Color of Desire/Hurricane


Book Description

Two new plays by Nilo Cruz, the first Latino honored with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.




Desire and Disaster in New Orleans


Book Description

Most of the narratives packaged for New Orleans's many tourists cultivate a desire for black culture—jazz, cuisine, dance—while simultaneously targeting black people and their communities as sources and sites of political, social, and natural disaster. In this timely book, the Americanist and New Orleans native Lynnell L. Thomas delves into the relationship between tourism, cultural production, and racial politics. She carefully interprets the racial narratives embedded in tourism websites, travel guides, business periodicals, and newspapers; the thoughts of tour guides and owners; and the stories told on bus and walking tours as they were conducted both before and after Katrina. She describes how, with varying degrees of success, African American tour guides, tour owners, and tourism industry officials have used their own black heritage tours and tourism-focused businesses to challenge exclusionary tourist representations. Taking readers from the Lower Ninth Ward to the White House, Thomas highlights the ways that popular culture and public policy converge to create a mythology of racial harmony that masks a long history of racial inequality and structural inequity.




Hurricane Season


Book Description

A USA TODAY bestseller! Hurricane Season is the story of sisterhood, motherhood, and an unconventional journey to healing—and the relationships that must be mended along the way. Betsy and Ty Franklin, owners of Franklin Dairy Farm in southern Alabama, have long since buried their desire for children of their own. While Ty manages their herd of dairy cows, Betsy busies herself with the farm’s day-to-day operations and tries to forget her dream of motherhood. But when her free-spirited sister, Jenna, drops off her two young daughters for “just two weeks,” Betsy’s carefully constructed wall of self-protection begins to crumble. As the two weeks stretch deeper into the Alabama summer, Betsy and Ty learn to navigate the new additions in their world—and revel in the laughter that now fills their home. Meanwhile, record temperatures promise to usher in the most active hurricane season in decades. Attending an art retreat four hundred miles away, Jenna is fighting her own battles. She finally has time and energy to focus on her photography, a lifelong ambition. But she wonders how her rediscovered passion can fit in with the life she’s made back home as a single mom. But when Hurricane Ingrid aims a steady eye at the Alabama coast, Jenna must make a decision that will change her family’s future, even as Betsy and Ty try to protect their beloved farm . . . and their hearts. Praise for Hurricane Season: “A poignant and heartfelt tale of sisterhood, motherhood, and marriage, Hurricane Season deftly examines the role that coming to terms with the past plays in creating a hopeful future. Readers will devour this story of the hurricanes—both literal and figurative—that shape our lives.” —Kristy Woodson Harvey, national bestselling author of Slightly South of Simple Full-length contemporary Southern fiction Stand-alone novel Includes discussion questions for book clubs




Exquisite Agony


Book Description

“Beautifully strange… An opera star with a penchant for dramatic sorrow shows up at a doctor’s office, looking for her husband’s heart. Someone got it when he died—which means that somewhere, inside another person’s rib cage, a piece of her husband lives on… Thus begins a tantalizing correspondence in Nilo Cruz’s Exquisite Agony, a play about the human heart: its fumblings and yearnings, its bruises and scars, its generosity and viciousness.” —Laura Collins-Hughes, New York Times “Exquisite Agony is about a woman who finds life in death, in an atmosphere where poetic insights are the norm and women are the center. Cruz’s feminist view is one of the liberating aspects of his writing, as is a kind of magical realism that is not cloying but true to his characters, and to the fact of dispossession: sometimes we don’t know who we are because we don’t know where life has landed on our bodies, let alone in our hearts.” —Hilton Als, New Yorker “Exquisite Agony is explosive… As in several of Cruz’s previous works, drama ignites from the friction between the banal and the magical.” —Zachary Stewart, TheaterMania “Exquisite Agony entertains and enraptures… There’s rueful humor, Chekhovian reveries, and a sense of the mystical… Ravishing on all levels.” —Darryl Reilly, TheatreScene.net Nilo Cruz is a Cuban-American playwright and director, and the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for his play Anna in the Tropics. His other plays include Sotto Voce, Beauty of the Father, Two Sisters and a Piano, Lorca in a Green Dress, Dancing on Her Knees, and Night Train to Bolina.




