Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Damon Runyon Theater - Madame La...

  Damon Runyon

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  The Damon Runyon Theatre Hour.  Damon Runyon is acknowledged as one of the great writers to come out of twentieth century America.  Runyon's short stories are almost always told in the first person by a narrator who is never named, and whose role is unclear; he knows many gangsters and has no job that can be gleaned from his musings, nor does he admit to any criminal involvement; He’s a bystander, an observer, an average street-corner Joe.  Runyon described himself as "being known to one and all as a guy who is just around".  That line seems to say a lot about Runyon and his life.  It was like you were with him on some street corner hustle or some shady dive and he was filling you in on all the angles, all the gossip, all of life. He was who so many people wanted to be with……or so many people wanted to be.  Of course, the cliché about newspapermen and writers is that they are heavy drinkers, chain-smokers, gamblers and obsessively chase women with a sideline in the gathering of stories and facts and actually getting something written just before the deadline hits. That seems like Damon Runyon and his life summed up in one sentence.  His stories became legendary ways of looking that bit differently at America, of soaking up the atmosphere of a glamorous and rip-roaring age and distilling it into black and white type or, in our case, The Damon Runyon Theatre Hour.

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  The Spiritual Verses

  Jalaloddin Rumi

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  Rumi’s Spiritual Verses, is the greatest mystical poem in Islamic culture and of all time. Rumi tells of our human separation from reality, from love and from truth. He shows how love – neither erotic nor sentimental but divine, by which the universe is held together – enlightens ignorance and dissolves suffering. The first book of the Masnavi is the key to the whole work: it takes off from simple, amusing tales into realms unimaginable, but wholly familiar to the human heart.

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  Tender Buttons

  Gertrude Stein

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  Tender Buttons consists of multiple poems covering the everyday mundane, Stein's experimental use of language renders the poems unorthodox and their subjects unfamiliar.It is renowned for its Modernist approach to portraying the everyday object and has been lauded as a "masterpiece of verbal Cubism". Its first poem, "A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass", is arguably its most famous, and is often cited as one of the quintessential works of Cubist literature.

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  Old Fashioned Landowners -...

  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 ‘Old Fashioned Land Owners’ Gogol describes a peaceful setting and a peaceful couple who have grown old together.  But foreboding makes an entrance and life is now a series of cruel twists that breaks everything.

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  Psalms and Odes of Solomon

  Unknown

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  One of the Pseudepigrapha, the Psalms of Solomon is a group of eighteen psalms (religious songs or poems) that are not part of any scriptural canon (they are, however, found in copies of the Peshitta). The Psalms of Solomon were referenced in Early Christian writings, but lost to modern scholars until a Greek manuscript was rediscovered in the 17th century. Politically, the Psalms of Solomon are anti-Maccabee, and some psalms in the collection show a clear awareness of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem under Pompey in 63 BCE, metaphorically treating him as a dragon who had been sent by God to punish the Maccabees.The Odes of Solomon is a collection of 42 odes attributed to Solomon. Various scholars have dated the composition of these religious poems to anywhere in the range of the first three centuries AD. The original language of the Odes is thought to have been either Greek or Syriac, and to be generally Christian in background. (Summary by Wikipedia)

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  Burkas and Bacon Butties (NHB...

  Shamia Chalabi, Sarah Henley

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  A heart-warming, clash-of-cultures comedy set in a Wigan taxi.
  The play follows taxi-driver Ashraf and his twenty-something daughter, Shaz, over the course of a year as they negotiate the ups and downs of living in a mixed-culture family.
  Burkas and Bacon Butties by Shamia Chalabi and Sarah Henley was first performed as part of the 2018 VAULT Festival, London.
  Also available in the collection Plays from VAULT 3.

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