Stephen Sondheim has won seven Tonys, an Academy Award, seven Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize and the Kennedy Center Honors. His lyrics have become synonymous with musical theater and popular culture, and here Sondheim has not only collected his lyrics for the first time, he is giving readers a rare personal look into his life as well as his remarkable productions. Along with the lyrics for all of his musicals from 1954 to 1981--including West Side Story, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd--Sondheim treats us to never-before-published songs cut or discarded from each show. He discusses his relationship with his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, and his collaborations with extraordinary talents from Leonard Bernstein to Angela Lansbury. The anecdotes--filled with pointed observations and intimate details--transport us back to a time when theater was a major pillar of American culture. Best of all, Sondheim offers unparalleled insights into songwriting.--From publisher description.

Inspired by Georges Seurat's pointillist masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical celebrates the art of creation and the creation of art. In the first half of the musical, set in 1884, the people - and the animals - in the painting come to life in a world where, for the artist George, art comes before love, before everything. In the second half, a century later, Seurat's great-grandson is wrestling with the same obsessions in present-day New York. Sunday in the Park with George was premiered on Broadway in May 1984, in a production directed by James Lapine. An earlier, incomplete version had been performed Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in July 1983. The musical went on to win the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The first London production opened at the National Theatre in March 1990. It won the 1991 Olivier Award for Best New Musical.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson’s newest volume of poetry, "Searching for the Ox," heralds a literary event of the highest order. The poems here all have a strong narrative structure, and at the same time they are beautifully lyrical, evocative of times, places and moods as strikingly different as the 1930s in tropical Kingston harbor and windy, wintry afternoons on postwar Riverside Drive. Like the masters of Zen, Simpson celebrates the everyday things that give the world color, shape, form and reason; he conveys the essence of an experience through his observation of small details. "Searching for the Ox" is divided into four parts. As Simpson observes in the Preface, "The first two parts describe the life of a young man coming from a background similar to my own. Poems in the third part are more meditative; they are about a way of life. And the concluding section is made up of poems rising out of my interests as a writer."