Bossypants. Tina Fey
by Tina Fey
from Sphere
Once in a generation a woman comes along who changes everything. Tina Fey is not that woman, but she met that woman once and acted weird around her. Before 30 Rock, Mean Girls and 'Sarah Palin', Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV. She has seen both these dreams come true. At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon -- from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence. Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've all suspected: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.
Amazon Best Books of the Month, April 2011: Tina Fey’s new book Bossypants is short, messy, and impossibly funny (an apt description of the comedian herself). From her humble roots growing up in Pennsylvania to her days doing amateur improv in Chicago to her early sketches on Saturday Night Live, Fey gives us a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of modern comedy with equal doses of wit, candor, and self-deprecation. Some of the funniest chapters feature the differences between male and female comedy writers ("men urinate in cups"), her cruise ship honeymoon ("it’s very Poseidon Adventure"), and advice about breastfeeding ("I had an obligation to my child to pretend to try"). But the chaos of Fey’s life is best detailed when she’s dividing her efforts equally between rehearsing her Sarah Palin impression, trying to get Oprah to appear on 30 Rock, and planning her daughter’s Peter Pan-themed birthday. Bossypants gets to the heart of why Tina Fey remains universally adored: she embodies the hectic, too-many-things-to-juggle lifestyle we all have, but instead of complaining about it, she can just laugh it off. --Kevin Nguyen
The Phantom of the Opera (Hollywood Archives Series) (v. 1)
by Philip J. Riley
from Magicimage Filmbooks
What inspired the film? What inspired Chaney's make-up? What was in the hour of footage cut from the film's release that was considered too horrible for audiences in 1925? The answers to these and many other questions can be found in this book. Includes: complete Press Book; complete shooting script; rare behind the scenes photographs; complete production history from those who were there; Contributions by Mary Philbin ("Christine"), Charles van Enger, and more!
The Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde
from Simon & Brown
Wilde was both a glittering wordsmith and a social outsider. His drama emerges out of these two perhaps contradictory identities, combining epigrammatic brilliance and shrewd social observation. This book includes "Lady Windermere's Fan", "Salome", "A Woman of No Importance", "An Ideal Husband", "A Florentine Tragedy" and "The Importance of Being Earnest", which appears in full with the 'Grigsby' scene which originally made up the fourth act.
The World of Downton Abbey
by Jessica Fellowes
from St. Martin's Press
The Gift of the Magi
Here is O'Henry's classic tale of love and devotion in a beautiful new gift edition, superbly illustrated and packaged in an elegant slipcase. Full-color illustrations.
The Talented Mr Ripley: Play (Methuen Drama)
by Patricia Highsmith
from Methuen Drama
The first stage adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's famous crime novel
Tom
Ripley is a criminal with an ambiguous past. He is sent to Italy by a
wealthy financier to try and coax home the rich man's son. In the
process Ripley becomes both attracted and seduced, finding the murder
the only way to deal with the situation. From that point Ripley tries
to cover up his crime. Patricia Highsmith's beguiling tale of morality
and amorality is given a dramatic rendering by contemporary dramatist
Phyllis Nagy, who knew Highsmith in her later years in Paris.
"Each
play I see by Phyllis Nagy confirms me in the belief that she is the
finest playwright to have emerged in the 1990s" (Financial Times)
One of the great crime novels of the 20th century, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley is a blend of the narrative subtlety of Henry James and the self-reflexive irony of Vladimir Nabokov. Like the best modernist fiction, Ripley works on two levels. First, it is the story of a young man, Tom Ripley, whose nihilistic tendencies lead him on a deadly passage across Europe. On another level, the novel is a commentary on fictionmaking and techniques of narrative persuasion. Like Humbert Humbert, Tom Ripley seduces readers into empathizing with him even as his actions defy all moral standards.
The novel begins with a play on James's The Ambassadors. Tom Ripley is chosen by the wealthy Herbert Greenleaf to retrieve Greenleaf's son, Dickie, from his overlong sojourn in Italy. Dickie, it seems, is held captive both by the Mediterranean climate and the attractions of his female companion, but Mr. Greenleaf needs him back in New York to help with the family business. With an allowance and a new purpose, Tom leaves behind his dismal city apartment to begin his career as a return escort. But Tom, too, is captivated by Italy. He is also taken with the life and looks of Dickie Greenleaf. He insinuates himself into Dickie's world and soon finds that his passion for a lifestyle of wealth and sophistication transcends moral compunction. Tom will become Dickie Greenleaf--at all costs.
Unlike many modernist experiments, The Talented Mr. Ripley is eminently readable and is driven by a gripping chase narrative that chronicles each of Tom's calculated maneuvers of self-preservation. Highsmith was in peak form with this novel, and her ability to enter the mind of a sociopath and view the world through his disturbingly amoral eyes is a model that has spawned such latter-day serial killers as Hannibal Lecter. --Patrick O'Kelley
The Winter's Tale (New Folger Library Shakespeare)
by William Shakespeare
from Washington Square Press
Completely re-edited, the New Folger Library editions of Shakespeare's plays put readers in touch with current ways of thinking about Shakespeare. Each freshly edited text is based directly on what the editors consider the best early printed version of the play. Each volume contains full explanatory notes on pages facing the text of the play, as well as a helpful introduction to Shakespeare's language. The accounts of William Shakespeare's life, his theater, and the publication of his plays present the latest scholarship, and the annotated reading lists suggest sources of further information. The illustrations of objects, clothing, and mythological figures mentioned in the plays are drawn from the Library's vast holdings of rare books. At the conclusion of each play there is a full essay by an outstanding scholar who assesses the play in light of today's interests and concerns.
Hamlet (Barnes & Noble Shakespeare)
by William Shakespeare
from Barnes & Noble Shakespeare
Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, is part of the Barnes & Noble Shakespeare series. This unique series features newly edited texts prepared by leading scholars from America and Great Britain, in collaboration with one of the world’s foremost Shakespeare authorities, David Scott Kastan of Columbia University. Together they have produced texts as faithful as possible to those that Shakespeare wrote.
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Each volume in the Barnes & Noble Shakespeare includes:
A Doll's House (Plays for Performance Series)
by Henrik Ibsen
from Ivan R Dee
Ibsen’s seminal play, which changed modern drama, is a searing view of a male-dominated and authoritarian society, presented with a realism that elevates theatre to a level above mere entertainment. The reverberations of Nora’s slamming the door as she leaves Torvald continue to this present day. Nicholas Rudall, justly celebrated for his translations of Ibsen, again provides a play of power and speakability.
A history of western music
This comprehensive collection of 205 scores illustrates every significant trend and genre of Western music from antiquity to modern times.
Highlights of the repertoire include new works from all periods: more contrasting virelais, ballades, and other chansons from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries; large-scale choral works, including Gabrieli’s In ecclesiis, Lully’s Te Deum, Haydn’s Creation, and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky; more opera, including Norma, Les Huguenots, and Madama Butterfly; orchestral and chamber works by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Dvorák, and Tchaikovsky; and new twentieth-century works by Satie, Bartók, Milhaud, Prokofiev, Varèse, Hindemith, Cowell, Cage, Feldman, Stockhausen, Boulez, Berio, Reich, Adams, Ligeti, Schnittke, and Michael Daugherty.+++
