Download or read book The Pulitzer Prize Plays written by Paul A. Firestone and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2008 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With this book, Paul Firestone, lifelong educator and theater aficionado, delivers one of the most comprehensive compendiums of essays on these vital works. Firestone's understanding of each play's substance is rich and impressive. His vast and ambitious examination takes into account many different elements-characters, plots, and symbolism, as well as the lives and psychology of the playwrights, the historical context in which the plays emerged, and their relevance on sociological, political, familial, psychological, and spiritual levels.".

Download or read book Now Playing at the Valencia written by Stephen Hunter and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-12-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pulitzer Prize-Winning Movie Critic Stephen Hunter Comes A Brilliant, Freewheeling, And Witty Look At The Movies. Evanston, Illinois, was an idyllic 1950s paradise with stately homes, a beautiful lake, a world-class university, two premier movie houses, and one very seedy movie theater -- the Valencia. This was the site of Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter's misspent youth. Instead of going to school, picking up girls, or tossing a football, Hunter could be found sitting in the fifteenth row, right-hand aisle seat of the Valencia, sating himself on one B-list movie after another. The Valencia had a sticky floor, smelly bathrooms, ancient popcorn, and a screen set in a hideously tacky papier-mache castle wall. It was also the only place in town to see westerns, sci-fi pictures, cops 'n' robbers flicks, slapstick comedy, and Godzilla. In Now Playing at the Valencia, the author of such bestselling novels as Havana and Pale Horse Coming has compiled his favorite movie reviews written between 1997 and 2003, bringing to the discussion the passionate feelings for cinema he discovered in the '50s, a time when genres were forming, mesmerizing stars played unforgettable characters, and enduring classics were made. While filmmaking has changed tremendously since Hunter first frequented the Valencia, the view from the fifteenth row, and the thrill of down and dirty entertainment, has remained the same.

Download or read book The End of the Myth written by Greg Grandin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE A new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump’s border wall. Ever since this nation’s inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States’ belief in itself as an exceptional nation – democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, though, America hasa new symbol: the border wall. In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history – from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. For centuries, he shows, America’s constant expansion – fighting wars and opening markets – served as a “gate of escape,” helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward. But this deflection meant that the country’s problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. And now, the combined catastrophe of the 2008 financial meltdown and our unwinnable wars in the Middle East have slammed this gate shut, bringing political passions that had long been directed elsewhere back home. It is this new reality, Grandin says, that explains the rise of reactionary populism and racist nationalism, the extreme anger and polarization that catapulted Trump to the presidency. The border wall may or may not be built, but it will survive as a rallying point, an allegorical tombstone marking the end of American exceptionalism.

Download or read book The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love written by Oscar Hijuelos and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2013-11-14 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestseller: A “lush, tipsy, all-night mambo of a novel about Cuban musicians in strange places like New York City” (People). Brothers Nestor and Cesar Camillo arrive from Cuba in 1949 with dreams of becoming famous mambo musicians. This memorable novel traces the arc of the two brothers’ lives—one charismatic and macho, the other soulful and sensitive—from Havana to New York, from East Coast clubs and dance halls to the heights of musical fame. The basis for a popular film, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love “tells of the triumphs and tragedies that befall two men blessed with gigantic appetites and profoundly melancholic hearts. . . . Hijuelos has depicted a world as enchanting as that in Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera” (Publishers Weekly). “Rich and provocative . . . a moving portrait of a man, his family, a community and a time.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Download or read book Tinkers written by Paul Harding and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Special edition of Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel—featuring a new foreword by Marilynne Robinson and book club extras inside In this deluxe tenth anniversary edition, Marilynne Robinson introduces the beautiful novel Tinkers, which begins with an old man who lies dying. As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past, where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature. The story behind this New York Times bestselling debut novel—the first independently published Pulitzer Prize winner since A Confederacy of Dunces received the award nearly thirty years before—is as extraordinary as the elegant prose within it. Inspired by his family’s history, Paul Harding began writing Tinkers when his rock band broke up. Following numerous rejections from large publishers, Harding was about to shelve the manuscript when Bellevue Literary Press offered a contract. After being accepted by BLP, but before it was even published, the novel developed a following among independent booksellers from coast to coast. Readers and critics soon fell in love, and it went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize, prompting the New York Times to declare the novel’s remarkable success “the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory.” That story is still being written as readers across the country continue to discover this modern classic, which has now sold over half a million copies, proving once again that great literature has a thriving and passionate audience. Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: Enon and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tinkers. He teaches at Stony Brook Southampton.

Download or read book The Who the What written by Ayad Akhtar and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Homeland Elegies and Pulitzer Prize winner Disgraced explores the conflict that erupts within a Muslim family in Atlanta when an independent-minded daughter writes a provocative novel that offends her more conservative father and sister. Zarina has a bone to pick with the place of women in her Muslim faith, and she's been writing a book about the Prophet Muhammad that aims to set the record straight. When her traditional father and sister discover the manuscript, it threatens to tear her family apart. With humor and ferocity, Akhtar's incisive new drama about love, art, and religion examines the chasm between our traditions and our contemporary lives.

