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  The Wisdom of Omar Khayyam

  Philosophical Library

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   A Persian poet’s masterpiece While better known in his time for his mathematical and astronomical works, eleventh-century Persian philosopher and poet Omar Khayyam is best known today for his romantic poetry collected in the Rubaiyat. This selection presents 365 of the approximately 1,000 quatrains, translated from the original Persian. Khayyam’s poetry draws readers in with its lush imagery and timeless observations on the human experience and the metaphysical mysteries of our world. As wise and intriguing as they are beautifully crafted, Khayyam’s verse has inspired much Western art and literature. 
   

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  Dynamics of Distancing in...

  Nadia Anwar

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  Nadia Anwar presents a compelling reading framework for the study and analysis of selected post-independence Nigerian dramas, using the conceptual parameters of metatheatre, a theatrical strategy which foregrounds the process of play-making by breaking the dramatic illusion. She argues that distancing, as a function of metatheatre, creates a balanced theatrical experience and environment in terms of the emotive and cognitive levels of reception of a particular performance. 
  
  Anwar's book is the first in-depth study of the concept of metatheatre with reference to Nigerian drama including Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman (1975) and King Baabu (2002), Ola Rotimi's Kurunmi (1971) and Hopes of the Living Dead (1988), Femi Osofisan's The Chattering and the Song (1977) and Women of Owu (2006), Esiaba Irobi's Hangmen Also Die (1989), and Stella 'Dia Oyedepo's A Play That Was Never to Be (1998). 
  
  The perspectives of Bertolt Brecht (1936), Thomas J. Scheff (1963), and other theoreticians of dramatic distancing and metatheatre are used in the analyses and, where required, challenged through appropriate contextual and theoretical adjustments. 
  
  The book is the first attempt to illustrate how Brechtian approach to the display and generation of emotions can be revised through Scheff's model of emotional balance.

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  Around the World in 80 Poems - A...

  Robert Louis Stevenson

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  In the Victorian age that great adventurer Phileas Fogg attempted to traverse the globe in a mere 80 days using only the existing transport infrastructure and his own nous.    
   
  Today the globe can be spanned much quicker and in more comfortable fashion but alas without much of the intrigues, stories and landscape that accompanied Mr Fogg and made the trip so exciting. 
   
  In this volume we have an answer: Let’s travel the globe with the words and verse of 80 esteemed and voluble poets.  Let’s explore places, peoples, philosophical musings on our world and all manner of things that Mr Fogg had no access to.  With the words of classic poets such as John Keats, Rabindranath Tagore, Du Fu and Edna St Vincent Millay as your companions it’s one heck of a journey. 
   
