A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2015... First William Morrow paperback edition published 2016. Second William Morrow paperback edition published 2021."--Title page verso./ Includes the novella How the marquis got his coat back./ Published in 1997, Neil Gaiman's first novel, Neverwhere is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young London businessman with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he discovers a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her -- an act of kindness that plunges him into a world he never dreamed existed. Slipping through the cracks of reality, Richard lands in Neverwhere -- a London of shadows and darkness, monsters and saints, murderers and angels that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth. Neverwhere is home to Door, the mysterious girl Richard helped in the London Above. Here in Neverwhere, Door is a powerful noblewoman who has vowed to find the evil agent of her family's slaughter and thwart the destruction of this strange underworld kingdom. If Richard is ever to return to his former life and home, he must join Lady Door's quest to save her world -- and may well die trying.

In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition. Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin’s landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckett’s tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.

"At the beginning of the 20th Century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna. But Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptised Jew married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. Gathered in the Merz apartment in a fashionable part of the city, Hermann's extended family are at the heart of Tom Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama. By the time we have taken leave of them, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany and - for Austrian Jews - the Holocaust in which 65,000 of them were murdered. It is for the survivors to pass on a story which hasn't ended yet"--Back cover

The Faber Classic Screenplay Series presents the very best writing from the history of cinema. Sweet Smell of Success is the smartest, most cynical American film of the 1950s. Written by Ernest Lehman ( North by Northwest , The Sound of Music ) and the celebrated leftist playwright Clifford Odets, it is a vicious dissection of the world of public relations and journalism which conjures up a wprld of creeping hysteria and acid disenchantment. Tony Curtis playing the Scuttling press agent Sidney Falco, and Burt Lancaster as the colimnist J.J. Hunsecker, gave the performances of their careers. With a specially commissioned introduction by Lehman, and an appreciation of the film's director, Alexander Mackendrick, by James Mangold. The Faber Classic Screenplay Series presents the very best writing from the history of cinema. Sweet Smell of Success is the smartest, most cynical American film of the 1950s. Written by Ernest Lehman ( North by Northwest , The Sound of Music ) and the celebrated leftist playwright Clifford Odets, it is a vicious dissection of the world of public relations and journalism which conjures up a wprld of creeping hysteria and acid disenchantment. Tony Curtis playing the Scuttling press agent Sidney Falco, and Burt Lancaster as the colimnist J.J. Hunsecker, gave the performances of their careers. With a specially commissioned introduction by Lehman, and an appreciation of the film's director, Alexander Mackendrick, by James Mangold.

"Listen to the dialogue: no other American dramatist has this feel for the ordinary talk of ordinary people, or the knowledge of what they do. This is more than a writer's craft, it is a psychological and moral openness to humanity, an act not of imitating, but of sharing". Sunday Times This fourth anthology features Arthur Miller's two early plays, The Golden Years , a historical tragedy about Montezuma's destruction at the hands of Cortez, and The Man Who Had All the Luck , a fable about human freedom and individual responsibility, are brought together in this volume. It also features two of his contemporary shorter plays, I Can't Remember Anything and Clara , first presented on a double bill as Danger! Memory . The latter focus on the importance and dangers of remembering the past, while the early plays, written at the time of the Second World War, mark the emergence of a drama in which public issues are rooted in private anxieties and chart the beginning of Miller's career that was one of the most distinguished in dramatic history. First produced in 1944 and revived in London in 2008, The Man Who Had All the Luck is a mesmerising drama in which the author's brilliance and characteristic qualities are already evident: The fourth volume of Miller's plays has been reissued with a new cover and features an introduction by the author and a chronology of his work.

