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  Interview with the Sphinx -...

  Jack Matthews

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  In this provocative & immensely irritating comic play, the Sphinx from ancient Greece is interviewed in modern times as though she were a celebrity pop star. The problem is she never answers any questions — never directly anyway. Instead she prefers just dishing the dirt on everybody. ON HOMER: “I never was exactly sure which one Homer was. I’m positive he wasn’t the blind one, though; that was just a silly story they started telling a few centuries later”. ON OEDIPUS: “Eddie was terribly conceited, you know … of course he was smart and handsome and, oh, just had a way of carrying himself that impressed everybody. In spite of his foot.” Bit by bit the Interviewer learns that what happens in Greek legend didn’t happen exactly the way Sophocles described it. Fortunately, the Sphinx offers the Interviewer another riddle … if only he could figure out what exactly it is! This witty 67 minute audio play stars Jill Brumer as the Sphinx and Neal Gage as the Interviewer. Part Tom Stoppard, part Monty Python, part Oscar Wilde, this play by Jack Matthews combines philosophical paradoxes with fast-paced verbal pyrotechnics. It offers the perfect antidote to people who remembered ancient literature as nothing but stuffy and melodramatic characters with hard-to-pronounce names.  
  Neal Gage  is a Houston actor and teacher who has appeared in several features and comic sketch videos on  Funny or Die. Jill Brumer has an MFA in Media & Performing Arts and teaches theater at Houston colleges. Jack Matthews (1925-2013) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright and former professor in Ohio. 
  The play was first published & performed in 1992; later it was revised & expanded for the 2013 audio production.

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  CRUCIBLE OF THE VAMPIRE - An...

  Amanda Murray

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  Isabelle, a young university researcher, is sent to a country manor house deep in the heart of rural Shropshire to verify an ancient object that the family has discovered during the renovation of their home. 
  While Isabelle sets to work verifying its authenticity, she becomes the obsession of the owner’s strange but beautiful daughter and they develop a dangerous attraction. 
  Isabelle soon discovers that the object has a cursed history and that the house holds a dark and chilling secret.  
  A chance finding of a 200 year old journal confirms Isabelle’s suspicions that the family are not the only residents at Ashwell Hall and something more terrifying lurks within. 
  The truth is far more shocking than she could have imagined and will change Isabelle’s life forever. 
  Around every corner lies another harrowing surprise and Isabelle will be tested to her limits as she tries to escape from the Crucible of the Vampire, a modern gothic thriller that transports you from the English Civil War to the present day.

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  Born in the USA - Exploring...

  EMILY DICKINSON, Nathaniel...

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  Poetry. A form of words that seems so elegantly simple in one verse and so cleverly complex in another.  Each poet has a particular style, an individual and unique way with words and yet each of us seems to recognise the path and destination of where the verses lead, even if sometimes the full comprehension may be a little beyond us. 
   
  Through the centuries every culture has produced verse to symbolize and to describe everything from everyday life, natural wonders, the human condition and even in its more hubristic moments, the crushing triumph of an enemy. 
   
  In the volumes of this series we take a look through the prism of individual regions of the United States through the centuries and decades. 
   
  The United States may be many things: the world’s policeman, a bully, a shameless purveyor of mass market culture but it also, in its better moments, a standard bearer for truth, transparency, equality and the more positive qualities of democracy. 
   
  Little wonder that’s its poets are rightly acknowledged as wonders of their art.  Leading lights in the fight against slavery and for equality, even if the rest of the Nation is finding it problematic to catch up.   
   
  In this volume we have collected verse from poets born in New England.  This corner of America where the first Europeans began to push the indigenous culture back from its home is a grid of small States that have been home to some of the greatest poets ever born anywhere, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Helen Hunt Jackson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Kathy Lee Bates.

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  Poets of the Eighteenth Century...

  William Wordsworth, Robert...

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  For many in Europe the focus has shifted west to the Americas, both by settlement and by war against the indigenous tribes.  And then between themselves. 
   
  Democracy would be reborn by the American War of Independence. In the East India becomes the stage for further expansion. For our wordsmiths the world had become a wider page on which to write their thoughts.  Coleridge, Pope, Southey, Wordsworth speak with lyrical eloquence on subjects both great and small.  But always form the heart.

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  Nathan the Wise (NHB Classic Plays)

  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

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  Lessing's 18th-century masterpiece, a passionate plea for religious tolerance.
  Jerusalem, 1192. An uneasy stalemate exists between the Muslim forces of Saladin and the western Crusaders. Caught in the middle are the Jews. All sides respect Nathan for his wisdom and his wealth. But in a war-zone, no one is secure.
  This acclaimed English version of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's 1779 play Nathan the Wise by Edward Kemp was premiered at Chichester Festival Theatre in 2003, and was revived at Hampstead Theatre in 2005.
  'This is a play whose time has come again... brilliantly lucid translation... eminently worth seeing... a seminal piece of world drama written in 1779 and banned by the Nazis in 1933, its theme speaks urgently and forcefully to us today' - Guardian
  'An important work... even more eloquent today' - The Times
  'Edward Kemp's fine translation... combines Germanic seriousness with a winning English wit... Not only is Nathan the Wise both relevant and resonant, it is also one of those rare plays where you genuinely want to know what will happen next' - Daily Telegraph
  'Edward Kemp's terrific translation balances German gravitas with a comic deftness' - Financial Times

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  Not of This Worldview - Poetry...

  Richard S. Briggs

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  God is at work among us. The “kingdom of God”—that dynamic, active power that breaks in to the hardest of hearts and places—is on the move. And how may we have eyes to see and ears to hear all that is truly taking place in, with and under the reality of our daily lives?
  
   
  Here the gift of poetry may come to our aid. In poems that range from loose informality to tight structure, and from the humorous to the sombre, Richard Briggs seeks to let poetry open our eyes and ears to the strange and elusive work of God among us. He seeks out a voice that will let us celebrate the everyday, rejoice in the remarkable, and at the same time will enable us to weep with those who weep. He writes with gentle humour of his own path from zeal towards wisdom, and encourages us to follow.
  
   
  Life is a gift, and Not of This Worldview offers a response to accompany us wherever we are in the ups and downs of that life—from the mountain top to the pit, as the Psalmists once said, and at all locations in between.

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