The Lost Weekend swept the 1945 Academy Awards, with nominations for Best Film Editing, Score, and Black and White Cinematography, and Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Screenplay. It also received numerous awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globes. Based on the novel by Charles Jackson, a work that many in Hollywood had thought unfilmmable because of its relentless grimness, The Lost Weekend was one of the first films to explore the devastating effects of alcoholism. Ray Milland was cast against type as Don Birnam, a writer plagued by depression and self-doubt who, as his alcoholism progresses, slips into a horrifying downward spiral of lying, begging, stealing, and madness. Milland's riveting performance won him an Oscar. Jane Wyman also delivers a powerful performance as his faithful girlfriend, Helen St. James, whose selfless love offers Birnam a hope of redemption. This facsimile edition of The Lost Weekend not only reveals the genius of the film but also illuminates how the script stands alone as a rare, wonderful piece of writing. Jeffrey Meyers's introduction looks at the transformation from novel to film and examines Wilder and coauthor Charles Brackett's methods as collaborators. Readers will gain important insights into the craft of screenwriting, and the personality and methods of one of Hollywood's greatest directors.

"The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original. Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world"--

Today everyone – whether they know it or not – is in the emotional transportation business. More and more, success is won by creating compelling stories that have the power to move partners, shareholders, customers, and employees to action. Simply put, if you can’t tell it, you can’t sell it. And this book tells you how to do both. Historically, stories have always been igniters of action, moving people to do things. But only recently has it become clear that purposeful stories – those created with a specific mission in mind – are absolutely essential in persuading others to support a vision, dream or cause. Peter Guber, whose executive and entrepreneurial accomplishments have made him a success in multipleindustries, has long relied on purposeful story telling to motivate, win over, shape, engage and sell. Indeed, what began as knack for telling stories as an entertainment industry executive has, through years of perspiration and inspiration, evolved into a set of principles that anyone can use to achieve their goals. In Tell to Win, Guber shows how to move beyond soulless Power Point slides, facts, and figures to create purposeful stories that can serve as powerful calls to action. Among his techniques: *Capture your audience’s attention first, fast and foremost *Motivate your listeners by demonstrating authenticity *Build your tell around “what’s in it for them” *Change passive listeners into active participants *Use “state-of-the-heart” technology online and offline to make sure audience commitment remains strong To validate the power of telling purposeful stories, Guber includes in this book a remarkably diverse number of “voices” – master tellers with whom he’s shared experiences. They include YouTube founder Chad Hurley, NBA champion Pat Riley, clothing designer Normal Kamali, “Mission to Mars” scientist Gentry Lee, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank, former South African president Nelson Mandela, magician David Copperfield, film director Steven Spielberg, novelist Nora Roberts, rock legend Gene Simmons, and physician and author Deepak Chopra. After listening to this extraordinary mix of voices, you’ll know how to craft, deliver -- and own – a story that is truly compelling, one capable of turning others into viral advocates for your goal. From the Hardcover edition.

A luckless thief’s wrong turn becomes a crooked cop’s fortune in a wild ride of a thriller by a New York Times bestselling author. Failed lawyer Robert Green has such a good plan: Crack three hundred safe-deposit boxes and sail off to South America with his brilliant, morally flexible sister, Penny. If it weren’t for the damned freezing rain. In the dying resort town of Granite Shores, cop Jack Biddle is self-appointed king―mostly of bad decisions. Between his family’s crumbling legacy, a wife who just joined the city council, and life-threatening gambling debts, Jack’s looking for a way out. Then he spots a van spinning off a mountain road into the valley below. In the wreckage, Jack finds a very dead Robert, millions in heisted loot…and opportunity. All Jack has to do is clean up the mess, disappear Robert’s body, make off with the fortune, and not get caught. One hitch is Penny. Another is Mitch Diamond, a wild card ex-con who knows more about the missing fortune than he lets on. Jack, Penny, and Mitch each have an endgame. But there’s only one way out, and they’re crashing headlong toward it.

"In this Booker Prize-winning classic, a Casanova-esque young man searches for philosophical and sexual fulfillment as he seduces his way across Europe on the eve of World War I. John Berger's picaresque work, one of the author's best novels, is an inspired exploration of intimacy and loneliness set at the turn of the 20th century. In this luminous novel about a modern Don Juan, John Berger relates the story of G., a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century as Europe teeters on the brink of war. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the libertine's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their liaisons with him. Set against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi's attempt to unite Italy, the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War, and the dramatic first flight across the Alps, G. is a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in the turmoil of history"-- Provided by publisher.