Stella Adler examines the role of the actor and brings to life the plays from which all modern theater derives: Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, An Enemy of the People, and A Doll's House; Strindberg's Miss Julie and The Father; Chekhov's The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, and Three Sisters. Adler discusses the ideas behind these plays and explores the world of the playwrights and the history - both familial and cultural - that informed their work. She illumines not only the dramatic essence of each play but its subtext as well, continually asking questions that deepen one's understanding of the work and of the human spirit. --

Although Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy probably only met once in their lives, their names will be linked forever in the history of American literary feuds: they were legendary enemies, especially after McCarthy famously announced to the world that every word Hellman wrote was a lie, "including 'and' and 'the.'" The public battle, and the legal squabbling, that ensued ended, unsatisfactorily for all, with Hellman's death. In Imaginary Friends," Nora Ephron brilliantly and hilariously resuscitates these two bigger-than-life women to give them a post-mortem second act, and the chance to really air their differences.

"'Socrates' is a witty and endlessly fascinating drama about a complicated man who changed how the Western world thought. This powerful play is an intellectual thrill ride from the philosopher's growing prominence in democratic Athens through the military and social upheavals that led to one of the most infamous executions in Western history. 'Socrates' is a passionate tribute to the man who continues to inspire us to question authority and defend freedom of belief."--publisher description.

"Funny, moving, and undeniably sexy. The heady blend of smart dialogue and characters. . .makes it a candidate to be the "Angels in America" of the Bush II decade."--"San Francisco Chronicle" "The two works ["Angels in America" and "In the Wake"] use a volatile chapter in American history as background in their exploration of how the sociopolitical maladies of an age play out in the personal conduct of characters."-- Charles McNulty, "Los Angeles Times" Lisa Kron, author of Broadway's "Well" and the OBIE-winning solo show "2.5 Minute Ride," has taken on the big question of our country's character. On the Thanksgiving after the controversial 2000 election, political junkie Ellen gathers with family and friends in her cramped New York apartment. But she soon discovers--with an unexpected passionate encounter--that ideas about America and our own selves are not as fixed as they once seemed. A play with plenty of humor and passion to go with its politics, Kron's work premiered last year at Berkeley Rep and Los Angeles' Center Theater Group, and debuted at The Public Theater in New York this fall. Lisa Kron's plays have been performed on Broadway, off-Broadway, and around the world. She is a founding member of the award-winning theater group The Five Lesbian Brothers, and teaches playwriting at Yale University.

""Impromptu Man captures the remarkable impact of a singular genius, J.L. Moreno, whose creations-the best-known being psychodrama-have shaped our culture in myriad ways, many unrecognized. The record will be set straight for all time by this can't-put-down biography, a tribute by Jonathan D. Moreno to his father's masterly legacy." -DANIEL GOLEMAN, author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ J.L. Moreno (1889-1974), the father of psychodrama, was an early critic of Sigmund Freud, wrote landmark works of Viennese expressionism, founded an experimental theater where he discovered Peter Lorre, influenced Martin Buber, and became one of the most important psychiatrists and social scientists of his time. ?? A mystic, theater impresario and inventor in his youth, Moreno immigrated to America in 1926, where he trained famous actors, introduced group therapy, and was a forerunner of humanistic psychology. As a social reformer, he reorganized schools and prisons, and designed New Deal planned communities for workers and farmers. Moreno's methods have been adopted by improvisational theater groups, military organizations, educators, business leaders, and trial lawyers. His studies of social networks laid the groundwork for social media like Twitter and Facebook. ?? Featuring interviews with Clay Shirky, Gloria Steinem, and Werner Erhard, among others, original documentary research, and the author's own perspective growing up as the son of an innovative genius, Impromptu Man is both the study of a great and largely unsung figure of the last century and an epic history, taking readers from the creative chaos of early twentieth-century Vienna to the wired world of Silicon Valley. Jonathan D. Moreno, called the "most interesting bioethicist of our time" by the American Journal of Bioethics, is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. "--

