Here is the quintessence of Giraudoux's extraordinary imagination and style. A shy girl applying for a job at the Office of Inventions learns from a nondescript man that she can have her way with any man if she declares that he is as handsome as the nonexistent statue of the Apollo of Bellac. The play is alive with wry and trenchant observations on the comical attitudes and truths that men assume in life.

Body's critical biography seeks to unlock the secrets of Giraudoux and his work, and to provide a portrait of the author and an analysis of his short stories, novels, plays, essays, and political theory.

The Drama of Fallen France examines various dramatic works written and/or produced in Paris during the four years of Nazi occupation and explains what they may have meant to their original audiences. Because of widespread financial support from the new French government at Vichy, the former French capital underwent a renaissance of theatre during this period, and both the public playhouses and the private theatres provided an amazing array of new productions and revivals. Some of the plays considered here are well known: Anouilh's Antigone, Sartre's The Flies, Claudel's The Satin Slipper. Others have remained obscure, such as Cocteau's The Typewriter, Giraudoux's The Apollo of Marsac, and Montherlant's Nobody's Son; and two—André Obey's Eight Hundred Meters and Simone Jollivet's The Princess of Ursins—have remained virtually unread since the early 1940s. In examining French culture under the Vichy regime and the Nazis, Kenneth Krauss links the politics of gender and sexuality with the more traditional political concepts of collaboration and resistance. A final chapter on Truffaut's 1980 film, The Last Métro, demonstrates how the present manages to rewrite and revision the complex and seemingly contradictory reality of the past.

Winner of the 2009 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour The cops wanted to shoot me, my bosses thought I was a Bolshevik, and a local lawyer warned me that some people I was writing about might try to test the strength of my skull with a steel pipe. What more could any young reporter hope for from his first real job? The night Mark Leiren-Young drove into Williams Lake, British Columbia, in 1985 to work as a reporter for the venerable Williams Lake Tribune, he arrived on the scene of an armed robbery. And that was before things got weird. For a 22-year-old from Vancouver, a stint in the legendary Cariboo town was a trip to another world and another era. From the explosive opening, where Mark finds himself in a courtroom just a few feet away from a defendant with a bomb strapped to his chest, to the case of a plane that crashed without its pilot on board, Never Shoot a Stampede Queen is an unforgettable comic memoir of a city boy learning about—and learning to love—life in a cowboy town.

The gift and the giving is a contemporary play dealing with the question of man's faith in the value of personal commitment. Four young people take shelter in a church as they pause on their way to the state capitol where they hope to dramatize their plea for social change. They have vowed to fast until the march is completed, but now thoughts of food and comfort possess them. Their belief in the success of their goal is further weakened as unforeseen circumstances and the threat of physical harm work to defeat them. Only one is likely to complete the trek to the capitol steps, but the message he leaves with the others is that one committed man, with faith in his beliefs, can sometimes work small miracles. An unusual aspect is that the 'cause' is never specified, thus calling on the audience's imagination for participation. Designed for a youthful cast, the play is written for production in a church with the audience sitting in the pews. It can also be performed on a bare stage or at any number of locales.