Fifty Key Figures in LatinX and Latin American Theatre


Book Description

Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre is a critical introduction to the most influential and innovative theatre practitioners in the Americas, all of whom have been pioneers in changing the field. The chosen artists work through political, racial, gender, class, and geographical divides to expand our understanding of Latin American and Latinx theatre while at the same time offering a space to discuss contested nationalities and histories. Each entry considers the artist’s or collective’s body of work in its historical, cultural, and political context and provides a brief biography and suggestions for further reading. The volume covers artists from the present day to the 1960s—the emergence of a modern theatre that was concerned with Latinx and Latin American themes distancing themselves from an European approach. A deep and enriching resource for the classroom and individual study, this is the first book that any student of Latinx and Latin American theatre should read.




Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]


Book Description

This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.




Sotto Voce (TCG Edition)


Book Description

“Exquisite, dreamlike… The poetry of Cruz’s writing is what those who love his work cite most often about his style, and Sotto Voce has that… It also contains passages that are realistic, whimsical, sensual and heartbreaking. Cruz may be that rarity, a poet of the stage, but he is first and foremost a dramatist.” —Christine Dolen, Miami Herald The millennium, New York City. Bemadette Kahn, an eighty-year-old German-born writer, spends her days in her apartment, trying to forget the past. Until Saquiel Rafaeli, a young Jewish-Cuban researcher, appears on her doorstep, forcing her to confront those haunted memories. He’s eager to learn about Bemadette’s long-lost lover, Ariel Strauss, who set sail in 1939 aboard the St. Louis, never to be seen again. With layered lyrical language and vibrant intimacy, Sotto Voce is an imaginative exploration of the power of memory, love and human connection. Nilo Cruz is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Anna in the Tropics, as well as Beauty of the Father, Two Sisters and a Piano, Lorca in a Green Dress, Dancing on Her Knees, Night Train to Bolina and other works.




Color of Desire/Hurricane


Book Description

"The words of Nilo Cruz waft from the stage like a scented breeze. They sparkle and prickle and swirl, enveloping those who listen in both specific place and time . . . and in timeless passions that touch us all."—The Miami Herald One of the United States' most-produced Cuban American writers, Nilo Cruz employs his signature poetic imagery and vivid language to tender and humorous effect in this pair of his newest works. The Color of Desire, set in 1960 Havana, revolves around a passionate romance between an American businessman and an out-of-work Cuban actress. As the relationship becomes a metaphor for their countries' ruptured love affair, Cruz artfully weds magical realism to a familial story that is touching, harrowing, and funny. In Hurricane, a damaged family—a fire-and-brimstone missionary; his wife, who he saved in more than the spiritual sense; and their adopted son, who seems to have materialized from the ocean—face a shocking crisis when a hurricane ravages their Caribbean town. A celebration of humility, generosity, and kindness, Cruz's play explores the nature of identity, faith, and the redemptive power of love. Nilo Cruz is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Anna in the Tropics, as well as A Park in Our House, A Bicycle Country, Dancing on Her Knees, Night Train to Bolina, Two Sisters and a Piano, and other works.




Great Storms of the Jersey Shore


Book Description

Offers illustrations and maps to provide a historical look at the hurricanes and other natural storms which have caused havoc on the Jersey coast since colonial times




The Color of Desire


Book Description

"The words of Nilo Cruz waft from the stage like a scented breeze. They sparkle and prickle and swirl, enveloping those who listen in both specific place and time ... and in timeless passions that touch us all."--The Miami Herald One of the United States' most-produced Cuban American writers, Nilo Cruz employs his signature poetic imagery and vivid language to tender and humorous effect in this pair of his newest works. The Color of Desire, set in 1960 Havana, revolves around a passionate romance between an American businessman and an out-of-work Cuban actress. As the relationship becomes a metaphor for their countries' ruptured love affair, Cruz artfully weds magical realism to a familial story that is touching, harrowing, and funny. In Hurricane, a damaged family-a fire-and-brimstone missionary; his wife, who he saved in more than the spiritual sense; and their adopted son, who seems to have materialized from the ocean-face a shocking crisis when a hurricane ravages their Caribbean town. A celebration of humility, generosity, and kindness, Cruz's play explores the nature of identity, faith, and the redemptive power of love. Nilo Cruz is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics, as well as A Park in Our House, A Bicycle Country, Dancing on Her Knees, Night Train to Bolina, Two Sisters and a Piano, and other works.