Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays


Book Description

A volume of plays from the founding architect of twentieth-century drama, including his most popular and controversial work A Penguin Classic Pirandello is brilliantly innovatory in his forms and themes, and in the combined energy, imagination and visual colours of his theatre. This volume of plays, translated from the Italian by Mark Musa, opens with Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which six characters invade the stage and demand to be included in the play. The tragedy Henry IV dramatizes the lucid madness of a man who may be King. In So It Is (If You Think So), the townspeople exercise a morbid curiosity attempting to discover “the truth” about the Ponza family. Each of these plays can lay claim to being Pirandello’s masterpiece, and in exploring the nature of human personality, each one stretches the resources of drama to their limits. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.




Ideas of the Twentieth Century


Book Description

The twentieth century ushered in significant progress, as philosophers, scientists, artists, and poets across the world improved the way we lived. Yet the last century also brought increased levels of war, tyranny, and genocide, and people lost faith in values. Now, thinkers and leaders are reconstructing theories of value and creating institutions to embody them. In this thought-provoking, broad-sweeping course, you will learn how philosophy, art, literature, and history shaped the past century and continue to impact our world today.




Naked Masks


Book Description

This special one-volume edition features five great plays by one of the most celebrated and fascinating dramatists of the twentieth century. Pirandello, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1934, was the playwright par excellence of the conflict between illusion and reality. His modern and sensationally original plays dramatize with force and eloquence the isolation of the individual from society and from himself. The editor, Eric Bentley, is an international theater authority. In addition to the Introduction and the biographical and bibliographical material in the Appendices, Mr. Bentley has prepared for this volume the first English translations of the play Liolà and Pirandello’s important “Preface” to Six Characters in Search of an Author. Included Plays: Liolà It Is So! (If You Think So) Henry IV Six Characters in Search of an Author Each in His Own Way




One, No One and One Hundred Thousand


Book Description

In Luigi Pirandello's thought-provoking novel, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, the protagonist, Vitangelo Moscarda, undergoes a profound identity crisis after a casual remark from his wife. This sets him on a journey of self-discovery, questioning the nature of reality, identity, and the multifaceted perceptions others have of him. Through a series of philosophical musings and encounters with various characters, Moscarda grapples with the fragmented nature of the self and the illusions that shape our understanding of the world.




The Book Thief


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 BEST YA BOOKS OF ALL TIME The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time. “The kind of book that can be life-changing.” —The New York Times “Deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.” —USA Today DON’T MISS BRIDGE OF CLAY, MARKUS ZUSAK’S FIRST NOVEL SINCE THE BOOK THIEF.




Six Characters in Search of an Author


Book Description

Six fictional characters, abandoned by their creator, invade a rehearsal in progress and demand to be brought to life by a new author. But the characters' existential agenda collides with the more lighthearted ambitions of these theatre artists, whose open rehearsal "audience engagement event" becomes darkly entangled with the characters' tragic story. This intimate adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's absurdist classic foregrounds the comedic contrast between melodrama and the contemporary sensibilities of the acting company -- all the while asking us to consider just what we believe to be real.




Stories for the Years


Book Description

Regarded as one of Europe’s great modernists, Pirandello was also a master storyteller, a fine observer of the drama of daily life with a remarkable sense of the crushing burdens of class, gender, and social conventions. Set in the author’s birthplace of Sicily, where the arid terrain and isolated villages map the fragile interior world of his characters, and in Rome, where modern life threatens centuries-old traditions, these original stories are sun baked with the deep lore of Italian folktales. In “The Jar,” a broken earthenware pot pits its owner, a quarrelsome landholder, against a clever inventor of a mysterious glue. “The Dearly Departed” tells the story of a young widow and her new husband on their honeymoon, haunted at every turn by the sly visage of the deceased. The scorned lover, the despondent widow, the intransigent bureaucrat, the wretched peasant—Pirandello’s characters expose the human condition in all its fatalism, injustice, and raw beauty. For lovers of Calvino and Pasolini, these picturesque stories preserve a memory of an Italy long gone, but one whose recurring concerns still speak to us today.




In Search of Snow


Book Description

In the hot Arizona desert of the late 1950s, Mike McGurk comes of age in one big, riotous gush. Trapped pumping gas at a desolate roadstop, he yearns for things he has never known: love, hope, and the soft, white calmness of snow. Mike's world is filled with a menagerie of quirky characters, who cope with the weight of their unfulfilled dreams with bravado, humor, and violence. Mike trades snappy insults with his macho father, Texaco Turk McGurk, a moustachioed amateur boxer and self-proclaimed war hero who is unable to talk about love. Mike lusts after Lily, his seductive, poem-writing cousin. He cowers before and then confronts the vicious Ramses, grandson of Mr. Sneezy, the wisecracking Apache. And he is rescued by his best friend, Bobo, who delivers him into the care of the loving and generous Mama and Papa Garcia. In Search of Snow is an explosive coming-of-age adventure, full of hilarious episodes and still, poignant moments. Like a blue-collar Don Quixote, Mike must blow up his windmills before he can set off to find the things he lacks, especially the snow that will temper the passion he has just set aflame.




Power and Passion


Book Description

Samuel Wells shows how the characters in the Holy Week story face choices and experience feelings very similar to our own. He explores six kinds of power and demonstrates how Jesus' resurrection brings a new power that transforms the passion of our lives.