Judge Peyton is dead and his plantation Terrebonne is in financial ruins. Peyton’s handsome nephew George arrives as heir apparent and quickly falls in love with Zoe, a beautiful octoroon. But the evil overseer M’Closky has other plans—for both Terrebonne and Zoe. In 1859, a famous Irishman wrote this play about slavery in America. Now an American tries to write his own.

Every estranged member of the Lafayette clan has descended upon the crumbling Arkansas homestead to settle the accounts of the newly-dead patriarch. As his three adult children sort through a lifetime of hoarded mementos and junk, they collide over clutter, debt, and a contentious family history. But after a disturbing discovery surfaces among their father's possessions, the reunion takes a turn for the explosive, unleashing a series of crackling surprises and confrontations.

This modern riff on the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman follows Everybody (chosen from amongst the cast by lottery at each performance) as they journey through life’s greatest mystery—the meaning of living.

Louisa Picquet, child of a slave mother and her white master, was born in Columbia, S.C., but was soon sold with her mother because she looked too much like her master's other child. Around age thirteen, her mother was sold to Mr. Horton, in Texas, and Louisa was sold to Mr. Williams in New Orleans. Louisa lived with him until his death and bore four of his seven children. After his death, she was set free and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. The rest of the narrative describes her successful efforts to raise funds to free her mother. As she was only 1/8 African American, much of the narrative is concerned with Louisa's whiteness and that of her mother and other light-skinned slaves and the sexual exploitation they experienced at the hands of white men. Hiram Mattison met and interviewed Louisa Picquet in Buffalo, New York, in May 1860 and published this narrative, much of it written in interview style to preserve Picquet's own words. He included his own "Conclusion and Moral," emphasizing the many instances of slave women bearing their masters' children, and concludes the work with somber details of slaves being burned alive as punishment.

LOUISA PICQUET, the subject of the following narrative, was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and is apparently about thirty-three years of age. She is a little above the medium height, easy and graceful in her manners, of fair complexion and rosy cheeks, with dark eyes, a flowing head of hair with no perceptible inclination to curl, and every appearance, at first view, of an accomplished white lady.

THE STORY: This funny, trenchant, and powerful play follows an ambitious group of editorial assistants at a notorious Manhattan magazine, each of whom hopes for a starry life of letters and a book deal before they turn thirty. But when an ordinary humdrum workday becomes anything but, the stakes for who will get to tell their own story become higher than ever.

The first in an epic trilogy, Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies is "a remarkably rich saga . . . which has plenty of action and adventure à la Dumas, but moments also of Tolstoyan penetration--and a drop or two of Dickensian sentiment" (The Observer [London]). At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Her destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean shortly before the outbreak of the Opium Wars in China. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners on board, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of Canton. With a panorama of characters whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, Sea of Poppies is "a storm-tossed adventure worthy of Sir Walter Scott" (Vogue).

Father of Waters! I know thee well. In the land of a thousand lakes, on the summit of the “Hauteur de terre,” I have leaped thy tiny stream. Upon the bosom of the blue lakelet, the fountain of thy life, I have launched my birchen boat; and yielding to thy current, have floated softly southward. I have passed the meadows where the wild rice ripens on thy banks, where the white birch mirrors its silvery stem, and tall coniferae fling their pyramid shapes, on thy surface. I have seen the red Chippewa cleave thy crystal waters in his bark canoe—the giant moose lave his flanks in thy cooling flood—and the stately wapiti bound gracefully along thy banks. I have listened to the music of thy shores—the call of the cacawee, the laugh of the wa-wa goose, and the trumpet-note of the great northern swan. Yes, mighty river! Even in that far northern land, thy wilderness home, have I worshipped thee!...FROM THE BOOKS.

A black preacher returns home to rural Georgia to claim an inheritance and bring down the ruthless plantation owner that he once served. He finds a surprise ally in the plantation owner's son.