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  Pittsburgh Cycle: Book 4

  The Piano Lesson

  by August Wilson

  Set in 1936, The Piano Lesson is a powerful new play from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. A sister and brother fight over a piano that has been in the family for three generations, creating a remarkable drama that embodies the painful past and expectant future of black Americans.
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  Blood Wedding

  by Federico García Lorca, Lillian Groag

  This is a play written by the Spanish poet and dramatist who was murdered by Nationalist partisans in July 1936, shortly after the outbreak of Civil War. Commissioned and performed by the highly acclaimed Communicado Theatre Company, this translation won a Fringe First at the 1988 Edinburgh Festival.
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  The Recognition of Sakuntala

  A Play in Seven Acts

  by Kalidasa

  Kalidasa's play about the love of King Dusyanta for Sakuntala, a monastic girl, is the supreme work of Sanskrit drama by its greatest poet and playwright (c.4th century CE). Overwhelmingly erotic in tone and in performance, The Recognition of Sakuntala aimed to produce an experience of aesthetic rapture in the audience, comparable to certain types of mystical experience. The pioneering English translation of... (more)
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  Lakota Woman

  by Richard Erdoes, Mary Crow Dog

  A unique autobiography unparalleled in American Indian literature, and a deeply moving account of a woman's triumphant struggle to survive in a hostile world.
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  To Each His Own

  by Leonardo Sciascia

  The Sicilian master Leonardo Sciascia, widely acknowledged to be one of the outstanding figures of twentieth-century Italian literature, was the first novelist to venture freely into the closed world of the Mafia. To American readers, however, he remains a little-known secret. New York Review Books will reissue two of his major works. Here Sciascia presents a brilliant anatomy of a society based on secrets and... (more)
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  I'm Not Scared

  by Niccolò Ammaniti

  “Stop all this talk about monsters, Michele. Monsters don’t exist. It’s men you should be afraid of, not monsters.” A sweltering heat wave hits a tiny village in Southern Italy, sending the adults to seek shelter, while their children bicycle freely throughout the countryside, playing games and getting into trouble. On a dare, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano enters an old, abandoned farmhouse, where he stumbles... (more)
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  God Is Not Great

  How Religion Poisons Everything

  by Christopher Hitchens

  In the tradition of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris's recent bestseller, The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity,... (more)
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  The House of Bernarda Alba

  A Drama About Women in Villages of Spain

  by Federico García Lorca

  'Better never to lay eyes on a man, never to have seen one. Ever since I was a child, I've been frightened: the look of men, yoking up the oxen, picking up sacks of wheat, calling to each other, their thick voices, their thick boots. Every time I passed, fear of their hands, of their touch. God made me weak and ugly. It's his way of keeping them away.' So pronounces one of five unmarried daughters before her elder... (more)
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  The Old Way

  A Story of the First People

  by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

  One of our most influential anthropologists reevaluates her long and illustrious career by returning to her roots—and the roots of life as we know it When Elizabeth Marshall Thomas first arrived in Africa to live among the Kalahari San, or bushmen, it was 1950, she was nineteen years old, and these last surviving hunter-gatherers were living as humans had lived for 15,000 centuries. Thomas wound up... (more)
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  Vathek

  by William Beckford

  Written in 1782 by the near-legendary hedonist William Beckford, Vathek was the first Oriental-Gothic horror novel in English literature. It tells the story of Vathek, the debauched and pleasure-seeking ninth Caliph of the Abassides, who decides to build a great tower to "penetrate the secrets of heaven." The appearance of an Indian magician arouses Vathek’s thirst for knowledge and he is willing to go to any... (more)
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  Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses (Penguin Classics)

  by Anonymous

  This classic of English devotional literature was written for three anchoresses by a chaplain in about 1230 and is divided into eight sections, each dealing in an accessible way with one division of the religious rule. As well as being of historical importance, it is also a work of great charm and expressiveness, and is regarded as one of the greatest prose work of the Middle Ages.
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  In Search of Respect

  Selling Crack in El Barrio

  by Philippe I. Bourgois

  Philippe Bourgois's ethnographic study of social marginalization in inner-city America, won critical acclaim when it was first published in 1995. For the first time, an anthropologist had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods--East Harlem. This new edition adds a prologue describing the major dynamics that have altered life on... (more)
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  Havana Blue

  by Leonardo Padura

  Praise for the Havana Quartet: "Overlaid with a rich smoky patina, an atmosphere that reeks of slums and riches, cigar smoke and exotic perfumes. Havana Black is a strong tasting book, a rich feast of wit and feeling."- The Independent "Drenched with that beguiling otherness so appealing to fans of mysteries of other cultures, it will also appeal to those who appreciate the... (more)
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  Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry and Astrophil and Stella: Texts and Contexts

  by Philip Sidney

  This edition presents together Sir Philip Sidney's response to the many attacks on poetry current in early modern England, An Apology for Poetry, and his path-breaking sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella. The introduction provides biographical and historical contexts for reading Sidney's works, and to help students explore how the Apology arises from and intervenes in the "Quarrel over Poetry," this volume... (more)
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  Why I Am Not a Muslim

  by Ibn Warraq

  Those who practice the Muslim faith have resisted examinations of their religion. They are extremely guarded about their religion, and what they consider blasphemous acts by sceptical Muslims and non-Muslims alike has only served to pique the world's curiosity. This critical examination reveals an unflattering picture of the faith and its practitioners. Nevertheless, it is the truth, something that has either been... (more)
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  The Missionary: An Indian Tale (Broadview Literary Texts)

  by Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan

  Set in seventeenth-century India, The Missionary focuses on the relationship between Hilarion, a Portuguese missionary to India, and Luxima, an Indian prophetess. Both are aristocratic, devoted to their religions, bound by vows of chastity, and begin the novel biased against other cultures. This Broadview Literary Texts edition also includes extensive primary source appendices that situate the novel in relation to... (more)
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  The Country Wife

  by William Wycherley

  'Cuckolds like lovers should themselves deceive' So concludes one of Wycherley's most revived and much discussed plays. It is a satirical comedy sharply focussed on the follies, vices and hypocrisies of Restoration London through its central characters: the desperate Pinchwife; his naive wife; the sex-obsessed Horner and Lady Fidget's 'virtuous gang' of town ladies. Wycherley's strong wit informs almost every... (more)
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  Sultry Moon (Discoveries)

  by Mempo Giardinelli

  a novel, Argentinian bestseller, tr P Duncan
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  Persepolis

  The Complete Persepolis

  by Marjane Satrapi

  Here, in one volume: Marjane Satrapi's best-selling, internationally acclaimed memoir-in-comic-strips. Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trails of... (more)
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  Let It Be A Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems

  by Sheryl St. Germain

  In this retrospective collection, Sheryl St. Germain sings of her New Orleans upbringing, the Cajun/Creole culture, and the struggles of being a woman in a decaying culture.