In a series of amusing rules, cellist Alice McVeigh describes exactly how to succeed in the music profession (or not?). Fruity, feisty and fizzy, and adorned with cartoons by Private Eye's Noel Ford - All Risks Musical is the book every conductor will want to ban.

Features letters written by the American playwright, revealing his childhood experiences, college years struggling with goals, grades, and money, and his emerging relationships.

Tennessee Williams's first novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams. Published in 1950, his first novel was acclaimed by Gore Vidal as "splendidly written, precise, short, complete, and fine." It is the story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow recently a famous stage beauty, but now "drifting." The novel opens soon after her husband's death and her retirement from the theatre, as Mrs. Stone tries to adjust to her aimless new life in Rome. She is adjusting, too, to aging. ("The knowledge that her beauty was lost had come upon her recently and it was still occasionally forgotten.") With poignant wit and his own particular brand of relish, Williams charts her drift into an affair with a cruel young gigolo: "As compelling, as fascinating, and as technically skillful as his play" (Publishers Weekly).

A play produced only twice in the 1940s and now published for the first time reveals that Tennessee Williams anticipated the themes of Star Trek by decades.

"Biography of James Laughlin, founder of the publishing house New Direction, and one of the most important advocates for modernist and experimental literature"--

Originally published: Great Britain: Canongate Books, 2013.

Tennessee Williams and Europe: Intercultural Encounters, Transatlantic Exchanges documents the bi-directional exchange of ideas and images between Williams and post-war Europe that have altered the artistic landscapes of both continents. Fifteen Williams scholars from around the world examine this artistic symbiosis and explore avenues of research mostly uncharted in Williams scholarship to date, including our understanding of the early Williams and the uses he made of various European sources in his theatre; the late Williams and the promise European theatre afforded him with his experimental plays; and the posthumous Williams and his influence on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century European theatre and cinema. To some extent both a product of and a muse for Europe over the last half century, Williams is well positioned to become America’s most famous playwright on the international stage. This book hopes to mark the beginnings of Williams’ rich critical tradition within that global context.

The Short Story in Midcentury America provides in-depth case studies of four major writers of the post–World War II era—Paul Bowles, Mary McCarthy, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams—examining how they used the contained aesthetics of short fiction to map out an oppositional stance to the dominant narratives, both political and literary, of mid-twentieth century U.S. culture. Sam V. H. Reese presents a new understanding of the connections between politics, ideology, and literary form, arguing that writers employed the short story to critique the cultural mores of the early Cold War. The four authors under discussion found themselves socially marginalized by mainstream U.S. culture due to such factors as their gender, sexual orientation, religion, and foreign residence. Reese shows that each author embraced the short story’s compressed form as a means of resisting political coercion and conformity, speaking out in support of freedom and open expression. Reese argues that these four writers used the formal restrictions of the short story to develop a type of fiction that became recognizably countercultural, challenging the expansive, sprawling novels then receiving acclaim from critics. His analysis underscores the means by which each author’s short stories utilized the aesthetic practices of mediums outside conventional narrative fiction: Bowles’s career as a composer, McCarthy’s criticism and memoirs, Williams’s playwriting, and Welty’s photography. By studying both their prose and its conceptualization, Reese reveals how writers resisted the political and stylistic pressures that defined U.S. literary culture in the early years of the Cold War. In The Short Story in Midcentury America, Reese establishes a new framework for considering countercultural literature in the United States, reassessing the critical standing of the short story and re-evaluating the relationship between marginal social positions and literary form during the mid-twentieth century.