Here are 100 books that The Mystic in the Theatre fans have personally recommended if you like
The Mystic in the Theatre.
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I grew up with a lot of misconceptions. It wasn’t until I got out in the world and experienced life for myself that I began to see that I didn’t necessarily agree with what I’d been taught (or conditioned to believe). I learned that if I wanted to know the truth, I’d have to learn it for myself… These 5 books offered me a different perspective, and made me see things in a new light. They helped me succeed as a person, an artist, and as a human being… I hope they will help you and your loved ones, too.
This book breaks down illusions about wealth and gives it to ‘em straight.
Just because you think a person has money, it doesn’t mean that they have money. In fact, those who flaunt their wealth could actually be headed for disaster, as they spend their dollars on an endless effort to impress, one-up, and reward themselves. And because they are spending money they are not saving money. So while their bank account plateaus (or worse, depletes), the account of the unassuming, unflashy neighbor next-door flourishes, as he invests, saves, and plans—placing the max amount of $ into his 401K—until he eventually becomes, the “millionaire next door”… The save vs. spend principle seems obvious here, but the psychology of spending is not. It is curious and complicated, fascinating and (sometimes) hard to fathom… So it's good there is a book out there that examines wealth and de-bunks perception, so that people…
The bestselling The Millionaire Next Door identifies seven common traits that show up again and again among those who have accumulated wealth. Most of the truly wealthy in this country don't live in Beverly Hills or on Park Avenue-they live next door. This new edition, the first since 1998, includes a new foreword for the twenty-first century by Dr. Thomas J. Stanley.
I write about inequality in international development, American communities, environmental movements, and workplaces. I’ve been doing this reporting for over a decade. I’ve also worked in global health, an experience that has given me a first-hand glimpse into the depths and texture of inequality we have manufactured in our current world, including within the organizations and movements that purportedly challenge such global inequality. As a reader, I’m equally passionate about immersive nonfiction and fiction. I’ll dive into anything that’s driven by a good story.
I first read this book over a decade ago, and it has remained one of my favorites ever since. It is moving and exquisitely written, offering a close view of a community living on the edge of one of India’s biggest cities and exploring what it means to live on the cusp of wealth but mired in poverty.
Mostly, it is deeply human and a real page-turner. I expect this will remain my Holy Grail of writing and storytelling for a long time.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE
“Inspiring . . . extraordinary . . . [Katherine Boo] shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as important, she makes us care.”—People
“A tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece.”—Judges, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • USA Today •…
With over 20 years of experience as a professional artist and a successful track record of earning six figures a year from my art, I know firsthand what it takes to build a thriving artistic career. As the host of the Inspiration Place podcast, and founder of the Artist Incubator program, I’ve dedicated my life’s work to helping artists everywhere achieve their full potential and reach their goals. When you overcome the common challenges and mindset blocks that hold so many artists back and learn the practical tools and strategies you need for selling your art, you too find the same success.
Real Artists Don't Starve challenges the popular belief that artists must sacrifice financial stability in order to be true to their craft. The author argues that creativity and commerce can coexist, and uses examples from history and contemporary culture to prove his point. What I liked most about this book was learning about the great artists of the past, like Michelangelo, who was not only talented but also a great businessman who made a lot of money from his art. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to make a living from their artistic passion and believes that being a true artist and wanting to make money aren’t mutually exclusive. Goins offers practical tips and inspiration for artists looking to build a successful and sustainable career and provides a fresh perspective on the age-old debate about the relationship between art and commerce.
Jeff Goins dismantles the myth that being creative is a hindrance to success by revealing how an artistic temperament is a competitive advantage in the marketplace.?
The myth of the starving artist has dominated our culture, seeping into the minds of creative people and stifling their pursuits. The truth is that the world's most successful artists did not starve. In fact, they capitalized on the power of their creative strength.
In Real Artists Don't Starve, bestselling author and creativity expert Jeff Goins debunks the myth of the starving artist by unveiling the ideas that created it and replacing them with…
I grew up with a lot of misconceptions. It wasn’t until I got out in the world and experienced life for myself that I began to see that I didn’t necessarily agree with what I’d been taught (or conditioned to believe). I learned that if I wanted to know the truth, I’d have to learn it for myself… These 5 books offered me a different perspective, and made me see things in a new light. They helped me succeed as a person, an artist, and as a human being… I hope they will help you and your loved ones, too.
