Abrams: 1969 books

She's a college professor with a prim demeanor, and he's a carpenter with a foul mouth and violent streak. Betty has a history of promiscuity that Bobby won't let her forget, and from their first taunting exchanges there are intimations also of the history between them. Yet on the night when Betty...

In his new play, Chaucer in Rome, it is the year 2000, and Ron and his wife come to Rome to search for their son. And with his inimitable wit and understanding, Guare has written a scathingly funny satire on the warping hunger for fame, and the betrayal involved in creating art.

An extensive reworking of two earlier (1981) plays by John Guare about a nineteenth-century commune in Nantucket, Lydie Breeze is a two-play, six-hour cycle about four seekers who come to the island to create a special model for a better world in the ashes of the Civil War and end up as a model for...

Spicy continues to keep her pen pal Rainey entertained with stories and poems of her life with four feline housemates. In Love and Purrs, Spicy uses poetry to describe a fun visit she had with her human friend Lyla, who loves cats, and when they all hid, except Spicy, of course, Lyla and Mother went...

From Robert Fagles’s acclaimed translation, An Iliad telescopes Homer’s Trojan War epic into a gripping monologue that captures both the heroism and horror of war. Crafted around the stories of Achilles and Hector, in language that is by turns poetic and conversational, An Iliad brilliantly refreshes...

The play revolves around wealthy middle-aged couple Agnes and Tobias, who have their complacency shattered when their longtime friends Harry and Edna appear at their doorstep. Claiming an encroaching, nameless "fear" has forced them from their own home, these neighbors bring a firestorm...

The Zoo Story. More than fifty years later, master playwright Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?) wrote a prequel to this classic. Home Story contains the events in Peter’s life immediately preceding his encounter with Jerry on the park bench...

On the heels of the success of Edward Albee’s The Collected Plays of Edward Albee, Overlook brings back—in a stand-alone volume—one of Albee’s most cherished plays, a fantastic story of what it means to be alive—winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. On a deserted stretch of beach,...

Wes Anderson is one of the most influential voices from the past two decades of American cinema. A true auteur, Anderson is known for the visual artistry, inimitable tone, and idiosyncratic characterizations that make each of his films—Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic...

Pastor Paul does not believe in Hell, and today, he's going to preach a sermon that finally says what he really believes. He thinks all the people in his church are going be happy to hear what he has to say. He's wrong.

Best known for his surreal camera obscura pictures and luminous black-and-white photographs of books, photographer Abelardo Morell now turns his transformative lens to one of the most common of artistic subjects, the flower. The concept for Flowers for Lisa emerged when Morell gave his wife, Lisa,...

Award-winning author Lawrence Weschler’s book on the young Mexican American artist Ramiro Gomez explores questions of social equity and the chasms between cultures and classes in America.   Gomez, born in 1986 in San Bernardino, California, to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents, bridges the...

There are nearly 1,400 known varieties of wine grapes in the world—from altesse to zierfandler—but 80 percent of the wine we drink is made from only 20 grapes. In Godforsaken Grapes, Jason Wilson looks at how that came to be and embarks on a journey to discover what we miss.   Stemming from...

Cider is having a major moment, and The Cider Revival charts its history, resurgence, and a year with the vanguard makers of heritage cider Cider is the quintessential American beverage. Drank by early settlers and founding fathers, it was ubiquitous and pervasive, but following Prohibition...