Download or read book Trust written by Hernan Diaz and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022 ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2022 Trust is a sweeping puzzle of a novel about power, greed, love and a search for the truth that begins in 1920s New York. Can one person change the course of history? A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together, they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. Now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage. Who will have the final word in their story of greed, love and betrayal? Composed of four competing versions of this deliciously deceptive tale, Trust by Hernan Diaz brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart. 'One of the great puzzle-box novels . . . a page-turner' – The Telegraph 'Genius' – The Observer 'Radiant, profound and moving' – Lauren Groff, author of Matrix 'Metafiction at its best, unpredictable, clever and massively enjoyable' – The Sunday Times 'Enthralling' – Daily Mail

Download or read book Beloved written by Toni Morrison and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

Download or read book Junk written by Ayad Akhtar and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Homeland Elegies and Pulitzer Prize winner Disgraced, a fast-paced play that exposes the financial deal making behind the mergers and acquisitions boom of the 1980s. Set in 1985, Junk tells the story of Robert Merkin, resident genius of the upstart investment firm Sacker Lowell. Hailed as "America's Alchemist," his proclamation that "debt is an asset" has propelled him to a dizzying level of success. By orchestrating the takeover of a massive steel manufacturer, Merkin intends to do the "deal of the decade," the one that will rewrite all the rules. Working on his broadest canvas to date, Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar chronicles the lives of men and women engaged in financial civil war: insatiable investors, threatened workers, killer lawyers, skeptical journalists, and ambitious federal prosecutors. Although it's set 40 years in the past, this is a play about the world we live in right now; a world in which money became the only thing of real value.

Download or read book A Paul Green Reader written by Paul Green and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Carolina's Paul Green (1894-1981) was part of that remarkable generation of writers who first brought southern writing to the attention of the world. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1927, Green was a restless experimenter who pioneered a new form of theater with his "symphonic drama," The Lost Colony. A concern for human rights characterized both his life and his writing, and his steady advocacy for educational and social reform and racial justice contributed in fundamental ways to the emerging New South in the first half of this century. A Paul Green Reader makes available once again the work of this powerful and engaging writer. It features Green's drama and fiction, with texts of three plays_including the Pulitzer Prize-winning In Abraham's Bosom and the famous second act of The Lost Colony_and six short stories. It also reveals the life behind the work through several of Green's essays and letters and an excerpt from The Wordbook, his collection of regional folklore. Laurence Avery's introduction outlines Green's life and examines the central concerns and techniques of his work. A native of Harnett County, North Carolina, Paul Green was a devoted teacher of philosophy and drama at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Download or read book Wit written by Margaret Edson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award. Adapted to an Emmy Award-winning television movie, directed by Mike Nichols, starring Emma Thompson. Margaret Edson's powerfully imagined Pulitzer Prize–winning play examines what makes life worth living through her exploration of one of existence's unifying experiences—mortality—while she also probes the vital importance of human relationships. What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away—a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, "The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It's about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It's about compassion, but it shows insensitivity." In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end? The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson's writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader. As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.

Download or read book Anna in the Tropics written by Nilo Cruz and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, this lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of America in the midst of the Depression. Set in Ybor City (Tampa) in 1930, Cruz imagines the catalytic effect the arrival of a new ''lector (who reads Tolstoys Anna Karenina to the workers as they toil in the cigar factory) has on a Cuban-American family. Cruz celebrates the search for identity in a new land.

Download or read book Crimes of the Heart written by Beth Henley and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1982 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: The scene is Hazlehurst, Mississippi, where the three Magrath sisters have gathered to await news of the family patriarch, their grandfather, who is living out his last hours in the local hospital. Lenny, the oldest sister, is unmarried

Download or read book A Visit from the Goon Squad written by Jennifer Egan and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-06-08 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” (The Chicago Tribune). One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. “Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.” —The New York Times Book Review

Download or read book Driving Miss Daisy written by Alfred Uhry and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Racial tensions are delicately explored when a warm friendship evolves between an elderly Jewish woman and her black chauffeur. Winner of a 1988 Pulitzer Prize, and Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Download or read book A Little Life written by Hanya Yanagihara and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

Download or read book A Soldier s Play written by Charles Fuller and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 1981 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a Louisiana army camp in 1944 Capt. Taylor, the white C.O., has a problem. He commands a Black company whose sergeant has been murdered. He is worried the murderer may be a white officer or the local Klan. A Black captain, Richard Davenport, is assigned to investigate. Taylor tries to discourage him because he feels the assignment of a Black investigator means the case is to be swept under the rug. Capt. Davenport perseveres and, as he probes deeper, he finds the Black soldiers are as corrupted with hatred as the whites. Each one had a motive for the killing. Davenport solves the case and the truth is even more shocking than the murder itself.