Philippa S Secret Part Two Stage Performance

This New York Times bestseller from “one of the great storytellers of our time” (San Francisco Book Review) turns from the glamour of the royal courts to tell the story of an ordinary woman, Alinor, living in a dangerous time for a woman to be different. A country at war A king beheaded A woman with a dangerous secret On Midsummer’s Eve, Alinor waits in the church graveyard, hoping to encounter the ghost of her missing husband and thus confirm his death. Until she can, she is neither maiden nor wife nor widow, living in a perilous limbo. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run. She shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marshy landscape of the Tidelands, not knowing she is leading a spy and an enemy into her life. England is in the grip of a bloody civil war that reaches into the most remote parts of the kingdom. Alinor’s suspicious neighbors are watching each other for any sign that someone might be disloyal to the new parliament, and Alinor’s ambition and determination mark her as a woman who doesn’t follow the rules. They have always whispered about the sinister power of Alinor’s beauty, but the secrets they don’t know about her and James are far more damning. This is the time of witch-mania, and if the villagers discover the truth, they could take matters into their own hands. “This is Gregory par excellence” (Kirkus Reviews). “Fans of Gregory’s works and of historicals in general will delight in this page-turning tale” (Library Journal, starred review) that is “superb… A searing portrait of a woman that resonates across the ages” (People).

Since the first installment of Dunnett’s series was published in 1961, Francis Crawford of Lymond, the swashbuckling protagonist of the stories, has been captivating his fellow characters and readers alike. Instead of approaching the books primarily as historical fiction, Richardson, an enthusiastic admirer of the series, unravels the complexities of the main character by exploring his psychology, positioning the books within the genre of espionage, and examining Dunnett’s strategy of using games in her writing. Richardson’s insight and passion for his subject will inspire fans to revisit Dunnett’s series.

James Lasdun's two collections of short stories, Delirium Eclipse and Three Evenings, have won him outstanding praise as one of the most distinctive British writers of his generation, both as a stylist and as a storyteller. His work has been described by the New York Times Book Review as an "elegant pathology report on the modern soul," and the Village Voice calls his prose "art that burrows into troubling new territory even as it glides by like a dream." Besieged shows his gift for exploring the undertones of contemporary experience at its most haunting and electrically charged. Against a variety of stunningly evoked backgrounds—from the teeming banks of the Ganges in Varanasi to a homeless shelter in New York—these powerful, intensely focused narratives reverberate, as Michiko Kakutani put it in the New York Times, "insistently in the reader's mind long after he has finished the book." In "Ate/Menos" or "The Miracle," a young man takes unscrupulous advantage of a woman who mistakes him for someone else and finds himself enmeshed in her desperate obsessions and nightmares. In "The Siege," a wealthy recluse falls in love with the immigrant woman who lives in his basement. On discovering she is married and that her husband is a political prisoner, he embarks on a course of action that will lead simultaneously to his destruction and to his salvation. Two of the stories in this collection were made into major independent film. "Ate Menos" was the basis for the film Sunday, which won the Grand Jury Best Feature Award at Sundance. "The Siege" was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci for his film Besieged.

Thomas Middleton is one of the few playwrights in English whose range and brilliance comes close to Shakespeare's. This handsome edition makes all Middleton's work accessible in a single volume, for the first time. It will generate excitement and controversy among all readers of Shakespeare and the English classics.

Annie S. Swan's magazine.

A Study Guide for Ken Follett's "World Without End," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Newsmakers for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Newsmakers for Students for all of your research needs.