This book shows that Eugene O’Neill’s modern American drama is a survey on the politics of desire, the power of doom, and the variable configurations of the polis. It highlights that the modern American city, or polis, is the stage on which the antithetic categories of doom and desire are re-enacted in different undertones. The text notes that desire, doom, schizophrenia, and the archeology of the polis are reconceived by the playwright, while legacy, sexuality, lucre, and the volatility of the free flow of capital entrap the American subject in a maze of qualms and queries. Subjection and resistance give birth to schizorevolutionary subjects, seeking lines of flight. Indeed, as noted here, O’Neill’s plays portray their protagonists as desiring machines, trying to evade the modern closed circles of power, and various modes of becoming, to use Gilles Deleuze’s concept. O’Neill encounters Deleuze at the level of thoughts and sensations, anticipating postmodern plateaus for the human subject to grow into a rhizome.

The moderns found these two writers to be one of them, and the post moderns said their essence was post-modern. They were found to have deep existential core and humanism was the defining spirit of their works. When a writer writes with deep empathy for the human situation, the work is freed from the traps of ideologies and techniques. It reaches out to people beyond time and space. Truth is complex and individual in manifestation but simple and universal in essence. This simplicity is the most difficult to achieve and most prized achievement of an artist. This simplicity of the communication is what the journey of O’Neill and Beckett has been all about. Their journey is marked by unsparing effort to give a universal metaphor to an immensely subjective experience. The voices of two of the greatest dramatists come together to tell not just what drama has been all about in the 20th Century, but also what it is in our own day. It looks not just into the plots or characters to understand their works but also how they communicated so much more through the way they visualized the technical aspects and theatrical impact of their plays.

An “absorbing” biography of the playwright and Nobel laureate that “unflinchingly explores the darkness that dominated O’Neill’s life” (Publishers Weekly). This extraordinary biography fully captures the intimacies of Eugene O’Neill’s tumultuous life and the profound impact of his work on American drama, innovatively highlighting how the stories he told for the stage interweave with his actual life stories as well as the culture and history of his time. Much is new in this extensively researched book: connections between O’Neill’s plays and his political and philosophical worldview; insights into his Irish American upbringing and lifelong torment over losing faith in God; his vital role in African American cultural history; unpublished photographs, including a unique offstage picture of him with his lover Louise Bryant; new evidence of O’Neill’s desire to become a novelist and what this reveals about his unique dramatic voice; and a startling revelation about the release of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in defiance of his explicit instructions. This biography is also the first to discuss O’Neill’s lost play Exorcism (a single copy of which was only recently recovered), a dramatization of his own suicide attempt. Written with both a lively informality and a scholar’s strict accuracy, Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts is a biography worthy of America’s foremost playwright. “Fast-paced, highly readable . . . building to a devastating last act.” —Irish Times

The Present Book, The Plays Of Eugene O Neill : A Critical Study, Is A Full-Length Study Of Eugene O Neill S Major Plays. O Neil, Who Was Awarded The Nobel Prize For Literature In November 1936, Has A Firm Belief That Powerlessness, Cultural-Estrangement, Social-Isolation, Self-Estrangement And Normlessness Are The Major Factors Which Account For The Realistic Representation Of The Problems Of The Individual In His Plays. O Neill S Plays Are Modern Tragedies, Striking At The Very Root Of Sickness Inherent In The Present Day World. He Claims That He Has Studied Man Not In Relation To Man, But Man In Relation To God.

Rich and witty, the literary whodunits by Amanda Cross are a delight for readers who like their mysteries smart and suspenseful. Now comes the highly anticipated sequel to her Kate Fansler novel, Honest Doubt, which the Providence Journal called “one of [her] best books in years.” Here, Cross takes her beloved protagonist into uncharted territory, turning Kate Fansler’s world upside down. Just when Kate Fansler thinks life couldn’t possibly hold any more surprises, she receives a phone call from Laurence, the eldest of her imperious brothers. But a woman as sharp as Kate knows that the moment one stops believing in life’s little bends in the road is the time when it has more twists in store. Kate has always been different from the other Fanslers–a free and independent thinker in a family where propriety and decorum are prized above all. She has always assumed it was because she was the youngest and the only girl in the family. But over a drink with Laurence, Kate’s whole understanding of herself is thrown into question as he calmly tells her that a strange man came to his office claiming to be Kate’s father–and it’s quite possible that she is not a Fansler after all. There are even more dangerous curves in the road for Kate Fansler, especially after she meets the man who calls himself her father. When more life-threatening secrets and lies emerge, Kate and the Fansler family are suddenly pitched perilously close to the edge of doom

New edition of Modern American Drama completes the survey and comes up to 2000.

The autobiography of the early radical leader and her participation in communist, anarchist, and feminist activities

When Dylan Fielding, celebrated contemporary visual artist, becomes Br. Thomas Augustine, novice at Our Lady of the Pines monastery, he finds delight not only in the shock his choice causes everyone around him but--to his own surprise--in the rhythms of the life itself. Shortly before he solidifies a lifelong commitment to the community, a traumatic encounter with an abusive priest plunges Thomas Augustine into terror and doubt. Reeling and uncertain, he reaches out to his friend, rival, and former lover, Angele Solomon, with hopes that she can help him to speak the difficult truth. As she attempts to advocate for her friend, Angele must ask how the scars left by their common past-as well as newer harms-can ever be healed or transcended. The wider inquiries demanded next will transfigure how both of them picture a range of human and divine things: time and memory; art and agency; trust and responsibility; and what it might mean to know real freedom.