Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov

Written by Stella Adler
Edited by Barry Paris

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 12, 2000
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-74698-0 (0-679-74698-6)

In her long-awaited book, the legendary acting teacher Stella Adler gives us her extraordinary insights into the work of Henrik Ibsen ("The creation of the modern theater took a genius like Ibsen. . .Miller and Odets, Inge and O'Neill, Williams and Shaw, swallowed the whole of him"), August Strindberg ("He understood... Read more >

Playing Shakespeare
An Actor's Guide
Written by John Barton

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: August 21, 2001
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-72085-4 (0-385-72085-8)

Now in its first American edition, Playing Shakespeare is the premier guide to understanding and appreciating the mastery of the world’s greatest playwright.

Together with Royal Shakespeare Company actors–among them Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, and David Suchet–John Barton demonstrates how to adapt Elizabethan theater for the modern stage... Read more >

Verdi With a Vengeance
An Energetic Guide to the Life and Complete Works of the King of Opera
Written by William Berger

Format: Trade Paperback, 512 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 12, 2000
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70518-2 (0-375-70518-X)

Discover the world of the most popular opera composer of all time: entombed lovers (Aida), tragic courtesans (La Traviata), Shakespearean heroes (Otello and Macbeth), and even Attila the Hun (Attila) populate Verdi's operas, and this introductory guide shows us why Verdi's music is coming back--"with a vengeance."

From the composer's intense... Read more >

A Man for All Seasons

Written by Robert Bolt

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 14, 1990
Price: $10.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-72822-1 (0-679-72822-8)

Bolt's classic play is a brilliant dramatization of the historic confrontation between Sir Thomas Moore and King Henry VIII, which ultimately led to Moore's execution in 1535. A Man for All Seasons is first and foremost a compelling portrait of a courageous man who died for his convictions, whom Samuel Johnson... Read more >

Shakespeare A to Z
The Essential Reference to His Plays, His Poems, His Life and Times, and More
Written by Charles Boyce

Format: Trade Paperback, 752 pages
Publisher: Delta
On Sale: November 10, 1991
Price: $24.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-31361-2 (0-385-31361-6)

The only single-volume comprehensive reference to Shakespeare. With over 3,000 entries, the book covers every play and character, poems, actors, producers and directors, theatrical and literary terms, authors, scholars and publishers of Shakespeare's works and more. Read more >

The Open Door

Written by Peter Brook

Format: Trade Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: January 4, 2005
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7787-8 (1-4000-7787-7)

From King Lear to the Tragedy of Carmen, from Marat/Sade to the epic Mahabharata, Peter Brook has reinvented modern theatre, not once but again and again. In The Open Door the visionary director and theorist offers a lucid, comprehensive exposition of the philosophy that underlies his work.

It is a philosophy... Read more >

Caligula and Three Other Plays

Written by Albert Camus

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 12, 1962
Price: $10.36
ISBN: 978-0-394-70207-0 (0-394-70207-7)

Also includes The Misunderstanding, State of Siege, and The Just Assassins. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Read more >

1942
A Novel
Written by Robert Conroy

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: February 24, 2009
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-50607-8 (0-345-50607-3)

December 7 is “the date which will live in infamy.” But now Japan is hatching another, far greater plan to bring America to its knees. . . .

The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was a resounding success–except for one detail: a second bombing mission, to destroy crucial oil storage facilities... Read more >

Blithe Spirit, Hay Fever, Private Lives
Three Plays
Written by Noel Coward

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 26, 1999
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-78179-0 (0-679-78179-X)

Filled with languid aristocrats trading witticisms as they wait for martinis, this collection of three Noel Coward plays encapsulates the qualities that made him one of the most popular playwrights of the 1930s and '40s and one of the great personalities of the century.In Blithe Spirit, Charles Condomine receives a visit... Read more >

The Letters of Noel Coward

Written by Noel Coward
Edited by Barry Day

Format: Trade Paperback, 804 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 10, 2009
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-39100-1 (0-307-39100-0)

Lavishly illustrated and annotated, this definitive collection of letters to and from Noël Coward provides a portrait of an age, from the Blitz to the Ritz and beyond.

Granted unlimited access to the Coward archive, Barry Day gathers correspondence between the incomparable Noël and his friends and enemies, the famous and infamous... Read more >

Oscar Wilde

Written by Richard Ellmann

Format: Trade Paperback, 736 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 5, 1988
Price: $24.00
ISBN: 978-0-394-75984-5 (0-394-75984-2)

"A master of the biographer's art...a distinguished book...Ellmann has the first, indispensable virtue of telling his story well--not just the big story but the lesser stories that lie coiled inside it."--New York Review of Books

"It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive, measured and fascinating account."--Time Read more >

The Theatre of the Absurd

Written by Martin Esslin

Format: Trade Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 6, 2004
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7523-2 (1-4000-7523-8)

“Exciting and stimulating...a very useful reference work and a standard text book.” —Literary Review

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... Read more >

Copenhagen

Written by Michael Frayn

Format: Trade Paperback, 144 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: August 8, 2000
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-72079-3 (0-385-72079-3)

In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a strange trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. They were old friends and close colleagues, and they had revolutionized atomic physics in the 1920s with their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. But now the world... Read more >

Noises Off

Written by Michael Frayn

Format: Trade Paperback, 176 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: August 27, 2002
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3160-3 (1-4000-3160-5)

This classic farce by the Tony Award-winning author of Copenhagen has been newly revised for the enormously successful revival, currently on Broadway starring Patti LuPone, Peter Gallagher, and Faith Prince.

