Other books that might interest you

• 

  Ladies' Day (NHB Modern Plays)

  Amanda Whittington

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  An exuberant comedy about four likely lasses from the Hull fish docks on a day trip to the races, from the author of Be My Baby.
  Work, love and life are just one long, hard slog for the fish-filleting foursome Pearl, Jan, Shelley and Linda. But their fortunes are set to change when Linda finds tickets to Ladies' Day at Royal Ascot the year it relocated to York.
  Out go the hairnets, overalls and wellies as the four ditch work, do themselves up to the nines and head off to the races for a drink, a flirt and a flutter. If their luck holds, they could hit the jackpot - and more besides...
  'With its Yorkshire heart and soul it has all the warmth of a Calendar Girls or a Full Monty' - Yorkshire Post
  'Hull Truck Theatre Company clearly has a hit on its hands' - Hull Daily Mail
  'Exuberantly up-to-the-minute comedy' - Guardian

  Show book

• 

  Any Given Day (NHB Modern Plays)

  Linda McLean

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A sharply perceptive, darkly funny riff on urban isolation by one of Scotland's leading playwrights.
  This is a big day for Sadie and Bill; their favourite person is coming to visit. They've gone to great lengths to prepare for the occasion. It's an even bigger day for Jackie; and not one she'd anticipated. Should she make the most of it? She doesn't know if she can any more; too many people depend on her.
  Any Given Day explores our fear of the unknown, and our guilt and responsibility towards ourselves and others.
  'as bold, unnerving and fraught as anything McLean has written' - Guardian
  'an excellent play which truly does horrify on so many levels' - Independent

  Show book

• 

  Damon Runyon Theater - Bred for...

  Damon Runyon

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The Damon Runyon Theatre Hour.  Damon Runyon is acknowledged as one of the great writers to come out of twentieth century America.  Runyon's short stories are almost always told in the first person by a narrator who is never named, and whose role is unclear; he knows many gangsters and has no job that can be gleaned from his musings, nor does he admit to any criminal involvement; He’s a bystander, an observer, an average street-corner Joe.  Runyon described himself as "being known to one and all as a guy who is just around".  That line seems to say a lot about Runyon and his life.  It was like you were with him on some street corner hustle or some shady dive and he was filling you in on all the angles, all the gossip, all of life. He was who so many people wanted to be with……or so many people wanted to be.  Of course, the cliché about newspapermen and writers is that they are heavy drinkers, chain-smokers, gamblers and obsessively chase women with a sideline in the gathering of stories and facts and actually getting something written just before the deadline hits. That seems like Damon Runyon and his life summed up in one sentence.  His stories became legendary ways of looking that bit differently at America, of soaking up the atmosphere of a glamorous and rip-roaring age and distilling it into black and white type or, in our case, The Damon Runyon Theatre Hour.

  Show book

• 

  Thrown in the Throat

  Benjamin Garcia

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  “An unabashed celebration of complexity in queerness and gender, an arresting snapshot of survival and a triumphant reclamation of language.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review) “Tongues make mistakes / and mistakes / make languages.” And Benjamin Garcia makes a stunning debut with Thrown in the Throat. In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon’s butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when “because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes.” Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with. With language that arrives equal parts regal and raucous, Thrown in the Throat shines brilliant with sweat and an iridescent voice. “Sometimes even a diamond was once alive” writes Garcia in a collection that National Poetry Series judge Kazim Ali says “has deadly superpowers.” And indeed these poems arrive to our hands through touch-me-nots and the slight cruelty of mothers, through closets both real and metaphorical. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival. Garcia’s debut is nothing less than exactly the ode our history and present and our future call for: brash and unmistakably alive. “Angry, tender, and resounding with the speech of flowers, birds, and diamonds, every syllable carries a glorious charge.” —The Boston Globe, “Best Books of 2020” “Electrifying . . . explores unrepentant sexual desire, interrogates fraught familial relationships, and examines our troubled cultural moment.” —Lambda Literary

  Show book

• 

  Long Ago

  Christina Rossetti

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  LibriVox volunteers bring you 12 recordings of Long Ago by Christina G. Rossetti. This was the Weekly Poetry project for December 9, 2012.Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is perhaps best known for her long poem Goblin Market, her love poem Remember, and for the words of the Christmas carol In the Bleak Midwinter.  (Summary by Wikipedia)

  Show book

• 

  Poems: Series Two

  Emily Dickinson

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The collection Poems: Series Two presents the first installment of the complete poetic works of Emily Dickinson. It is broken into the four parts Life, Love, Nature, and Time and Eternity and includes 161 poems.Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence. While Dickinson was a prolific writer, her only publications during her lifetime were 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems, and one letter. The poems published then were usually edited significantly to fit conventional poetic rules. Her poems were unique for her era. They contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends, and also explore aesthetics, society, nature and spirituality. Although Dickinson's acquaintances were most likely aware of her writing, it was not until after her death in 1886 - when Lavinia, Dickinson's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems - that her work became public. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, though both heavily edited the content. A 1998 article in The New York Times revealed that of the many edits made to Dickinson's work, the name Susan was often deliberately removed. At least eleven of Dickinson's poems were dedicated to sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, though all the dedications were obliterated, presumably by Todd. A complete, and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955.

  Show book