Set in Brooklyn in 1986, The Squid and the Whale captures with extraordinary immediacy the inner workings of the Berkman family. Bernard (Jeff Daniels), a once successful novelist, and his wife Joan (Laura Linney), an up-and-coming writer, have given up on their marriage. Their two sons Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), 16, and Frank (Owen Kline), 12, are left to grapple with their confusing and conflicted feelings. The emotional tensions and strains that emerge during this difficult period for the Berkmans are given an unusually subtle and nuanced portrayal, producing scenes that are both anguished and hilarious to watch. This is a film that deftly presents the realities of a family in transition learning to redefine itself.

Presenting a masterpiece from one of America's great satirists. Jules Feiffer has had one of the most varied and illustrious careers of any 20th century cartoonist. For over 40 years he contributed strips to The Village Voice, and has long been a regular contributor to the London Observer and Playboy. An animated cartoon based on his story Munro received an Academy Award in 1961. In the '60s, he branched into theater, writing several plays now regarded as classics: Little Murders; Knock, Knock; The White House Murder Case; Elliot Loves; and The Grown-Ups, to name a few. Originally conceived for the stage, his Carnal Knowledge became one of the landmark films of the '70s. He has written two prose novels, Harry the Rat with Women and Ackroyd, as well as a cartoon novel, Tantrum. In the 1990s, Feiffer embarked on yet another career, this time as a children's book author. He has over a half-dozen to his credit, including modern classics like The Man and the Ceiling. Passionella and Other Stories collects Feiffer's finest extended graphic narratives of the late '50s and early '60s. It opens in full-color with "Excalibur and Rose," the fable of a village comedian who embarks on a crusade in search of his serious side, which he finds in spades when he encounters his true love, the pathologically depressed Rose. The volume's centerpiece, "Passionella," a retelling of Cinderella set in modern Hollywood, concerns a chimney sweep whose fairy godmother transforms her into the "mysterious exotic bewitching temptress" and movie star Passionella. Other stories include "The Lonely Machine," an account of one man's attempt to find the perfect relationship through robot love, and "Harold Swerg," the predicament of the world's greatest athlete who'd rather stay at his mundane job than compete against others, despite his country's desperate pleas to enter the Olympics. Three more classic graphic tales and several entertaining one-act plays round out this handsomely designed hardcover edition.

"A blistering, brilliant novel from the Booker-shortlisted author, elegantly reflecting his Geoffrey Faber Memorial award-winning story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity. In The Quantity Theory of Morality, Will Self 's unconventional new novel, his pen remains dipped in vitriol and elegance as ever. In this dark yet hilariously satirical "state-of-an-era novel," Self 's target is a collective morality that is nothing more or less than pure sociability. His middle-class, middle-English characters appear trapped in a timeless go-round of polite chitchat in dinner parties that refract like a hall of mirrors as the novel progresses, until one day someone says something to the effect of, "This way to the gas chamber, please, ladies and gentlemen." The Quantity Theory of Morality finally solves the equation of time and money that dominates our lives, in a way that is simultaneously deranging, destabilizing, and hilarious. With recurring-if defeated-appearances from now-canonical characters like Zack Busner, the repetition of each chapter, or "Proposition," shows Will Self to be both a master of satire and slapstick humor and a sublime and thoughtful critic of the alienation of modern life. With The Quantity Theory of Morality, Self provides the sequel to his award-winning debut of thirty-four years ago: The Quantity Theory of Insanity. That literary psycho-surgery proved there wasn't enough sanity to go around-now he's established what many of us fear to be the absolute truth: there isn't enough good to go around, either"-- Provided by publisher.

This is the screenplay for the film Great Expectations that takes its inspiration from Dickens' classic novel. Set in contemporary New York and Florida, the story follows the journey of Finn Bell (Ethan Hawke), an aspiring artist whose world is changed dramatically by three disparate strangers who unexpectedly invade his life: a dangerous convict, Lustig (Robert De Niro); the icy and beautiful Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow); and the wealthy and crazed eccentric Miss Dinsmoor (Anne Bancroft).