No contemporary French feminist has made a bigger impact in America than Häl_ne Cixous. Brilliant, bold, and combative, author of numerous novels and a gargantuan study of James Joyce, and sponsor of a series of notorious seminars at the Universityøof Paris about women's writing, she has exploited the roles of femme fatale and maitresse d'education in a career that has been spectacularly defiant and productive. Sihanouk is one of Cixous's most ambitious projects: the dramatic portrayal of the conflicts between old and new, East and West, North and South, religion and politics. At its center is the figure of Norodom Sihanouk. Vain when a prince, as king Sihanouk discovered his responsibility to his country and came to embody Cambodia. He used every means to keep his country growing, healthy, and out of the wars of Southeast Asia that consumed Laos and Vietnam. Cixous recognized in Sihanouk a historical figure as fascinating as a tragic king in Shakespeare: a man of uncommon intelligence on whom his country's history pivoted, a man placed by fate into a world of bad choices and surrounded by powerful and relentless antagonists. But Sihanouk gave Cixous something more: a king who is indisputably modern, who has read and loved Shakespeare, and whose story continues. First published in 1985, the play begins with Sihanouk's abdication in 1955 and ends with his arrest by the Khmer Rouge two decades later. The destiny of an entire country unfolds through the fifty characters who appear on stage.

The cause celebre of the 19th century, the Dreyfus Affair destabilized French society (1894-1906) and reverberated across the world. Its repercussions continue to this day. A deliberate miscarriage of justice, the public degradation of an innocent Jewish officer and his incarceration on Devil's Island, espionage, intrigue, media pressure, vehement antisemitism and political skulduggery--all these elements, based on historical records, are contained in George R. Whyte's trilogy of plays which also focuses on Emile Zola's letter to the President of France, J'Accuse, arguably history's most famous plea for human rights.

A sereis of linked television plays. A London library with a huge collection of rare photographs is faced with extinction. Among its 10 million pictures are images telling extraordinary stories of the past, intimate tales which are both erotic and full of pain. the custodians of these pictures are an eccentric collection of librarians whose stoical, arcane knowledge is in conflict with a new management determined to destroy their world forever

What is modern in modern drama? What defines it, unmistakably, as being of our time? This quality if the subject of John Peter's inquiry.For Peter, Beckett's Waiting for Godot makes such a radical break with dramatic tradition that it prompts the question: Is this play the single most important event in the theater since Aeschylus? Or is it the fulfillment of forces at work long before Beckett wrote it? Peter shows how Beckett's work represents a change in the very subject matter of drama, a fundamental revision of concepts of character, plot, and meaning, which in turn requires a new way of responding to drama. Where plays have traditionally engaged audiences in critical and moral dialogue, theater like Beckett's, according to Peter, is closed to questioning; it presents a vision of the world which can only be accepted or rejected. As such, it not only signals a new form of drama, but also posits a fundamentally changed audience.Peter views this change—essentially, a change of mind—in its wider context. The times and the thought that contribute to the modern imagination are represented here by novels, paintings, and music—works by Wagner, Kafka, Proust, Picasso, and Braque—as well as plays. Peter shows how the depiction of the world by these artists echoes—and is echoed by—the work of modern thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud.Vladimir's Carrot will provoke and stimulate readers who find themselves either lost or perfectly at home in "modern" culture.

Crossing Jerusalem describes a day in the life of an Israeli family at the beginning of the latest intifada. The Golem is a children₂s version of the famous story, exploring what happens when a monster is constructed to defend his community. Year Zero is a bittersweet satire about Communists, Gaulists, and collaborators in the north of France, 1940s. Saint Joan sets the heroine against a sweep of world history, culminating in the Parisian National Front rally of 1995.

Does Tommy know you're Jewish? Tommy knows I'm Irish. At 12:37pm on 22 July 1946, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed. 91 people were killed, 46 wounded. The bombing was carried out by right-wing Zionists, targeting the headquarters of the British in Palestine. Two Irish Jewish brothers, Paul and Cecil Green, journey from their Dublin birthplace to battle antisemitism on the streets of East London. Their Irish nationalism propels them towards Jewish nationalism as they struggle against British Imperialism to form a Jewish nation state. As violence between British soldiers and Jewish terrorists erupts, Paul and Cecil become involved in an act of terrorism that changes both their lives. 12:37 raises complex and controversial questions around Jewish violence, homeland and national identity in a stunning new play that is both a hard-hitting historical epic and an intimate family drama. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Finborough Theatre, London, in November 2022.

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