Cordelia Squad

"When true love hits," he used to tell her---like he knew what he was talking about---"you can almost hear it go click." That was a laugh. She'd cried for months, really. Cried when people came to look at the house. Cried at the closing. Cried at the lawyer's when she'd filed for divorce. Cried, especially, when the children tried to be kind. Well, it was over. She wasn't crying anymore. Divorce has left Claire Breslinsky with two teenagers and very little cash. So maybe it's rash of her to buy a huge and very dilapidated mansion in Queens. The plan, such as it is, is to somehow magically transform the place into a charming and profitable bed-and-breakfast. A fire at the Cordelia Inn, Claire's incipient hostel, brings fear of arson---and a firefighter with an eye for Claire. Then the wealthy contractor threatening Claire's business offers to rent Claire's best room. But why? From Mary Anne Kelly's first book, Park Lane South, Queens, the events in the life of the Breslinsky family have been followed by readers who feel they are sitting in Mary Breslinsky's kitchen. The author's gift for breathing genuine life into her characters is on brilliant display in The Cordelia Squad---a stirring portrait of Irish-Polish fortitude.

"Being popular is not just my right, but my responsibility, and I want you to know that I take it very seriously." -- Cordelia Chase Fashionista and leader of the pack, Cordelia Chase is known throughout Sunnydale High for her irrepressible blend of tactless maxims as much as she is renowned for her beauty. Most students -- even the members of her anti-fan club -- either want her or want to be her. Popularity proves a tough cross to bear, though: First, Cordy is stalked by an invisible being fueled by envy, and later she is deemed an ideal mate for a onetime Sunnydale football star -- problem is, he's currently deceased. But her most dangerous challenge is the race for Homecoming Queen. Forget the dance -- Queen C will be lucky to escape with her life!

What can you learn about plotting, writing, or revising your own stories by watching Buffy? More than you ever imagined. Bestselling author L. M. Lilly takes apart every episode in the first season of the cult TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She examines major plot points and turns, character arcs, metaphor, and more to show how to: - Strengthen plot structure; - Heighten conflict; - Create characters the audience loves; - Juggle multiple storylines; and - Keep readers coming back for more. If you love Buffy, and you love creating stories – or just taking them apart to see how they work – this book is for you. Start reading Buffy and the Art of Story Season One today.

When Enemies Become More than Friends -- THEY WIN In her first trial by fire, Cordelia Naismith captained a throwaway ship of the Betan Expeditionary Force on a mission to destroy an enemy armada. Discovering deception within deception, treachery within treachery, she was forced into a separate peace with her chief opponent, Lord Aral Vorkosigan -- he who was called "The Butcher of Komarr" -- and would consequently become an outcast on her own planet and the Lady Vorkosigan on his. Sick of combat and betrayal, she was ready to settle down to a quiet life, interrupted only by the occasional ceremonial appearances required of the Lady Vorkosigan. But when the Emperor died, Aral became guardian of the infant heir to the imperial throne of Barrayar -- and the target of high-tech assassins in a dynastic civil war that was reminiscent of Earth's Middle Ages, but fought with up-to-the minute biowar technology. Neither Aral nor Cordelia guessed the part that their cell-damaged unborn would play in Barrayari's bloody legacy.

Surrounded by dead crewmates, marooned above an unknown planet, the bridge crew of the Atlas awakens from a crash with extraordinary mental abilities. When their most powerful member jettisons their passengers to the planet below, they have an unprecedented opportunity: they can become gods. Two hundred years later, Lieutenant Cordelia Ross is a paladin serving the Storm Lord, her city’s patron deity. Her faith is absolute until her people are attacked by a native species, harmless creatures turned devious by an unknown hand. Cordelia tries to solve the mystery of their development before they kill anyone else, but the secrets surrounding them are too deep. As orders from the Storm Lord begin to value obedience over integrity, Cordelia wonders whose side her god is really on.

When Sergei Tretyakov’s ground-breaking play, I Want a Baby, was banned by Stalin’s censor in 1927, it was a signal that the radical and innovative theatre of the early Soviet years was to be brought to an end. A glittering, unblinking exploration of the realities of post-revolutionary Soviet life, I Want a Baby marks a high point in modernist experimental drama. Tretyakov’s plays are notable for their formal originality and their revolutionary content. The World Upside Down, which was staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold in 1923, concerns a failed agrarian revolution. A Wise Man, originally directed by the great film director and Tretyakov’s friend, Sergei Eisenstein, is a clown show set in the Paris of the émigré White Russians. Are You Listening, Moscow?! and Gas Masks are ‘agit-melodramas’, fierce, fast-moving and edgy. And Roar, China!dramatises an actual incident in the West’s oppression of China, when a British gunboat captain threatened to blow the city of Wanxien to bits. Roar, China! was translated into many languages and produced in cities across the world. The nerve this play touched may be gauged from the fact that it was staged in Yiddish translation in the Czestochowa concentration camp by Jewish prisoners during World War II. These plays are not only stirring in their themes, they are also hugely significant in their construction. Tretyakov’s early plays led directly to Eisenstein’s highly influential theory of ‘the montage of attractions’, while later his ideas were crucial in the formation of Bertolt Brecht’s theory of epic theatre. The reason why is evident in his plays, now collected and published for the first time.