The World of Ruth Draper: A Portrait of an Actress captures the life of the internationally acclaimed monologist and the familial, social, and theatrical worlds in which she lived from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1950s. Dorothy Warren draws on correspondence with family and friends, theatrical reviews, personal interviews, and her own long relationship with Ruth Draper in crafting this biography. Born in New York City in 1884, Ruth Draper began giving monologues at private parties and schools at the age of twenty-six and made her professional debut in 1920 at London's AEolian Hall. In charting the course of Draper's impressive career, Warren follows her performances on stages around the world, including private recitals for Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and the royal families of Britain, Spain, and Belgium. Warren also devotes a significant discussion to Draper's relationship with Lauro de Bosis, the Italian poet and political activist whose 1931 disappearance while dropping anti-Fascist pamphlets over Rome remains unexplained. Draper's long stage reign ended when she died in her sleep following a performance in New York City in December 1956. Ruth Draper's specialty was the monologue, a dramatic composition for a single performer evoking other characters upon the stage. She had in her repertoire sixty dramatic sketches featuring fifty-two characters whom she performed, as well as 316 others whom she evoked during the course of the sketches. Some of her better-known sketches were Opening the Bazaar, Vive la France -- 1940, The Scottish Immigrant, The Actress, and In County Kerry. Draper's unique quality was her ability to project an illusion, to evoke upon the stagethe characters with whom she conversed and interacted. Lynn Fontanne said of this faculty of Draper's: "There is the flavor of parlor magic in it -- something of conjuring". Bernard Levin, writing in the Times of London on April 4, 1988, recalls Draper's talent for evocation as "truly hallucinating" and adds, "Before the curtain came down, real hallucination had set in and we could see on the stage a crowd of people who were not there!" Eleonora Duse declared, "Ruth Draper is theater". The World of Ruth Draper features twenty-three illustrations.

Now a Netflix film starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha'la, Farrah Mackenzie, Charlie Evans and Kevin Bacon. Written for the Screen and Directed by Sam Esmail. Executive Producers Barack and Michelle Obama, Tonia Davis, Daniel M. Stillman, Nick Krishnamurthy, Rumaan Alam A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Fiction One of Barack Obama's Summer Reads A Best Book of the Year From: The Washington Post * Time * NPR * Elle * Esquire * Kirkus * Library Journal * The Chicago Public Library * The New York Public Library * BookPage * The Globe and Mail * EW.com * The LA Times * USA Today * InStyle * The New Yorker * AARP * Publisher's Lunch * LitHub * Book Marks * Electric Literature * Brooklyn Based * The Boston Globe A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong. From the bestselling author of Rich and Pretty comes a suspenseful and provocative novel keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped—and unexpected new ones are forged—in moments of crisis. Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple—it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area—with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service—it’s hard to know what to believe. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple—and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one other?

The most respected, authoritative study guide on Cosi is written by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg who is a published playwright and author of short fiction and teaches English at the University of Tasmania. She wrote the Insight Text Guide on The Secret River which was the subject of her Masters thesis.

In this collection, gifted poet and novelist Kim Addonizio uses her literary powers to bring to life a variety of settings, all connected through the suggestion that things in the known world are not what they seem. In "Beautiful Lady of the Snow," young Annabelle turns to a host of family pets to combat the alienation she feels caught between her distracted mother and ailing grandfather; in "Night Owls," a young college student's crush on her acting partner is complicated by the bloodlust of being half-vampire; in "Cancer Poems," a dying woman turns to a poetry workshop to make sense of her terminal diagnosis and final days; in "Intuition," a young girl's sexual forays bring her closer to her best friend's father; and in the collection's title story, a photographer looks back to his youth spent as a young illusionist under the big tent and his obsessive affair with the carnival owner's wife. Distracted parents, first love, the twin forces of alienation and isolation: the characters in The Palace of Illusions all must contend with these challenges, trafficking in the fault lines between the real and the imaginary, often in a world not of their making. The stories in this collection have appeared in journals ranging from Narrative Magazine to The Fairy Tale Review, and include the much loved "Ever After," which was featured on NPR's "Selected Shorts."

Contemporary technology has the potential to hinder humanity's attainment of freedom in the opinion of Thomas Merton and Jacques Ellul. Both thinkers offer unique perspectives on the impact that they believe technology has had on society in the twentiethcentury, and they both offer unconventional definitions of the concept of freedom. Shaw compares their views on technology and its impact on freedom, and in doing so allows those who may not be familiar with either of these thinkers to investigate some of their other writing more thoroughly.