The Scarlet Letters

"'Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.' With these chilling words a husband claims his wife after a two-year absence. But the child she clutches is not his, and Hester must wear a scarlet 'A' upon her breast, the sin of adultery visible to all. Under an assumed name her husband begins his search for her lover, determined to expose what Hester is equally determined to protect. Defiant and proud, Hester witnesses the degradation of two very different men, as moral codes and legal imperatives painfully collide." "Set in the Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, The Scarlet Letter also sheds light on the nineteenth century in which it was written, as Hawthorne explores his ambivalent relations with his Puritan forebears. The text of this edition is taken from the Centenary Edition of Hawthorne's works, the most authoritative critical edition."--BOOK JACKET.

Beautiful actress Martha Lawrence has a problem. Her once loving husband, Dirk, has become violent and controlling, and she doesn't know why. When she reaches out to their friend, mystery-solver Ellery Queen for help, Dirk interrupts their meeting in a drunken rage. He is convinced that the two are having an affair. Martha needs Ellery's help to convince Dirk that she's never cheated and never will. But from the clues he uncovers, it looks as if Martha might be two-timing after all. If Dirk is a cuckold, is his anger justifiable? And who is responsible if it results in murder? Ellery must figure out who is responsible for crippling a marriage before someone gets killed in the name of love.

Jenny Nordbak takes us to a place that few have seen, but millions have fantasized about, revealing how she transformed herself from a USC grad lacking in confidence into an elite professional dominatrix who finds her own voice, power and compassion for others. On an unorthodox quest to understand her hidden fantasies, Jenny led a double life for two years. By day she was a construction manager, but at night she became Mistress Scarlett. Working at LA’s longest-running dungeon, she catered to the secret fetishes of clients ranging from accountants to movie stars. She simultaneously developed a career in the complex and male-dominated world of healthcare construction, while spending her nights as a sex worker, dominating men. Far from the standard-issue powerful men who pay to be helpless, Mistress Scarlett’s clientele included men whose fantasies revealed more complex needs, from “Tickle Ed” to “Doggie Dan,” from the “Treasure Trolls” to “Ta-Da Ted.” The Scarlett Letters explores the spectacularly diverse array of human sexuality and the fascinating cast of characters that the author encountered along the way.

One month after her novel Gone With the Wind was published, Margaret Mitchell sold the movie rights for fifty thousand dollars. Fearful of what the studio might do to her story—“I wouldn’t put it beyond Hollywood to have . . . Scarlett seduce General Sherman,” she joked—the author washed her hands of involvement with the film. However, driven by a maternal interest in her literary firstborn and compelled by her Southern manners to answer every fan letter she received, Mitchell was unable to stay aloof for long. In this collection of her letters about the 1939 motion picture classic, readers have a front-row seat as the author watches the Dream Factory at work, learning the ins and outs of filmmaking and discovering the peculiarities of a movie-crazed public. Her ability to weave a story, so evident in Gone With the Wind, makes for delightful reading in her correspondence with a who’s who of Hollywood, from producer David O. Selznick, director George Cukor, and screenwriter Sidney Howard, to cast members Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland and Hattie McDaniel. Mitchell also wrote to thousands of others—aspiring actresses eager to play Scarlett O’Hara; fellow Southerners hopeful of seeing their homes or their grandmother’s dress used in the film; rabid movie fans determined that their favorite star be cast; and creators of songs, dolls and Scarlett panties who were convinced the author was their ticket to fame and fortune. During the film’s production, she corrected erring journalists and the producer’s over-the-top publicist who fed the gossip mills, accuracy be damned. Once the movie finished, she struggled to deal with friends and strangers alike who “fought and trampled little children and connived and broke the ties of lifelong friendship” to get tickets to the premiere. But through it all, she retained her sense of humor. Recounting an acquaintance’s denial of the rumor that the author herself was going to play Scarlett, Mitchell noted he “ungallantly stated that I was something like fifty years too old for the part.” After receiving numerous letters and phone calls from the studio about Belle Watling’s accent, the author related her father was “convulsed at the idea of someone telephoning from New York to discover how the madam of a Confederate bordello talked.” And in a chatty letter to Gable after the premiere, Mitchell coyly admitted being “feminine enough to be quite charmed” by his statement to the press that she was “fascinating,” but added: “Even my best friends look at me in a speculative way—probably wondering what they overlooked that your sharp eyes saw!” As Gone With the Wind marks its seventy-fifth anniversary on the silver screen, these letters, edited by Mitchell historian John Wiley, Jr., offer a fresh look at the most popular motion picture of all time through the eyes of the woman who gave birth to Scarlett.

No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by prominent Williams scholar Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: "More than fifty years after telling his story of a family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation, Williams's mellifluous voice still resonates deeply and universally." This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes." The cover features the classic line drawing by Alvin Lustig, originally done for the 1949 New Directions edition.

Like its namesake, Scarlet Letters addresses the hard truths of life in an increasingly "progressive" America where the irrational prejudices of a group can crush the soul of the individual. In both the old and new puritanism, worshippers achieve a sense of moral worth simply by designating themselves among "the elect"--no good works required. To validate that uncertain status, they feel compelled to heap abuse upon the sinner lest they too be thought guilty of the sin. Rather than simply cataloging the neo-puritan assaults on reason and liberty, Scarlet Letters illustrates how the progressive movement came to mimic a religion in its structure but not at all in its spirit while profiling those brave individuals who dared to take a stand against this inquisition. In the neo-puritan world, all conservatives are an awkwardly worded tweet away from being branded a homophobe, a racist, a sexist, an Islamophobe or worse. Progressives force assumptions upon anyone who disagrees with their political and social agenda. Those who dare suggest a violent attack was committed by someone of Islamic faith is an Islamophobe. Those who identify the race of even a wanted criminal is a racist. Those who don't support gay marriage are homophobes with a capitol "H." In the eyes of the progressive neo-puritan, that word - that letter - becomes all that a person is. With real-life examples from sexist Clarence Thomas to Islamophobe Ayaan Hirsi Ali to racist Paula Deen to homophobe Phil Robertson, author Jack Cashill explains how a person's identity is reduced to the cruelest of stereotypes. Falsified narratives and manufactured outrage perpetuate the neo-puritan goals, whether they be affecting a presidential election, or simply undermining an individual's personal opinion in order to drag them down. Discover how progressive forces have eroded traditional American values and how the movement became inquisitional and vengeful. Find out how individuals and organization have found the courage to resist this movement and what you can do to fight back successfully.