My passion for Greek literature began as a child when I was captivated by Greek myths and epic tales. As a student, I became fascinated with tragic revenge plots involving women, especially mothers who kill their children, and since then, I have published extensively on gender and violence in ancient Greek literature and life. I speak modern Greek and love thinking about these topics in traditional Greek folk poetry and literature as well, especially works like Alexandros Papadiamantis’ The Murderess and Pantelis Prevelakis’ The Sun of Death.
Sophocles’ play depicts Electra beautifully, from her bitter mourning for her dead father to her grim determination when she contemplates taking vengeance herself as she believes her brother Orestes is dead. The debate between Electra and her sister Chrysothemis over what they, as women, should do is a high point for me.
This edition features the Victorian translation of Jebb that matches the majesty of Sophocles’ play well and is enjoyable to read. Easterling’s introduction to the scholar’s career and approach is also fascinating.
This is one of the seven plays of Sophocles in the full editions by R.C. Jebb, all of which will be reissued under the BCP imprint. They have occasionally been reprinted but never before in affordable paperback versions. In this set, each volume contains a foreword by P.E. Easterling, concerned with Jebb and his contribution to Sophoclean scholarship; there follows an introduction by a noted Sophoclean scholar dealing with Jebb's treatment of the individual play and its value for - and contrast with - subsequent interpretations, for which a select bibliography is included.
I studied French language and literature from the time I was 13 until I graduated from college. Alongside that work, I also became more interested in African American literary and artistic histories, so I studied that as well. I realized there was a lot of overlap as many Black American artists would flee to Europe to “escape” American racism. Learning more about these historical writers throughout my graduate school journey made me very interested in researching further and writing my own take on the subject for young people.
I love this book because Beneatha Younger’s insatiable curiosity about the world beyond the South Side of Chicago propels her to make important decisions about her life. It drives her right into the arms of a man (Asagai) willing to be alongside her as she explores. Beneatha’s audaciousness inspires me.
"Come to A Raisin in the Sun as you would to any classic. It speaks to us today as it did almost half a century ago." Bonnie Greer
In south side Chicago, Walter Lee, a Black chauffeur, dreams of a better life, and hopes to use his father's life insurance money to open a liquor store. His mother, who rejects the liquor business, uses some of the money to secure a proper house for the family. Mr Lindner, a representative of the all-white neighbourhood, tries to buy them out. Walter sinks the rest of the money into his business scheme,…
Much has been written about the Holocaust but enough
can never be said. Tom Stoppard was born
in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to a non-observant Jewish family forced to flee the
Nazi terror.
In his play Leopoldstadt
Stoppard follows the history of a family living in that Jewish suburb of
Vienna, from the turn of the 20th century to today. The story of the prejudice and restrictions
they experienced, as well as the hopes they had of transcending them through
business success and assimilation, are heartbreaking. A friend of mine came from such a family and
from his recollections I know that Stoppard has described the situation
accurately.
This play (as the family) is full of characters you care about
deeply, and knowing about the coming Holocaust, we want to cry out a warning to
them. We can’t. But this is a
warning about the future.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna. But Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptised Jew married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. Gathered in the Merz apartment in a fashionable part of the city, Hermann's extended family are at the heart of Tom Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama. By the time we have taken leave of them, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany and - for Austrian Jews - the Holocaust in which 65,000 of them were murdered. It is…
I’m a poet, lover of great literature, and an English professor who has served as faculty advisor to my university’s student-run literary journal. I caught the bug as a teenager when I first started reading and memorizing poems that moved and intrigued me. Since then, reading and writing poetry—and having the pleasure of teaching it to students—has been my best way of checking in with myself to see what’s most important to me that I may have lost sight of in the daily bustle. It’s also my best way of going beyond myself—allowing my imagination to carry me to unexpected places.
I also love Eliot’s poetry (and his comments on the creative process) because of how different they are from Wordsworth’s—and equally profound. In essays including Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot argues that keeping your poetry “personal” artificially limits your material. And I think he’s right: some of my own best poems come from imagining my way into someone else’s mind.