This warm, charming, slightly-odd novel celebrates the Christmas spirit, and makes one realize what’s important in life. Slow, meditative, understated, and engaging, it’s the perfect book to read during the holiday season. It is best read over the course of some nights, so that the chapters can be pondered and savored.
Nearly three years have passed since I wrote "Hanson Drake". Three years, and more than a million letters and emails sent from eight million readers around the world asking questions about Hanson Drake’s life.
What can I possibly tell them?
Tell you?
BLURB Hanson Drake has five hundred million in the bank and a house on the beach overlooking the ocean. As the writer of the world’s favourite song, he hasn’t had to do a day’s work in his life.
Stung into action by a derisive article in a national newspaper, Hanson Drake decides to change his…
Make-believe is my vocation, calling to me since earliest childhood. Not too surprising, for I was raised in a Southern Gothic household, simmering with mendacity and thwarted desires. Back then, I plotted stories for my dolls and scribbled plays of love and murder for backyard productions with the neighbor girls. Living and schooling were necessary preparation for the next story or play. To this day, while truly embracing my lived-life with passion and wonder, I still make sense of it, in part, through make-believe—an act that is both solitary and collaborative—writing dialogue for actors to interpret and novels for readers to perform in their own active imaginations.
Biography is one of my favorite ways to explore history, and this double-biography is a doozy. The feud between Sarah Bernhardt and rival actress Eleonora Duse comes to dramatic life on the page as these remarkable women thrill theater audiences across the globe with their on-stage performances and off-stage scandals. Bernhardt created her public persona as the first superstar, and her name and fame certainly endure. But Duse intrigues me even more in contrast with the Divine Sarah. Unlike Bernhardt playing herself while playing a role, Duse disappeared into her roles with her natural, believable style of acting. Her technique revolutionized the theater from the late 19th century onward. And Duse’s style is the one that I find plays best in my head each time I read a novel.
The riveting story of the rivalry between the two most renowned actresses of the nineteenth century: legendary Sarah Bernhardt, whose eccentricity on and off the stage made her the original diva, and mystical Eleonora Duse, who broke all the rules to popularize the natural style of acting we celebrate today.
Audiences across Europe and the Americas clamored to see the divine Sarah Bernhardt swoon-and she gave them their money's worth. The world's first superstar, she traveled with a chimpanzee named Darwin and a pet alligator that drank champagne, shamelessly supplementing her income by endorsing everything from aperitifs to beef bouillon,…
I have been fascinated by women who are artists and activists, such as Ivy Bottini, Käthe Kollwitz and Peggy Guggenheim. (All subjects of plays I wrote). They are convicted, unique, champions of justice, diversity and inclusion.
An insightful examination of art collector Peggy Guggenheim, a fascinating character, Ms. Guggenheim was friends with a vast assortment of American and European writers and artists. The reader gets to see the contradictory sides of this brilliant and unconventional woman. As a result of reading this book, I wrote a play about her entitled The Collection.
"Mrs. Guggenheim, how many husbands have you had?" she was once asked. "D'you mean my own, or other people's?"
Peggy Guggenheim's tempestuous life (1898-1979) spanned the most exciting and volatile years of the twentieth century, and she lived it to the full. How she became one of the century's foremost collectors of modern art-and one of its most formidable lovers-is the subject of this lively and authoritative biography.
Her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, went down with the Titanic en route home from installing the elevator machinery in the Eiffel Tower, and it was in Paris in the 1930s that the young…
I love exploring new places, buildings, and artworks. Luckily, my job, as a professor of ancient Roman art history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, allows me to do so! I am fascinated by the material culture of the Roman Empire and the ways in which buildings and objects—whether grand monuments like the Pantheon in Rome or humbler items like a terracotta figurine of a gladiator—shape how we experience the world and relate to other people. Whether I am living in Paris or Rome, excavating in Greece or Italy, or traveling elsewhere in the former lands of the Roman Empire, these topics are never far from my mind.
This lavishly illustrated book offers a visually stunning and information-packed tour of ancient Rome’s most popular forms of entertainment: chariot racing, gladiatorial combats, and theater performances. I was astonished by the sheer range and creativity of Roman spectacles and their material commemorations, from action figures of gladiators with removable helmets, piggy banks with pictures of lucky winning charioteers, and mosaic puzzles that challenged viewers to guess the names of famous racehorses based on visual clues. As an art historian, I particularly love the beautiful color illustrations; my own copy of this book is dog-eared because I am constantly returning to look at the fascinating objects she discusses. For me, this book about spectacles is spectacular in its own right.
