychological warfare. Only too late does this 'frat boy' prank reveal itself as deadly serious, with a struggle between the two men at the heart of the battle. The woman is only a means to an end, a pawn easily captured and tossed aside in a dark, wicked duel for corporate ascension.

    Howard, and Shakespearean Romance by Walter Cohen. Like its parent volume, this concise edition gives students the vibrant introductions, readable single-column format, helpful glosses and notes, and extensive reference materials maps, a timeline, annotated bibliographies and film lists, documents that have made The Norton Shakespeare, Second Edition the best-selling classroom edition worldwide."

    Book annotation not available for this title.

    Only two characters appear on stage; Hughie, the third and most important one, is dead. It is Hughie's innocence, gullibility, and need to believe in a far more exciting existence than he ever knew which gives some kind of purpose to the shabby lives of the two who remain. O'Neill here again writes of the defeated and the courage that comes by way of illusions reflecting still other illusions in a world that needs them all.Hughie, the only surviving manuscript from a series of eight one-act monologue plays that O'Neill planned in 1940, was completed in 1941.

    It has received worldwide productions, whether as a study of parent-child relationships, as in its landmark 1976 production directed by Miller in Beijing, or as a critique of Western capitalism and has been filmed once for television and twice for movies.

    In an unprecedented (for him) run of promiscuity, Ty has managed to impregnate three women in the span of one week: His ex-girlfriend, his 40-something married next-door neighbor, and his 18 year-old student. In this edgy comedy by playwright Rajiv Joseph, Ty's problems illuminate every triumph and failure of his life, and as the women

    The first scene of the play is a conversation between two lovers, Tommy and Donna, who broke up some time earlier but who are obviously still attracted to each other. Donna is enraged because Tommy, a would-be artist, is now having an affair with her younger sister, but Tommy, stretched out on his recliner (which, apart from a refrigerator full of beer, comprises the entire furnishings of his spartan apartment), is seemingly unmoved by her harangue. In the second scene Donna visits her father, a once successful artist who stopped painting at the death of his wife, whom he had bullied and betrayed despite his professed love for her. Combative and complex (but also very funny) the father sits and drinks and eventually gives in to his daughter's demand that he force Tommy to marry her or beat him up. Then, in the third and final scene, the father and Tommy confront each other, with results that are sometimes menacing, sometimes antic, with a lively discussion about art and women eventually leading to a sort of tenuous truce—and a grudging recognition of the responsibility that love, in its various guises, imposes.

    This play which won the author a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony award presents the lead character, Willy Loman (played over time by Lee J Cobb, George C Scott, Dustin Hoffman, and Brian Dennehy, among others), who has come to represent the middle-class struggle.