Eliot’s own poetry, including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, illustrates the value of this approach in how it crafts its titular character. Eliot can also write deeply intellectual poems like The Waste Land that transcend purely “personal” concerns by exploring history and that repay many re-readings. In addition to their thematic richness, Wordsworth’s and Eliot’s poems are also beautifully musical.
An indispensable collection of the Nobel Prize winner's most renowned works
“In ten years’ time,” wrote Edmund Wilson in Axel’s Castle, “Eliot has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in English.” In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize “for his work as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry.”
This book is made up of six individual titles: Four Quartets, Collected Poems: 1909–1935, Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and The Cocktail Party. It offers not only enjoyment of one of the great talents…
I write what I know. My life has given me so much to write about that people seem to connect with. I started this journey as a writer to share my personal story but instead, what I authored was a novel about my life, but as a fictional story. A lot of situations that my characters find themselves in are things that I have endured or seen personally in my life and in my travels. My passion is broken people I guess, because I have been surrounded by so many of them, in my life.
This book is also about the relationships between family and friends. After not seeing her family for many years, the lead character inherits from the family and must return home. That alone can cause anyone anxiety, returning to your hometown after an exceptionally long absence. Well as she gets reaccustomed to home and deals with all her emotions of loss and inheritance, she ends up falling for two men. Now, amiss everything else going on, she must dig deep and come to grips. This is a decision that is tearing her apart. But she must decide what she really wants. She has to decide between the two men and fast.
Shelond never knew what love was or how to go about achieving it. Work was always her main focus, but when she inherits a house and land out in the boonies she has to take some time off. She'd come here very summer when she was a young child, but who would have thought that she'd be considering living here. But being torn between two men will do that to you. Who will she choose? The warm and down to earth town lawyer Will or would she choose the rough rugged loner Sean? Just when she thought that she'd made…
I’ve been a working blues musician for almost half a century, a blues harmonica teacher for much of that time. Twenty-five years ago I first began offering university-level courses on the blues literary tradition. My experience as a Harlem busker back in the 1980s and a touring performer in the 1990s as part of the duo Satan & Adam critically shaped my approach, anchoring me in the wisdom, humor, and deep-groove aesthetics of partner, Mississippi native Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee. The blues is or the blues are? It’s complicated! I try to honor that multiplicity and the people who put it there.
I remember reading Wilson’s play for the first time as a grad student, not long after I’d been a street musician in Harlem working with a brilliant, irascible old bluesman from Mississippi, and thinking “I knowthese guys.”
Wilson, the greatest American blues playwright (and one of the greatest American dramatists period), has an uncanny ear for the jibing, jiving, wisdom-declaiming back-and-forth that fills the conversational space between four southern-born musicians who find themselves in a Chicago recording studio one day in 1927, getting ready to back up their boss, Ma Rainey.
Toledo, elder and griot, the keeper of ancestral wisdom, butts heads with Levee, the hotheaded young innovator who bears, and brandishes, deep wounds inflicted by white southern violence. The play’s denouement is hurtful, shattering, unforgettable.
NOW A NETFLIX FILM STARRING VIOLA DAVIS AND CHADWICK BOSEMAN
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson comes the extraordinary Ma Rainey's Black Bottom—winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play.
The time is 1927. The place is a run-down recording studio in Chicago. Ma Rainey, the legendary blues singer, is due to arrive with her entourage to cut new sides of old favorites. Waiting for her are her Black musician sidemen, the white owner of the record company, and her white manager. What goes down in the session to come is…
I have alwaysbeen obsessed with the weather. From the third grade, I knew that I would be college-bound to get my degree in meteorology (I have two). I can still distinctly recall, as a very young boy in the early 1960s, sneaking my trusty transistor radio under the pillow, eagerly anticipating the latest update every time a snowstorm was on the horizon. And my passion for big storms—especially those of the snow variety—has only grown greater over time. Whenever a snowstorm is occurring, I’m up every hour or so all night long “just to check the radar”—my patient, long-suffering Sweetheart (wife) will attest to that!
