Other books that might interest you

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  Short Poetry Collection 101

  Various

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  This is a collection of poems read by LibriVox volunteers for October 2011.

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  Time Flies

  David Ives

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  A series of short comic vignettes from playwright David Ives, In the title work, two houseflies try to make the most out of their brief time on earth. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Fran Adams, Ed Begley Jr., Shannon Cochran, Evan Gore, Arye Gross and Victoria Principal.Directed by Ron West. Recorded before a live audience in March, 1998.

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  Shadow and Substance

  Paul Vincent Carroll

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  An overbearing archbishop and a saintly servant are faced with allegations of collusion in the church. Through comedy, drama, and tragedy do they learn the ultimate lesson of humility. Co-starring Helena Carroll, daughter of playwright.Starring: Edward Mulhare as Thomas Canon Skerritt, Finola Hughes as Bridget, Colm Meaney as Dermot Francis O'Flingsley, Bairbre Dowling as Thomasina Concannon, Helena Carroll as Jemima Cooney, Ian Abercrombie as Father Corr, James Lancaster as Father Kirwan, Marty Maguire as Francis O'Connor, Sean McClory as Archibald Holt, Jeanette Nolan as Rosie Violet and CART's Announcer John Harlan.Adapted, produced, and directed by Peggy Webber.

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  The Ice Palace - Author of the...

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
   
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
   
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
   
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack. 
   
  One of Fitzgerald’s short story gems is ‘The Ice Palace’. A Southern girl wants ‘to live where things happen on a grand scale’.  She is engaged to a Yankee but on their visit to The Ice Palace attraction life reveals a very different destiny for her.

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  Jude (NHB Modern Plays)

  Howard Brenton

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  About to be fired from her cleaning job for stealing a volume of Euripides, Jude turns her employer's outrage to shock by translating the ancient Greek on the spot. The employer, a Classics teacher, knows great talent when she sees it and the encounter kick-starts Jude's lifelong ambition to study at Oxford University. Entirely self-taught and possessing an astonishing gift for languages, Jude will stop at nothing to achieve her dream – but she remains oblivious to the hidden barriers that her background has placed in her path...
  Howard Brenton's play, loosely inspired by Thomas Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure, is a modern day tale of unexpected genius and of our struggle to accommodate extraordinary talent.
  Jude premiered at Hampstead Theatre in May 2019.

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  A Florentine Tragedy and La...

  Robert Baldwin Ross

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  Two short fragments: an unfinished and a lost play. A Florentine Tragedy, left in a taxi (not a handbag), is Wilde’s most successful attempt at tragedy – intense and domestic, with surprising depth of characterisation. It was adapted into an opera by the Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky in 1917. La Sainte Courtisane, or The Woman Covered in Jewels explores one of Wilde’s great idées fixes: the paradox of religious hedonism, pagan piety. Both plays, Wildean to their core, revel in the profound sadness that is the fruit of the conflict between fidelity and forbidden love. Written towards the end of his tragic life, these fragments give us a glimpse of a genius at his best: visceral, passionate, personal, poetic. (Summary by Simon Larois)A Florentine Tragedy - cast:Narrator: TriciaGGUIDO BARDI, A Florentine prince: mbSIMONE, a merchant: Simon LaroisBIANNA, his wife: Ruth GoldingLa Sainte Courtisane - cast:Narrator: Ruth GoldingFirst man: mbMyrrhina: PhilippaSecond man: L.FrenchHonorius: woggy298Edited by Ruth Golding

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