Theater, spectacle, and performance played significant roles in the political and social structure of the Roman Empire, which was diverse in population and language. A wide and varied range of entertainment was available to a Roman audience: the traditional festivals with their athletic contests and dramatic performances, pantomime and mime, the chariot races of the circus, and the gladiatorial shows and wild beast hunts of the arena. In Theater and Spectacle in the Art of the Roman Empire, which is richly illustrated in color throughout, Katherine M. D. Dunbabin emphasizes the visual evidence for these events.Images of spectacle appear in…
I was an ambitious teen, and as I entered adulthood, my relationship with ambition has continually evolved. Those of us with marginalized genders sometimes have our ambition treated with suspicion or scorn—by peers, family, or would-be mentors. I wanted to share books that don’t necessarily come to the same conclusion about ambition’s role in our lives, but that all grapple with what it means to be ambitious in a culture where that is often seen as threatening or unladylike—or where any sign of ambition gets one automatically labeled as “unlikeable.” I love these books’ narrators, and I hope you will find something to love in them too.
This book is an absolutely to-die-for rivals-to-lovers tale, sparked when Natalie is forced to team up with her long-time enemy on a musical in order to secure funding for the arts at their high school. Natalie’s evolving relationships with her family and friends are complex and brilliant, and I felt allthe feelings about the interplay between art and ambition while reading.
A pair of fierce foes are forced to work together to save the arts at their school in this swoony YA enemies-to-lovers romance that fans of Jenny Han and Morgan Matson are sure to adore.
Lifelong rivals Natalie and Reid have never been on the same team. So when their school's art budget faces cutbacks, of course Natalie finds herself up against her nemesis once more. She's fighting to direct the school's first ever student-written play, but for her small production to get funding, the school's award-winning band will have to lose it. Reid's band. And he's got no intention…
I’m a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and I currently work as a High School Guidance Counselor for the past 25 years. I love kids and I love helping them to understand and love themselves and helping them to love and accept others as well. These books, even though the target audience is young (0-11 years old), older kids and adults can learn something from them as well. Sometimes a simple message is more powerful than a bunch of words.
This book is about a girl in a wheelchair who is cast in the middle school play. I love this book because it helps us understand the challenges of being in a wheelchair as well as all the challenges that go along with being a middle schooler. It addresses all those identity issues that occur during that age with the added challenge of being in a wheelchair.
A heartfelt middle-grade novel about a theater-loving girl who uses a
wheelchair for mobility and her quest to defy expectations-and
gravity-from Tony award-winning actress Ali Stroker and Stacy Davidowitz
Thirteen-year-old Nat Beacon loves a lot of things: her dog Warbucks,
her best friend Chloe, and competing on her wheelchair racing team, the
Zoomers, to name a few. But there's one thing she's absolutely OBSESSED
with: MUSICALS! From Hamilton to Les Mis, there's not a
cast album she hasn't memorized and belted along to. She's never
actually been in a musical though, or even seen an actor who uses a
wheelchair…
As a teenager, I didn’t have the lack of inhibition or abundant self-confidence to excel in high school drama. Like Sadie in Bit Players, I finally wowed the directors at my senior year audition, only to learn the lead was promised in advance to someone else. I recovered and stayed involved in theater: cast, crew, and front-of-house jobs for a summer theater program; the box office for Cornell’s MFA program; and supporting my kids’ drama activities. Performing in a show is different from any other experience. If you’ve been in a show, you know this. If you haven’t, read on to enter the magical world of theatre.
If you’ve never done theater, this book will have you running for the nearest audition. The non-fiction book contains heartwarming reflections from the cast, crew, and creative team for Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, including director Joel Grey. Readers get an inside look at show life, from cast bonding to pre-opening stress to performance mishaps. The vignettes convey what each cast and crew member contributes to making the magic happen. While heavy on the feel-good memories, it rings true and mesmerizes.
Theatre Quotient: High. It’s all theater, all the time!
A look inside Off-Broadway's Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, the ground-breaking, award-winning musical. Samantha Hahn, the youngest member of the cast, tells the story of how "Yiddish Fiddler" came to be. Samantha has interviewed the cast, crew, and creative team - each with a unique take on the show and the impact it has had on their lives - for a behind-the-scenes look at what makes "Yiddish Fiddler" so special. On the Roof takes the reader on a never before seen journey - from rehearsals that end in tears and screaming in elevators, to the beautiful bonds between company…
