Other books that might interest you

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  Spirits in Bondage

  C. S. Lewis

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  Spirits in Bondage is C.S. Lewis’s first book and the first of his works to be available in the public domain.  It was released in 1919 under the pseudonym of Clive Hamilton and was written in a period of darker thought for C.S. Lewis than was later evidenced in his Christian apologist writings. 
  The darkness of the verse is most evident in Part One (The Prison House), begins to change in the short transitional Part Two (Hesitation) and attains a more hopeful tone in the final Part Three (Escape).  Yet a dreamy effect, influenced by Celtic and Druid mythology, persists throughout. 
  Spirits in Bondage consists of forty poems that provide an intriguing insight into the youthful heart of C.S. Lewis and occasionally provides interesting lyrical foreshadowing of some of the landscapes portrayed in his famous Chronicles of Narnia series.(Summary by Robert Garrison)

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  Taken (NHB Modern Plays)

  Winsome Pinnock

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  A mother is confronted by the child she had to give up.
  This play was originally published in the volume Charged, a collection of plays about the lives of women in the criminal justice system, and was commissioned and premiered by Clean Break, a theatre and education company working with women whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system.

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  Maydays (NHB Modern Plays)

  David Adger

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  Maydays tells the story of the twenty-somethings who came of age in 1968 and were drawn into revolutionary politics; of defection from East to West as well as from Left to Right. David Edgar's play is told through a number of interlocking stories, across three continents and twenty-five years of tumultuous history.
  The play was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican, London, in 1983, Maydays was revived in this new version, also by the RSC, in 2018.
  'David Edgar's magnificent new play for the Royal Shakespeare Company is an epic, brilliantly plotted piece of writing that takes revolution as its theme' - The Financial Times on the 1983 production of Maydays

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  Classic Radio's Greatest...

  Black Eye Entertainment

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  This collection contains 12 of the greatest Christmas shows ever broadcast during the Golden Age of Radio! You'll hear Jack Benny on The Jack Benny Program, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll as Amos 'N' Andy, Lucille Ball in My Favorite Husband, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Jim and Marian Jordan as Fibber McGee & Molly, Eve Arden as Connie Brooks on Our Miss Brooks, William Conrad as U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, plus many more! Relive these classic Christmas shows from yesteryear and their legendary stars in this incredible collection.  
   
  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 12/24/45 The Night Before Christmas The Aldrich Family 12/21/52 Christmas Eve with the Family The Amos 'N' Andy Show 12/22/44 Christmas Show Boston Blackie 12/22/48 Stolen Rings for Santa Broadway Is My Beat 12/24/49 The Nick Norman Case Escape 12/24/47 Back For Christmas Fibber McGee & Molly 12/19/39 A Package From Uncle Sycamore Arrives Gunsmoke 12/20/52 Christmas Story The Jack Benny Program 12/21/52 Trimming the Christmas Tree My Favorite Husband 12/16/49 Christmas Present Night Beat 12/20/50 Christmas Story Our Miss Brooks 12/24/50 Christmas Show

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  The Nose - Gogol uses the absurd...

  Nikolai Gogol

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  Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born on 1st April 1809 to a father, descended from Ukrainian Cossacks and a mother with a military background in the Ukrainian town of Sorochyntsi, then part of the Russian Empire and rich in Cossack traditions and folklore.   
   
  His father wrote poetry and plays which the young Gogol helped stage at his uncle’s home theatre.  This helped ignite in him a love of literature and blossomed when he attended, what is now, the Nizhyn Gogol State University at the age of 12.  Here he participated in school theatre productions and refined his mastery of his native Ukrainian and also the Russian of his Imperial masters. 
   
  In 1828 he went to St Petersburg and unsuccessfully tried to begin a career as an actor after finding that with no money and no connections the civil service was barred to him. 
   
  Embezzling money from his mother he embarked on a trip to Germany. When the money ran out, he returned to St Petersburg but the experiences were used in a series of stories he contributed to periodicals.  These tales were steeped in his childhood memories of the Ukrainian landscape and peasantry enlivened with the supernatural of its folklore woven with realistic events of the day.  He wrote in Russian in a whimsical, colloquial style with a smattering of Ukrainian words and phrases that provided an authenticity.  Eight stories were published as ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’.  Seemingly all at once fame and fortune arrived. Gogol was hailed by his contemporaries, including Pushkin, as a pre-eminent writer of Russian literature.   
   
  His success continued with his brilliant plays ‘The Inspector General’ and the comedy ‘The Marriage for the Theatre’, both being highly acclaimed.   
   
  In 1834 he became Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg but with little academic or teacher training, failed to adequately fulfil many of his duties and soon resigned this post.  With no obligations and using his earnings from his writing, which now included the impressionistic and immortal ‘Dead Souls’, Gogol travelled around Europe, spending the most time in Rome where he studied art, read Italian literature and developed a passion for opera.  
   
  In the 1840s Gogol became preoccupied with a need to purify his soul and embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In tandem he fell under the influence of a strict and austere spiritual ascetic who persuaded him to observe strict fasts that, allied with his depression and deteriorating health, contributed to his death on 21st April 1852 at the age of only 43. 
   
  In the Nose Gogol reaches out with the absurd premise that a Nose can have, and enjoy, a life of its own regardless of the complications and consequences to its former owner.

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  Tinderbox (NHB Modern Plays)

  Lucy Kirkwood

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  Fast, wild and farcically funny, Lucy Kirkwood's first full-length play is a disturbing vision of a dystopian future.
  Sometime in the 21st Century, England is dissolving into the sea. Amidst the chaos, one man clings to his traditional British values and his love of meat.
  For Londoner Saul Everard, his butchers shop is an empire that he will do anything to preserve, including moving it to Bradford. An outlaw Scottish artist swims Hadrian's Channel from Scotland to England and seeks refuge in Saul's shop. There's rioting on the streets and the police are onto him but Saul's meaty little realm may be the last place to seek sanctuary.
  Tinderbox premiered at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2008.
  'lovely, bawdy, deliciously off-colour...like a madcap mixture of Joe Orton, Ben Jonson, Martin McDonagh and Stephen Sondheim' WhatsOnStage
  'grisly... rings with nasty, maniacal laughter... off-kilter imaginative flair' The Times

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