This novel is an opportunity to see a world full of prejudice and ignorance through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old. Many of the facts are real, but for personal reasons, the author has used fictitious names and places. The story takes place in Romania during the communist period, and most of the situations reflect a dark side of the underground life which the totalitarian regime of that time tried to hide. The author discovered a thread of events that he followed, driven by curiosity, and then he tried, through the naivety of his age, to depict it in a mature and dramatic way. Beyond the psychological exaggerations of the author, you will discover a bygone world of human ignorance and indifference in an outmoded and morally rotten society.

Like all plantations, during America's slave period, the Big A had its share of secrets. And as Mr. Arnold went on believing old Mae (his oldest and best picker) was oblivious to his little secret... old Mae had a few secrets of her own, which left the wealthy plantation owner clueless to what would be his own undoing... yet old Mae couldn't hold a candle to Pleasant, who stayed royally humble, as he went about helping everyone around him. But not even Ella knew what Duval took to the battle field with him. And while Clora Lee and Cowayne held more secrets than anyone could count, Sistah often kept the two young adventure seekers off balance, with her double life. Yet the secret, the Arnold's oldest daughter held close to her chest, was sure to come to light one day. And as the Big A slowly fell into ruins, it collapsed on one last secret, the old plan-tation hoped to keep hidden for all eternity...

It starts with the sound of a spoon scraping against glass and the wet noise of lips smacking together. June and Lurie have a haunting new houseguest - and she's ravenously hungry. They do their best to keep her fed and happy, but Beatrice always demands more. As she burrows deeper and deeper into their lives, the couple faces a horrific question: What will it cost to exorcise Beatrice forever? Kirsten Greenidge's spine-chilling gothic tale, about a contemporary Black couple haunted by the ghost of a young white girl, deftly explores questions of race, class and the American Dream.

Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw - Akasha Classics, AkashaPublishing.Com - As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a sequel, which I have supplied in its due place. The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to English-men. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J. Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any, include some satires that may be published without too destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.

Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

"A tremendous achievement in American playwriting: a tragicomic populist portrait of a tough land and a tougher people."--"Time Out New York"

"Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County" is what O'Neill would be writing in 2007. Letts has recaptured the nobility of American drama's mid-century heyday while still creating something entirely original."--"New York" magazine

One of the most bracing and critically acclaimed plays in recent Broadway history, "August: Osage County" is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family at its finest--and absolute worst. When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed. After its sold-out Chicago premiere, the play has electrified audiences in New York since its opening in November 2007.

Tracy Letts is the author of "Killer Joe," "Bug," and "Man from Nebraska," which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been performed throughout the country and internationally. A performer as well as a playwright, Letts is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where "August: Osage County" premiered.

Part one begins by examining the nature of Diderot's theatrical revolution as it is revealed in the works of dramatic theory, the Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel and De la poesie dramatique, as well as in his letters and articles for the Correspondance litteraire. It also compares this theory with the level of innovation revealed in practical terms in the plays themselves. Diderot's approach to theatrical dialogue seems to be one of the most original, and most frequently criticised, aspects of his dramaturgy and this is therefore the subject of a separate chapter. Part two examines both the sources of Diderot's dramatic works, and the way in which he renews this source material in order to produce dramatic theory which seems more original than it actually is, and a theoretical style which, for good or ill, is uniquely his own. This section begins with a consideration of the most obviously derivative of his dramatic works, his translation of The Gamester, which, because of the contemporary popularity of the English play, gives us a unique opportunity to compare Diderot's working methods with those of three French contemporaries who were also attracted by this text. The remaining chapters deal firstly with the major influences on the dramatic theory, and secondly with the sources and compositional methods of the four plays: Le Fils naturel, Le Pere de famille, Les Peres malheureux and Est-il bon? Est-il mechant?

One life in the hands of 12 women. Rural Suffolk, 1759. As the country waits for Halley's comet, Sally Poppy is sentenced to hang for a heinous murder. When she claims to be pregnant, a jury of 12 matrons are taken from their housework to decide whether she's telling the truth, or simply trying to escape the noose. With only midwife Lizzy Luke prepared to defend the girl, and a mob baying for blood outside, the matrons wrestle with their new authority, and the devil in their midst. The Welkin premiered at the National Theatre, London, in 2020, directed by James Macdonald and featuring Maxine Peake and Ria Zmitrowicz. Lucy Kirkwood's other plays include Mosquitoes, The Children, Chimerica (winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Play, the Evening Standard Best Play Award, the Critics' Circle Best New Play Award, and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), NSFW and it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now.

This is the first complete new scholarly edition for almost a century of one of the masterpieces of Athenian Old Comedy. Olson offers an extensive introduction, a text based on a fresh collation of the manuscripts, and a massive literary and historical commentary. All Greek in the introduction and commentary not cited for technical reasons is translated, making much of the edition accessible to non-specialists.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is the tale of a catastrophic confrontation between fantasy and reality, embodied in the characters of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Arthur Miller. 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers' Fading southern belle Blanche DuBois is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of grandeur bring her into conflict with Stella's crude, brutish husband Stanley Kowalski. Eventually their violent collision course causes Blanche's fragile sense of identity to crumble, threatening to destroy her sanity and her one chance of happiness. Tennessee Williams's steamy and shocking landmark drama, recreated as the immortal film starring Marlon Brando, is one of the most influential plays of the twentieth century. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and Small Craft Warnings (1972). If you enjoyed A Streetcar Named Desire, you might like The Glass Menagerie, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Lyrical and poetic and human and heartbreaking and memorable and funny' Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather 'One of the greatest American plays' Observer

They may be mother and daughter yet they are strangers to each other, still refusing to face what really happened that day. No wonder they cannot move on with their lives. It takes another stranger, Cassiel, a passing fisherman to help them disentangle the weeds that are drowning them. But Cassiel is more than he appears...A hauntingly beautiful, many-layered tale of love and forgiveness, played out on an abandoned jetty.

'Nothing is any longer one thing.' From a teenage encounter with Elizabeth I, through infatuations, voyages and even a change of gender, Orlando lives out five centuries of life and love before they finally find the courage to truly be themselves. Neil Bartlett's sparkling adaptation of Virginia Woolf's famous fantasy finds powerful contemporary relevance in her vision of equal rights to love for bodies of every kind - and brings it to life on the stage with a kaleidoscope of theatrical styles, overseen by the haunting figure of Woolf herself. It premiered at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End in November 2022, in a production directed by Michael Grandage and starring Emma Corrin in the title role. Written for a diverse ensemble of nine or more actors, this adaptation will appeal to any theatre or company looking to entertain their audiences with a bold new take on this iconic tale of love and transformation.

TRANSLATED WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY EDWIN BJORKMAN.