Publisher: Gibbs Smith
One of American’s most distinctive poets, Emily Dickinson scorned the conventions of her day in her approach to writing, religion, and society. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers is a collection from her vast archive of poetry to inspire the writers, creatives, and leaders of today.
This is Robert Bly and John Lee reading together their poetry after a weekend men's conference in the mountains of North Alabama where they co-hosted that conference for 16 years. You will hear the master poet Robert Bly weave his words together to form the magic that only he can produce. Lee reads with enthusiasm and excitement to be reading with his long-time friend.A Better Listen audio production.Show book
“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.” The Waste Land is a seminal work of modernist poetry by T.S. Eliot. Written in 1922, this five-part poem is a portrait of its time, a work that expresses the disillusionment of the modernist era and the desperation that the generation of writers of that time was feeling. This poem comes from the area just after the first world war, an era in which the world was in disarray. Many young men had lost their lives or livelihoods from the war, families were torn apart, and the survivors were aimless and disoriented at how to move on. This was the era of literary greats like Ezra Pound, F. Scott. Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and, of course, T. S. Eliot. The artists of this time turned to poetry and literature as a way of expressing the widespread spirt of wandering their generation had come to embody. The Waste Land’s alternating narrators, character vignettes, references to eastern religions, and imagery of chaos and disillusionment all come together to create an impactful and insightful work of art. This poem exemplifies a generation of artists, and is a masterful work from a great artist at his peak.Show book
Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for PoetryFinalist for the 2019 National Book AwardJericho Brown's daring book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex—a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues—is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.Show book
Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most important and influential American writers of the 19th century. He was the first author to try to make a professional living as a writer. Much of Poe's work was inspired by the events that happened around him. His poetry alone would ensure his spot in the literary canon. Poe's notable verses range from the early masterpiece “To Helen” to the dark, mysterious “Ulalume.” From “The Raven,” which made him world-famous upon its publication in 1845, to “Annabel Lee,” the posthumously published eulogy for a maiden “in a kingdom by the sea.” Most famously, Poe completely transformed the genre of the horror story with his masterful tales of psychological depth and insight not envisioned in the genre before his time and scarcely seen in it since. Stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” reveal Poe’s talent at its height. He was an early pioneer in the genre of science fiction. Poe was fascinated by the science of his time, and he often wrote stories about new inventions. Poe too is credited with inventing the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” His concept of deductive reasoning, which he called "ratiocination" inspired countless authors, most famous among them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.Show book
Petruchio tames Katherina, an unwilling participant in the relationship, with various psychological torments, such as keeping her from eating and drinking, until she becomes a desirable, compliant, and obedient bride. This edition of The Taming of the Shrew is an adaptation of Shakespeare's eponymous drama, narrated in plain modern English, capturing the very essence and key elements of the original Shakespeare's work. Read in English, unabridged.Show book
This collection of plays written and introduced by actor-turned-writer Ab Khan Din charts the development of a writer able to turn the tumultuous experience of life in modern Britain into satisfying, humane and often richly comic drama. Whether drawing on his own childhood, growing up in an Anglo-Pakistani family in Salford, or on E.R. Braithwaite's account of racial tensions in the East End in To Sir, With Love, he depicts the struggles of individuals to come to terms with their conflicting cultural legacies- and he does so with unerring warmth and compassion. East is East (1996) is an irresistible comedy set in multiracial Salford in 1970, where the Khan children are buffeted this way and that by their Pakistani father's insistence on tradition, their English mother's laissez-faire and their own wish to be citizens of the modern world. The film adaptation that followed, with a screenplay by the author, became one of the most successful British films ever made. The version included here is the revised text first performed at the Trafalgar Studios in 2014. The short, elegiac play, Notes on Falling Leaves (2004), is an emotionally tender depiction of a young man as he loses his mother to dementia, 'overwhelming in its emotional impact' (Telegraph). In All the Way Home (2011), a quarrelsome group of siblings gathers at the family home under the shadow of impending loss. Amidst the cut and thrust of spiky Salford banter, long-harboured resentments rise to the surface and family bonds unravel and unwind. To Sir, With Love (2013), based on E.R. Braithwaite's autobiographical novel, is the uplifting story of a talented, idealistic young teacher discovering the reality of life as a black man in Britain after the Second World War as he struggles to find a way to connect with his students at a tough but progressive East End school.Show book