Excerpt from The Modern Chess Instructor, Vol. 1 The chief purport of the work on Chess, of which the present volume forms the first part, is the theoretical application of new principles and of the reasoning by analogies of positions which have been my guide in practice, especially during the last twenty years. It is perhaps unnecessary to state that the task which I have set before me was beset with enormous difficulties. Many variations that have been the product of vast changes in the style of play which has taken place in modern times, have no doubt been duly noticed in able treatises on the game, but no attempt has yet been made in any book on Chess to base the analysis systematically on general ideas which would assist the judgment of the student in similar positions. In the present work great efforts are essayed in that direction, especially in the annotation of illustrative games from practical play where the results of the application of the principles recommended for the conduct of the openings and the middle part can be more distinctly traced in the end. But as will be seen from the few examples given in this volume, of reasoning out the opening moves by comparison of different maxims, it would have been practically impossible within the scope of this work to adopt the same sort of commentation throughout the analysis of the openings, and I had to confine myself in that respect to pointing out the most striking examples of the adaptation of principles in the early part of the game. However, I have carefully examined the debuts treated in this volume on the basis of such general maxims, and as the openings have been hitherto analysed by the authorities chiefly in an empirical manner, it became necessary to introduce a very large number of novelties at various stages of variations which, up to the present, had been generally recognized as standard lines of play. In short I have come to conclusions differing very widely from those hitherto sanctioned by firstclass practitioners and authors right at the roots of the openings, and sometimes as early as on the third or fourth moves, like in the Ruy Lopez, the Petroff's Defence, and the Philidor Defence. The analysis of the openings had therefore to be entirely remodelled in many instances in which new ideas are developed that have never been put to any practical test. Most of the experimental deductions which I introduce to students of the game, must therefore be regarded only as imaginary examples of tactics and strategy which I trust will in the main afford good instruction to the reader, but cannot lay any claim to absolute accuracy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A few years ago, Christopher Buckley wrote of Bruce Jay Friedman in the New York Times Book Review that he "has been likened to everyone from J. D. Salinger to Woody Allen," but that "he is: Bruce Jay Friedman, sui generis, and no mean thing. No further comparisons are necessary." We are happy to report that he remains the same Bruce Jay Friedman in his unique, unblinking, and slightly tilted essays—collected here for the first time—in Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos . A butler school in Houston, a livestock auction in Little Rock, a home for "frozen guys" in California, JFK's humidor in Manhattan—all are jumping off points for Friedman's baleful and sharply satirical scrutiny of American life and behavior in the second half of the twentieth century. Travel with Friedman from Harlem to Hollywood, from Port-au-Prince to Etta's Eat Shop in Chicago. In these pieces, which were published in literary and mass-circulation magazines from the 1960s to the 1990s, you'll meet such luminaries as Castro and Clinton, Natalie Wood and Clint Eastwood, and even Friedman's friends Irwin Shaw, Nelson Algren, and Mario Puzo. Friedman is a master of the essay, whether the subject is crime reporting ("Lessons of the Street"), Hollywood shenanigans ("My Life among the Stars"), or his outrageous adventures as the editor of pulp magazines (the classic "Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos"). We could sing his praises as a journalist, humorist, and social critic. But, as Buckley tells us, being Bruce Jay Friedman is enough. Bruce Jay Friedman is the author of seven novels (including The Dick , Stern , and A Mother's Kisses ), four collections of short stories, four full-length plays (including Scuba Duba and Steambath ), and the screenplays for the movies Splash and Stir Crazy .

Humor, Comedy, Graphic Novel

"An ex-Soviet professor plays amateur detective in this post Cold War romp by New York Times bestselling spy master Robert Littell. Lemuel Falk, a theoretical "chaoticist," has been denied permission to leave Russia for the last twenty-three years, likely because he knows a few state secrets. Even he is surprised-and wary-when his twenty-fourth request is approved, and he is offered a position as visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies in upstate New York. But as soon as Professor Falk arrives in America, he is plunged into a new kind of chaos-including a high-stakes academic catfight, an affair with a much-younger hairdresser, and cascading offers from domestic spies looking to capitalize on his knowledge-and soon finds himself playing amateur detective at the behest of local police. While he helps hunt for a dangerous serial killer, he grapples with ghosts from his own past in Russia. In this wholly original novel, Littell explores chaos theory, questions of faith, ad the ironies of contemporary America"-- Provided by publisher.

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (1959), which stars Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Ed Begley, and Gloria Graham, is written by blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky and directed by Robert Wise. The last great film noir of the black & white era, ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW reflects the author's strong social conscience--as racial conflict is portrayed as central to the failure of a bank robbery. This publication of the complete script of ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW blends the shooting script (written before the film was shot) and the continuity script (the elements which are contained in the finished film). The critical analysis draws extensively on specially conducted interviews with Robert Wise, Harry Belafonte, and Abraham Polonsky. Discussed din depth are the significance of a black protagonist within the film noir genre; the film's staus with African-American related cinema; the adaptation from William McGivern's novel; and the critically celebrated jazz score by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

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