Meteorologists generally regard this 2004 two-volume set as the definitive tome in describing the major snowstorms which have impacted the northeastern US since colonial times. These two highly credentialed and well-known former National Weather Service experts provide a detailed analysis of each storm, along with their painstaking reconstruction of surface and upper-air pressure patterns for many of them. The result is an enormous wealth of information offered up in this 821-page magnum opus (with some 500 references) which will satisfy both the interested layperson and the seasoned professional meteorologist.
I’ve been an entrepreneur for over 40 years and now pass on that knowledge to mentees and university students. The key to success in business is being able to attract and then learn from mentors, who, in my opinion, always should provide their knowledge, wisdom, and connections free of charge. As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to go down ‘The Dark Side’, especially if the pursuit of money and power becomes overwhelming. Many famous billionaires are not especially nice people. But there are many nice businesspeople out there and I aspire to be one of those, hence my pursuit of a daily advancement in esoteric, hermetic, and other knowledge.
Perhaps you wonder why some people sometimes behave so badly, including becoming an internet troll, protesting with violence, and shouting at people at work or in restaurants. This book explains the games that disturbed people play (‘Persecutor’, ‘Victim’ and ‘Rescuer’) and how to avoid getting sucked into their dramas.
The Karpman Drama Triangle is a psychological model used around the world in coaching, management, training and therapy. This book explains it in a concise, jargon-free way, for professionals in these fields, for students, and for inquisitive non-specialists.
Why do people act out Drama? How do they do it? What can we do about it, for ourselves and other people? This book answers these questions.
It begins by showing the Drama Triangle in action. What does Drama look like? It then goes into detail about the three Drama Triangle roles: Persecutor, Victim and Rescuer. It explains how everyone finds themselves…
I'm a full-time author and freelance editor from a small Canadian city, and I’ve always been fascinated by a good mystery—flipping through the pages, trying to guess who did or didn’t do it. Dark and gritty are my favorites, and the titles on this list do a good job of staying in that realm while still being very much YA. I hope you love them as much as I did!
Kacey, the new girl in Broken Falls who has two best friends, Bailey and Jade. There’s a sinister vibe in this book, right off the top; something feels off with this friend group, and when Bailey goes missing, we—as readers—are left flipping the pages, trying to find out what could have happened.
This is one of those books where you really feel like you can’t trust anyone—even the main character. I loved how this story kept me guessing until the very end. Its gritty, filled with family and friendship drama, and the wintery setting make it all the more haunting of a read.
For fans of Pretty Little Liars, comes a psychological thriller, from the author of The Cheerleaders, about about how when you're the new girl in town, you can't trust anyone, especially other teenage girls.
Kacey is the new girl in Broken Falls. When she moved in with her father, she stepped into a brand-new life. A life with a stepbrother, a stepmother, and strangest of all, an adoring younger half sister.
Kacey's new life is eerily charming compared with the wild highs and lows of the old one she lived with her volatile mother. And everyone is so nice in…
I grew up in Uganda and Kenya, and when I moved to the United States, I felt separated from myself. Learning how to be American was exhausting and so I disappeared into books. I’m now more settled, but I still travel through fiction. These days, I am reading fiction by African women. You should be, too! There is so much stunning literature out there. These five books are just the beginning, but they are novels I can’t stop thinking about.
The Son of the House is modern, original, page-turning, powerful, and beautifully written. I was curious about the seeming contradiction between Onyemelukwe-Onuobia’s title, and the novel’s subject, two women who have been kidnapped in Enugu, Nigeria. Of course, I soon learn there is no contradiction. The lives of both Nwabulu and Julie are impacted by the value once placed upon the son of the house. The novel makes clear that these traditions are changing fast, even as the characters grapple with the reverberations. The novel introduces us to fascinating women who I have thought about long after I finished reading it.
Pulsing with vitality and intense human drama, Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia’s debut is set against four decades of vibrant Nigeria and celebrates the resilience of women as they navigate and transform what remains a man’s world.
