The Profilist

The Profilist

Adrian Mitchell

Poetry / Literature & Fiction / Theater

"There were likely to be deserts enough for Goliath to feel quite at home, he said. But that gave rise to a puzzle as to why we would want to go exploring there. Never mind. My task was to record what we saw." By his training as a profilist - a silhouette painter - Ethan Dibble has learned to take a sidelong view of life. When he arrives in early colonial South Australia he has no idea of what to expect; but with his knack for observation and detachment, and a wry sense of humour, he finds that the variety of activity and events provides colour in plenty. There is no black and white here. First Adelaide, then the Victorian goldfields, then Sydney and Melbourne attract his wandering attentiveness. In "The Profilist", Adrian Mitchell paints a compelling picture of the early years of the Australian colonies, in the imagined voice of the artist Samuel Thomas Gill - or someone very like him.
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Baby Doll & Tiger Tail

Baby Doll & Tiger Tail

Tennessee Williams

Theater

A taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner.In 1956, Time magazine called Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll "just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited." The taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge, who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner in Tiger Tail County, Mississippi until she is "ready," has gained in humor and pathos over the years as society has caught up with the author's savagely honest view of bigotry and lust in the rural South. But Tennessee Williams was first and foremost a writer for the stage, and this reissue of his original screenplay for the Elia Kazan movie of Baby Doll is now accompanied by the script of the full-length stage play, Tiger Tail, developed from that screenplay during the '70s. The text, which incorporates the author's final revisions, records the play...
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Time Waits for Winthrop

Time Waits for Winthrop

William Tenn

Theater

In an afterword to this story when it was reprinted over a decade ago in his three volume complete works, Phillip Klass (who used the pseudonym "William Tenn" for his science fiction) noted that he had been paid originally $790 for this 23,000 word novella which was, before he sold BERNIE THE FAUST for $5000 to Playboy a few years later, the largest amount he had ever received for a single work. Such was the science fiction market in the 50's (and so for the most part is the science fiction market today). TIME WAITS FOR WINTHROP, published in 1957, was the longest of Tenn's contributions to GALAXY and among his last (a short story, THE DISCOVERY OF MORNIEL MATHAWAY was to follow in 1958 and then THE MEN IN THE WALLS, the first third of his one novel, in 1963). It may be the most carefully worked and precise of his many contributions to the magazine. Superficially dealing with the tension overwhelming a group of corporately-displaced time travelers when one of them, the...
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Tales

Tales

LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)

Poetry / Theater / Nonfiction

"We owe profound thanks to Akashic Books for reissuing this important collection of Amiri Baraka's short stories. Baraka was, without question, the central figure of the Black Arts Movement, and was the most important theorist of that movement's expression of the 'Black Aesthetic,' which took hold of the African American cultural imagination in earnest in the late sixties. While known primarily for his plays, poems, and criticism of black music, Baraka was also a master of the short story form, as this collection attests. Tales first appeared in 1967 and is an impressionistic and sometimes surrealistic collection of short fiction, showcasing Amiri Baraka's great impact on African American literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Tales is a critical volume in Amiri Baraka's oeuvre, and an important testament to his remarkable literary legacy."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr."A clutch of early stories from the poet, playwright, and provocateur, infused with...
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Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer

Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer

Tennessee Williams

Theater

Two of Tennessee Williams's most revered dramas in a single paperback edition for the first time.Orpheus Descending is a love story, a plea for spiritual and artistic freedom, as well as a portrait of racism and intolerance. When charismatic drifter Valentine Xavier arrives in a Mississippi Delta town with his guitar and snakeskin jacket, he becomes a trigger for hatred and a magnet for three outcast souls: storekeeper Lady Torrance, "lewd vagrant" Carol Cutrere, and religious visionary Vee Talbot.Suddenly Last Summer, described by its author as a "short morality play," has become one of his most notorious works due in no small part to the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift that shocked audiences in 1959. A menacing tale of madness, jealousy, and denial,the horrors in Suddenly Last Summer build to a heart-stopping conclusion.With perceptive new introductions by playwright Martin Sherman — he reframes...
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The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?

The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?

Edward Albee

Theater / Literature & Fiction

More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USAReviewUnquestionably one of the wittiest and funniest plays Albee has ever written . . . truly fascinating . . . enthralling. -- Clive Barnes, New York Post**About the AuthorEdward Albee, the American dramatist, was born in 1928. He has written and directed some of the best plays in contemporary American theatre and three of his plays: A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women have received Pulitzer Prizes. His most famous play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. His other plays include The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, The American Dream, Tiny Alice, All Over, Listening, The Lady from Dubuque, The Man Who Had Three Arms, Finding the Sun, Fragments, Marriage Play and The Lorca Play.
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The Tenants

The Tenants

William Tenn

Theater

The building does not have thirteenth floor: fourteenth immediately follows twelfth. But three very strange-looking gentlemen want to rent it nevertheless.
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