  1 - Around the World in 80 Poems - An Introduction 
  2 - Travel by Edna St Vincent Millay 
  3 - Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  4 - A Ballad of London by Richard Le Gallienne 
  5 - The World State by G K Chesterton 
  6 - The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud 
  7 - In the Train and at Versailles by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
  8 - Train Ride by Federico Garcia Lorca 
  9 - I Go on Dreaming of Paths by Antonio Machado 
  10 - Sonnet I by Fernando Pessoa 
  11 - Sonnet on Approaching Italy by Oscar Wilde 
  12 - To Italy by Radclyffe Hall 
  13 - Sicily December 1908 by Henry Van Dyke 
  14 - Sonnet to Lake Leman by Lord Byron 
  15 - Pathways by Rainer Maria Rilke 
  16 - In the Black Forest by Amy Levy 
  17 - Calm at Sea by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 
  18 - Sonnet to Ocean by Thomas Hood 
  19 - In Amsterdam by Eugene Field 
  20 - Sonnet at Ostend July 22nd 1787 by William Lisle Bowles 
  21 - Belgium by Edith Wharton 
  22 - Forced March by Miklos Radnoti 
  23 - Autumn Evening in Serbia by Francis Ledwidge 
  24 - The Cretan Dance by Sappho 
  25 - The Isles of Greece by Byron 
  26 - Sailing to Byzantium by W B Yeats 
  27 - Constantinople by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 
  28 - Beirut Wedding Poem by Tim Graham 
  29 - The Life of Love - Spring by Khalil Gibran 
  30 - Gates of Damascus by James Elroy Flecker 
  31 - Walk to Caesarea by Hannah Senesh 
  32 - The City of Baghdad by Sultan Bahu 
  33 - Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley 
  34 - To the Nile by Keats 
  35 - Ode to Ethiopia by Paul Laurence Dunbar 
  36 - My Africa by Gladys May Casely Hayford 
  37 - Africa by Lewis Alexander 
  38 - Poem by Sarah of Yemen 
  39 - Sleepless I Kept the Night Vigil by Khansa 
  40 - The Golden Journey to Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker 
  41 - A World with No Boundaries by Jalaluddin Rumi 
  42 - All Pervading Consciousness by Farid ud-Din Attar 
  43 - The Cloud on the Mountain by Alama Iqbal 
  44 - In the Bazaars of Hyderabad by Sarojini Naidu 
  45 - To the City of Bombay by Rudyard Kipling 
  46 - An Old Tibetan Rug by Else Lasker Schuler 
  47 - Dawn by Du Fu 
  48 - Chiang Chin Chiu by Li Po 
  49 - In Praise of May by Akiko Yosano 
  50 - Having Slept The Cat Gets Up by Kobayashi Issa 
  51 - The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear 
  52 - The Loji Expedition by Tom Hood 
  53 - The Ocean by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
  54 - A Song for January the 26th 1824 by Charles Tompson 
  55 - Brother, You'll Take My Hand by Henry Lawson 
  56 - Tiare Tahiti by Rupert Brooke 
  57 - A Song of the Panama Canal by Damon Runyon 
  58 - Tezcotzinco by Alan Seeger 
  59 - Down By The Carib Sea by James Weldon Johnson 
  60 - North and South by Claude McKay 
  61 - Bermudas by Andrew Marvell 
  62 - Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman 
  63 - New York at Night by Amy Lowell 
  64 - The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus 
  65 - Away to Canada by Joshua McCarter Simpson 
  66 - The Railway Station by Archibald Lampman 
  67 - Past One O'Clock by Vladimir Mayakovsky 
  68 - A Dish of Peaches in Russia by Wallace Stevens 
  69 - Aurora Borealis by Herman Melville 
  70 - Iceland First Seen by William Morris 
  71 - My Artificial Flowers by Edith Sodergran 
  72 - The Wayfarer by Patrick Pearse 
  73 - The Lake Isle of Inisfree by W B Yeats 
  74 - Beauti

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  The Body's Question - Poems

  Tracy K. Smith

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  The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith received the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."

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  Oedipus Rex - King of Thebes

  Sophocles

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  Oedipus Rex, also known as Oedipus the King or Oedipus the Tyrant, is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles that was first performed about 429 BC (noted classicist Gilbert Murray, translator of this version of the play, rendered the title as Oedipus, King of Thebes). It was the second in order of Sophocles's composition of his three plays dealing with Oedipus. Thematically, however, it was the first in the trilogy's historical chronology, followed by Oedipus at Colonus and then Antigone. Oedipus the King tells the story of Oedipus, a man who becomes the king of Thebes, whilst in the process unwittingly fulfilling a prophecy that he would kill his father Laius and marry his mother Jocasta. The play is an example of classic tragedy, notably containing an emphasis upon how Oedipus's own faults contribute to his downfall (as opposed to making fate the sole cause). Over the centuries, Oedipus Rex has come to be regarded by many as the Greek tragedy par excellence.
  
  An Author's Republic audio production.

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  Now More Than Ever

  Aldous Huxley

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  Over the course of his career, British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) shifted away from elitist social satires and an atheistic outlook toward greater concern for the masses and the use of religious terms and imagery. This change in Huxley's thinking underlies the previously unpublished play Now More Than Ever.   Written in 1932-1933 just after Brave New World, Now More Than Ever is a response to the social, economic, and political upheavals of its time. Huxley's protagonist is an idealistic financier whose grandiose schemes for controlling the means of production drive him to swindling and finally to suicide. His fate allows Huxley to expose the evils he perceives in free-market capitalism while pleading the case for national economic planning and the rationalization of Britain's industrial base.    This volume contains the full text of Now More Than Ever, which was believed to be lost until 1976, when a copy was found at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. A "thinker's play" that has never been produced on stage, it is the last previously unpublished piece of Huxley's major writings and immensely important to understanding his development as a writer. The editors of this volume have annotated the play for contemporary readers. Their introduction sets the play in the context of Huxley's intellectual life.

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