Noises Off—which ran in London's West End for nearly five years when first staged—is not one play but two: simultaneously a traditional... Read more >

Master Harold and the Boys

Written by Athol Fugard

Format: Trade Paperback, 64 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 13, 2009
Price: $12.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-47520-6 (0-307-47520-4)

This play about a young white boy and two African servants is at once a compelling drama of South African apartheid and a universal coming-of-age story. Originally produced in 1982, it is now an acknowledged classic of the stage, whose themes of injustice, racism, friendship, and reconciliation traverse borders and time.

“In... Read more >

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana

Written by Carlo Emilio Gadda
Translated by William Weaver
Introduction by Italo Calvino

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: NYRB Classics
On Sale: February 27, 2007
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-59017-222-3 (1-59017-222-1)

In a large apartment house in central Rome, two crimes are committed within a matter of days: a burglary, in which a good deal of money and precious jewels are taken, and a murder, as a young woman whose husband is out of town is found with her throat cut. Called... Read more >

Shakespeare After All

Written by Marjorie Garber

Format: Trade Paperback, 1008 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: September 20, 2005
Price: $22.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-72214-8 (0-385-72214-1)

Winner of the CHRISTIAN GAUSS AWARD for Literary Scholarship

A brilliant and companionable tour through all thirty-eight plays, Shakespeare After All is the perfect introduction to the bard by one of the country’s foremost authorities on his life and work. Drawing on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over... Read more >

Goethe's Faust

Written by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Translated by Walter Kaufmann
Introduction by Walter Kaufmann

Format: Trade Paperback, 512 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: December 4, 1962
Price: $11.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-03114-1 (0-385-03114-9)

The best translation of Faust available, this volume provides the original German text and its English counterpart on facing pages. Walter Kaufmann's translation conveys the poetic beauty and rhythm as well as the complex depth of Goethe's language. Includes Part One and selections from Part Two. Read more >

The Slaves of Solitude

Written by Patrick Hamilton
Introduction by David Lodge

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: NYRB Classics
On Sale: February 20, 2007
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-59017-220-9 (1-59017-220-5)

England in the middle of World War II, a war that seems fated to go on forever, a war that has become a way of life. Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter. Overwhelmed by the rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach... Read more >

The Unit

Written by Ninni Holmqvist
Translated by Marlaine Delargy

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Other Press
On Sale: June 9, 2009
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-59051-313-2 (1-59051-313-4)

A 2009 Booklist Editors’ Choice Selection

One day in early spring, Dorrit Weger is checked into the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. She is promised a nicely furnished apartment inside the Unit, where she will make new friends, enjoy the state of the art recreation facilities, and live the few... Read more >

I Am Forbidden
A Novel
Written by Anouk Markovits

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Hogarth
On Sale: February 26, 2013
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-98474-6 (0-307-98474-5)

Read more >

The Cripple of Inishmaan

Written by Martin McDonagh

Format: Trade Paperback, 128 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 8, 1998
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70523-6 (0-375-70523-6)

In 1934, the people of Inishmaan learn that the Hollywood director Robert Flaherty is coming to the neighboring island to film a documentary. No one is more excited than Cripple Billy, an unloved boy whose chief occupation has been gazing at cows and yearning for a girl who wants no part... Read more >

The Retreat from Moscow
A Play About a Family
Written by William Nicholson

Format: Trade Paperback, 128 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: March 23, 2004
Price: $12.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7763-2 (1-4000-7763-X)

“Riveting. . . . Subtle and powerful, [with] marvelous emotional complexity.” —John Lahr, The New Yorker

How well do we know the people we marry? Is it wrong to decide it’s time to be honest? Is love enough to save a family? In The Retreat from Moscow, William Nicholson, the celebrated author... Read more >

Seven Famous Greek Plays

Written by Whitney J. Oates

Format: Trade Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: July 12, 1955
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-394-70125-7 (0-394-70125-9)

"In the interval between the epics of Homer...and the age of the three great tragic poets, thinkers began to explore the various phenomena of the external world and came to understand many aspects of nature which had hitherto been shrouded in complete mystery. The creative literary activity of this epoch likewise... Read more >

Playwrights at Work

Written by Paris Review
Edited by George Plimpton
Introduction by John Lahr

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: May 30, 2000
Price: $23.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-64021-9 (0-679-64021-5)

This third volume in Modern Library’s Paris Review: Writers at Work series gives the student a chance to study the words and opinions of some of the most important and compelling playwrights of our time. The interviews collected here range in date from 1956 to 1997 and in personality from Tennessee... Read more >