Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in World Literature

Exiles is the only play written by James Joyce. It draws material from "The Dead", the final story in his famous short stories collection, Dubliners. It centers around four individuals - Richard, Robert, Bertha, and Beatrice - and the complex romantic entanglements between them as tensions rise and relationships are tested.

A collection of one-acts by the Pulitzer-winning playwright, including Close the Book, Suppressed Desires, Tickless Time, Woman's Honor, The People, and Trifles.

Set in Vienna at the turn of the 19th century, the romantic entanglements of four young individuals, Fritz, Theodor, Christine, and Mizi, offer a sharp social commentary and insight on the influence of personal and social morals on relationships.

A House of Pomegranates (1891) is a collection of four fairy tales by Oscar Wilde: "The Young King," "The Birthday of the Infanta," "The Fisherman and His Soul," and "The Star Child." These magical, beautiful, tragic, and cynical tales will charm listeners of any age. Narrated by Noel Badrian, and performed by a full cast.

This collection was published in 1923 and won the Pulitzer Prize for the author in the following year. It is laid out in three main sections. The first is a lengthy poem, titled New Hampshire, the name being given to the entire collection. The second section bears the title "Notes", and consists of 14 poems, including the mini drama, "The Witch of Coös". The final section, which contains 30 poems, many of which are very short, is titled "Grace Notes."

Alice Gerstenberg (1885-1972) was an American playwright, actress, and activist. She is best known for her many feminist plays, which often feature female lead characters and all-female casts (a rare occurrence at the time). This is a collection of ten one-act plays, which cover a wide range of topics -highlights include a lighthearted farce involving gossiping women, a satire about dinner parties, and a comedy about the pretensions of conventional theater, but some plays also touch on more serious themes such as death, war, and the effects of an unhappy marriage.

New South Wales struggled as a new British penal colony, facing drought, famine, social incoherence, and the development of an intransigent military cartel which did not lose any opportunity to exploit the circumstances. Together with an entrepreneurial landowner society led by John Macarthur, they made the task of the Governor, William Bligh (of The Bounty) very difficult.

According to George Bernard Shaw, Joan of Arc was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs. She was one of the first apostles of nationalism, and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare. She also refused to accept the specific woman's lot, and dressed and fought and lived as men did. Shaw's exploration of the story of this ingenuous and eponymous heroine is set in six scenes and an epilogue, which takes place in 1456, when the church cleared Joan of the charge of heresy and condemned her accusers of corruption.

Anatol, one of Arthur Schnitzler's earliest works, concerns the life of a shallow and immature playboy, who has multiple dalliances with various women but suffers from a crippling fear of commitment underneath his womanising facade. The play offers sharp social commentary on the themes of toxic masculinity and fidelity, and has been adapted in English to two different musicals: The Game of Love and The Gay Life.

King Claudius, when a young man, wrote a five-act tragedy which was damned, and all reference to it forbidden under penalty of death. The King has a son - Hamlet - whose tendency to soliloquize has so alarmed his mother, Queen Gertrude, that she has sent for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to devise some Court revels for his entertainment. Rosencrantz is a former lover of Ophelia, to whom Hamlet is betrothed, and they lay their heads together to devise a plan by which Hamlet may be put out of the way. Some Court theatricals are in preparation.

Cutting Room is set in the "Town Welfare Department" of a town in the Midlands, Burtonwood, during public sector cuts. Four characters (David, Lucy, Ian, and an intern, Anne) have to take calls from members of the public complaining about the loss of public services, with the boss Harry coming in occasionally to offer cheerful but often useless encouragement. As the cuts continue, tensions run high, with Ian in particular taking his anger and frustration out on the secretary, Tilly. At the play's conclusion there is a surprising twist.

Hands Around, also known as La Ronde or Reigen, is possibly Schnitzler's most provocative and controversial work. In a series of 10 conversations occurring before or after a sexual encounter, between 10 pairs of characters from all walks of life, Hands Around offers a playful scrutiny of the sexual morals and class ideology of the era.

This play forms part of a tetralogy which focuses on one of Wedekind's obsessive themes: the destructive interplay between primal sexual urges and social convention. Each play revolves around a powerful young female character, who has the power to control and captivate men, but who in turn is destroyed by the exercise of that power. In this play, the dominant female is Fräulein Elfriede von Malchus, an idealistic crusader who visits a brothel operated by the cynical impresario Casti-Piani in order to rescue a young woman who has fallen into his clutches.

A man loses his only child in a car accident. But has she really gone? Why does he keep hearing her voice?

First published in 1926, The Benson Murder Case relates the murder of a wily womanizer found shot dead in his home, and behind locked doors. Amateur Detective Philo Vance makes his first appearance in this work and assists the New York District Attorney in tracking down the murderer.

Lewis Vickers, a young American languishing in South America because he is “wanted” for a crime that was the result of an accident, comes across another American—Hobart Lee who greatly resembles him. That man dies and Vickers, to get back to the United States, decides to impersonate him. He is taken to the family group upon his arrival in New York City and soon finds himself embroiled in a situation he cannot just walk away from—no matter how badly he wants to. Who was this “Bob” Lee and why does his cousin seem to hate him so?

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) is a science-fiction drama that was first presented in Czech in 1921. It introduced the term "robot", which is derived from a Czech word meaning "worker," to international vocabulary. The action opens in a factory that has successfully produced thousands of robots, who are essentially mindless drones. An idealistic humanitarian activist launches a plan to imbue some of the robots with human traits. The robots which have been humanized then assume leadership over the other robots and seek to organize them in a revolution to take over the world.

The focus in Melincourt is the operation of the "rotten borough" which corrupted the English electoral system until the reform bill of 1832. A rotten borough was a constituency that had been established by royal prerogative but had subsequently lost most of its population. Nevertheless, it still retained the right to have two representatives in the House of Commons. On the other hand, many population centers which had expanded rapidly during the Industrial Revolution were not entitled to any electoral representation.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was one of the most prominent members of the Imagist movement, a brief flowering of modernist poetry, in which Ezra Pound was also involved. Williams was also an accomplished painter and art critic. Imagist verse is characterized by a distinct economy of verbiage and freedom of rhythm. Sour Grapes was his fourth collection of poetry and was published in 1921. As with much of Williams' early works, critical acclaim was slow in coming. Today, the collection is considered to contain some of his most significant poems.

Calidore is a fragment of an unfinished romance and may be considered unique among Peacock's work. Composition probably commenced after the publication of Peacock's largest novel, Melincourt, in 1817. The action concerns the adventures of a young man, Calidore, who finds himself in Wales, en route to London in search of "a wife and a philosopher".