Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Drama & Plays

Acclaimed classicist James Romm translates surviving pieces of timeless wisdom from the lost plays of ancient Athens. "The truly happy man ought to stay at home." "Hunger, and lack of coin, put a stop to love." "Hades, alone of the gods, does not enjoy bribes." These quotes―and hundreds of...

George Bernard Shaw has been called the second greatest playwright in English (after William Shakespeare) and one of the inventors of modern celebrity as the most famous public intellectual of his time. Beginning in the 1880s, as a critic and as a playwright, he transformed British drama, bringing to it intellectual substance, ethical imperatives, and modernity itself, setting the theatrical course for the subsequent century. That his legacy endures 70 years after his death is testament to the prescience of his thinking and his prolific creativity. 

While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways.

Laurel Darby is no stranger to hard work, but most folks can't see past her family’s name and wealth. Having built her quilt shop from the ground up, she knows how hard it is to keep a business running. But that doesn’t leave much time for a relationship, and the last thing on Laurel's mind is unraveling herself and disrupting her carefully constructed life. Fresh out of long-term relationship hell, Dallas Hayes has nothing but a dream and the sweat equity for a fresh start. Opening her bourbon lounge is the only thing on her mind. But love? Nope, she won't go down that rabbit hole again.

David Weir explores the conflicting attitudes towards modernity present in decadent culture by examining the difference between aesthetic decadence - the excess of artifice - and social decadence, which involves excess in a variety of forms, whether perversely pleasurable or gratuitously cruel. Such contrariness between aesthetic and social decadence led some of its practitioners to substitute art for life and to stress the importance of taste over morality, a maneuver with far-reaching consequences. 

Author Kate Bornstein ushers listeners on a funny, fearless, and wonderfully scenic journey across the terrains of gender and identity. On one level, Gender Outlaw details Bornstein's transformation from heterosexual male to lesbian woman, from a one-time IBM salesperson to a playwright and performance artist. But this particular coming-of-age story is also a provocative investigation into our notions of male and female, from a self-described nonbinary transfeminine diesel femme dyke who never stops questioning our cultural assumptions.

The Stories We Cannot Tell is a contemporary novel about the emotional journey of two women. Rachel is a thirty-year-old married, Jewish woman who's wanted a baby for a long time. Katie's a thirty-two-year-old single, Catholic woman who has been trying to find a man who'll stick around. We follow the women individually as they find themselves pregnant, Rachel happily, Katie, not.

I don't need a man for anything. Love and romance? Pfft. No thanks. Never again. Between my career as a wedding planner and being a single mother, I barely have time to think about men. I wasn't looking for a hero when I ended up locked outside a hotel that was engulfed in a blazing inferno, wearing nothing but a robe. I would've eventually saved myself. Too bad he didn't give me a chance. Yep, you guessed it. Luke Incendio, the sexy firefighter who came to my hotel rescue and the man who had caused me to swear off love years ago is one and the same.