Modern Library has launched a major, new series of individual paperback plays from the internationally renowned Royal Shakespeare Company, edited by acclaimed Shakespearean scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (William Shakespeare: Complete Works).

Now available:

A Midsummer Night's Dream | Hamlet | Love's Labour's Lost | Richard III | The Tempest

Each individual edition includes:

· expanded introduction and an overview of Shakespeare's theatrical career

· a new section which explores the theatrical history of the play as well as modern-day production choices through original interviews with today's leading directors and theatrical professionals

· a scene-by-scene analysis and key facts about the play

· a Shakespeare chronology

· black-and-white photos featuring original production shots from the RSC

All titles are available on this website. For more information about the series, click here.

Chandra Manning, author of What this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, has been selected by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition as a finalist for the Tenth Annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards for the study of the African-American experience.

The $25,000 annual award for the year's best non-fiction book on the subject of slavery and/or abolition and antislavery movements is the most generous history prize in its field. The prize winner will be announced following the Douglass Prize Review Committee meeting in September, and the award will be presented at a dinner at the Yale Club of New York on February 19, 2009.

The Frederick Douglass Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding accomplishments.

We are pleased to announce that the following Random House authors have been inducted into the The American Academy of Arts and Letters:

LITERATURE: Robert A. Caro·Joy Williams

FOREIGN HONORARY MEMBERS: Salman Rushdie

The following Random House authors have received awards by the academcy in literature:
ACADEMY AWARDS IN LITERATURE ($7500 given to honor and encourage creative work): Dan Chiasson·Rikki Ducornet·Edith Grossman·Mona Simpson

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER AWARD IN LITERATURE ($20,000 to a prose writer for achievement and dedication): John Edgar Wideman

MILDRED AND HAROLD STRAUSS LIVINGS ($50,000 a year for 5 years to two writers to devote their time exclusively to writing): Madison Smartt Bell

MORTON DAUWEN ZABEL AWARD IN LITERATURE ($10,000 to a writer of progressive, original, and experimental tendencies): Ben Marcus

The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of 250 architects, composers, artists, and writers. The honor of election is considered the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States. The Academy's purpose is to foster and sustain an interest in Literature, Music, and the Fine Arts by identifying and encouraging individual artists. This is done by administering awards and prizes, exhibiting art and manuscripts, funding stage readings and performances of new works, and purchasing works of art to be donated to museums.

Naeem Murr, author of The Perfect Man (Random House Trade Paperback), has been awarded a 2008 PEN/Beyond Margins Award, which celebrates exceptional books by writers of color published in the United States. Sponsored by the Open Book Program, this award also helps to insure that "those who are the custodians of language and literature are representative of the American people".

Knopf author Cynthia Ozick has been awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award, which celebrates the accomplishments of a living author whose body of work, either written in or translated into English, represents achievement in a variety of literary genres and is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship. The PEN/Faulkner Foundation will also be honoring Ms. Ozick with the 2008 PEN/Malamud Award. This prize recognizes a body of work that demonstrates excellence in the art of short fiction.

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation recently awarded Kate Christensen with their 2008 award for Fiction for her novel The Great Man (Anchor).

Finalists include:
Julie Kavanagh, author of Nureyev: The Life (Pantheon Books), for the The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography , which is a biennial prize of $10,000 given to a distinguished biography possessing notable literary merit.

Peter Constantine for the PEN Translation Prize for his translation from the Italian of The Essential Writings of Machiavelli by Niccolo Machiavelli (Modern Library).

Other Press is the publisher of outstanding works in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, as well as novels, short stories, poetry, and essays from the U.S. and around the world that represent literature at its best. They also publish books about the history of ideas, literary theory, philosophy, religion, politics, and human rights. Many of their publications explore the effects of globalization on postmodern society, and are informed by perspectives stemming from a variety of cultures.

Other Press books are available on this site and may also be viewed on the publisher's website: http://otherpress.com/