Search results for ""Author Christopher Bigsby""

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Many of the American playwrights who dominated the 20th century are no longer with us: Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Neil Simon, August Wilson and Wendy Wasserstein. A new generation, whose careers began in this century, has emerged, and done so when the theatre itself, along with the society with which it engages, was changing. Capturing the cultural shifts of 21st-century America, Staging America explores the lives and works of 8 award-winning playwrights – including Ayad Akhtar, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Young Jean Lee and Quiara Alllegría Hudes – whose backgrounds reflect the social, religious, sexual and national diversity of American society. Each chapter is devoted to a single playwright and provides an overview of their career, a description and critical evaluation of their work, as well as a sense of their reception. Drawing on primary sources, including the playwrights’ own commentaries and notes, and contemporary reviews, Christopher Bigsby enters into a dialogue with plays which are as various as the individuals who generated them. An essential read for theatre scholars and students, Staging America is a sharp and landmark study of the contemporary American playwright.

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Can some truths ever be captured, either in images or words?

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The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dreamA Penguin Classic Since it was first performed in 1949, Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the tragic shortcomings of an American dreamer has been recognized as a milestone of the theater. Willy Loman, the protagonist of Death of a Salesman, has spent his life following the American way, living out his belief in salesmanship as a way to reinvent himself. But somehow the riches and respect he covets have eluded him. At age 63, he searches for the moment his life took a wrong turn, the moment of betrayal that undermined his relationship with his wife and destroyed his relationship with Biff, the son in whom he invested his faith. Willy lives in a fragile world of elaborate excuses and daydreams, conflating past and present in a desperate attempt to make sense of himself and of a world that once promised so much. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Christopher W. E. Bigsby.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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Writers in Conversation compiles Christopher Bigsby’s interviews with the world’s greatest writers from over a decade of the Arthur Miller Centre’s International Literary Festival at the University of East Anglia. These often candid, in-depth, witty and illuminating exchanges shine a light on the craft and profession of the working writer today; a must buy for any scholar or fan of any of these household names.Published in association with the Arthur Miller Institute for American Studies.Writers in Conversation with Christopher Bigsby Volume Seven, edited by Christopher Bigsby, features interviews with Paddy Ashdown, Antony Beevor, Louis de Bernièrs, Kenneth Clarke, J P Donleavy, Richard Flanagan, David Grossman, Richard Holmes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Penelope Lively, David Lodge, Ruth Rendell, Kamila Shamsie, Jon Snow, Rebecca Stott, D J Taylor, Rose Tremain, and Stephen Westaby.

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In Joe and Kate Keller's family garden, an apple tree - a memorial to their son Larry, lost in the Second World War - has been torn down by a storm. But his loss is not the only part of the family's past they can't put behind them. Not everybody's forgotten the court case that put Joe's partner in jail, or the cracked engine heads his factory produced which caused it and dropped twenty-one pilots out of the sky ...

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Writers in Conversation compiles Christopher Bigsby's interviews with the world's greatest writers from a decade of the Arthur Miller Centre's International Literary Festival at the University of East Anglia. These often candid, in-depth, witty and illuminating exchanges shine a light on the craft and profession of the working writer today.Featuring interviews with Naomi Alderman, David Almond, Tash Aw, Vince Cable, Tracy Chevalier, Bernard Cornwell, Andrew Cowan, Richard Dawkins, Margaret Drabble, Stephen Fry, David Hare, Emma Healey, Charlie Higson, Eimear McBride, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Lawrence Norfolk, Paul Nurse, Jane Smiley, Rose Tremain, David Vann and Vendela Vida.

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