Collections
The thirteen one-act plays collected in this volume include some of Tennessee Williams's finest and most powerful work. They are full of the perception of life as it is, and the passion for life as it ought to be, which have made The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire classics of the American theater. Only one of these plays ( The Purification ) is written in verse, but in all of them the approach to character is by way of poetic revelation. Whether Williams is writing of derelict roomers in a New Orleans boarding house ( The Lady of Larkspur Lotion ) or the memories of a venerable traveling salesman ( The Last of My Solid Gold Watches ) or of delinquent children ( This Property is Condemned ), his insight into human nature is that of the poet. He can compress the basic meaning of life―its pathos or its tragedy, its bravery or the quality of its love―into one small scene or a few moments of dialogue. Mr. Williams's views on the role of the little theater in American culture are contained in a stimulating essay, "Something wild...," which serves as an introduction to this collection.
Here are the eleven remarkable stories of Tennessee Williams's first volume of short fiction, originally published in 1948 and reissued as a paperbook in response to an increasingly insistent public demand. It was this book which established Williams as a short story writer of the same stature and interest he had shown as a dramatist. Each story has qualities that make it memorable. In “One Arm” we live through his last hours and memories with a 'rough trade" ex-prizefighter who is awaiting execution for murder. "The Field of Blue Children" explores some of the strange ways of the human heart in love, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" is a luminous and nostalgic recollection of characters who figure in "The Glass Menagerie," while "Desire and the Black Masseur" is an excursion into the logic of the macabre. "The Yellow Bird," well known through the author's recorded reading of it, which tells of a minister's daughter who found a particularly violent but satisfactory way of expiating a load of inherited puritan guilt, may well become part of American mythology.
Hard Candy contains Tennessee Williams’s short stories written after the publication of his first collection of short fiction, One Arm , and before the stories appearing in The Knightly Quest . These volumes have established him as an original, compelling, and honest master of the short story. The stories in Hard Candy display Mr. Williams’s mastery of several very different styles. “Three Players of a Summer Game,” for instance, is as powerful and moving a study of the disintegration of an individual as A Streetcar Named Desire . The delicate and luminous nostalgia of “The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin” will remind readers of The Glass Menagerie . Other stories, like “Two on a Party,” are more colloquial and brittle; and one––”The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly”––is an excursion into ironical fantasy. Yet each of the stories demonstrates, in its different way, the characteristic blend of psychological penetration with compassion and understanding that has marked Tennessee Williams’s successes in the theater.
This anthology contains four of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's most brilliant works: Summer and Smoke, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer and Period of Adjustment. "The innocent and the damned, the lonely and the frustrated, the hopeful and the hopeless . . . (Williams) brings them all into focus with an earthy, irreverently comic passion."--Newsweek.
Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso
Tennessee Williams's controversial Hollywood screenplay 'Baby Doll' opens with Archie Lee's teenage bride driving him to distraction, as she has refused to consummate their marriage until the day of her 20th birthday. This volume also contains 'Something Unspoken' and 'Summer and Smoke'.
The story of an alcoholic, Brick Pollitt, who tried to regain his self-respect with the help of his mistress, his doctor's widow.
Few writers achieve success in more than one genre, and yet if Tennessee Williams had never written a single play he would still be known as a distinguished poet. The excitement, compassion, lyricism, and humor that epitomize his writing for the theater are all present in his poetry. Tennessee Williams's fame as a playwright has unjustly overshadowed his accomplishment in poetry. This paperback edition of In The Winter of Cities-his collected poems to 1962-permits a wider audience to know Williams the poet. The poems in this volume range from songs and short lyrics to personal statements of the greatest intensity and power. They are rich in imagery and illuminated by the psychological intuition which we know so well from Williams's plays.
Five Plays by Tennessee Williams : Moony's Kid Don't Cry, The Dark Room, The Case of the Crushed Petunias: A Lyrical Fantasy, The Long Stay Cut Short, or, The Unsatisfactory Supper, Ten Blocks on the Camino Real: A Fantasy,
"A Streetcar Named Desire" is one of the most remarkable plays of our time. It created an immortal woman in the character of Blanche DuBois, the haggard and fragile southern beauty whose pathetic last grasp at happiness is cruelly destroyed. It shot Marlon Brando to fame in the role of Stanley Kowalski, a sweat-shirted barbarian, the crudely sensual brother-in-law who precipitated Blanche's tragedy. Produced across the world, translated into many languages, and recreated as a prize-winning film, "A Streetcar Named Desire" has attracted one of the widest audiences in contemporary literature.
First UK edition hardcover with mylar covered unclipped dust jacket, in very good condition. Jacket rear is marked. Binding is sound and pages are clear. LW
"First published as New Directions Paperbook 287, 1970; published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited."--T.p. verso.
Stories previously published in magazines in 1971, 1973 and 1974.
Four film scripts deal with a young male hustler, life in a mental hospital, debutante society in the 1920s, and a St. Louis schoolteacher.
Tennessee Williams was famous for insisting he write every morning. Even during his darkest days, while mourning a lover, or abusing some substance -- and he abused most of them at one time or another -- he'd write. The stories in this volume, arranged chronologically, are from every period of his long life, and recreate the milieux Williams knew and chronicled so movingly -- from his gypsy youth in St. Louis and New Orleans to his days of celebrity in Hollywood and New York. Some are studies for his plays, and like them, their language can suddenly surprise you with a poetic image that shines like a jewel. This edition includes a useful publishing history for each of the fifty stories. "One overpowering impression emerges from all these stories put together: Tennessee Williams knew more about the hidden life of far-flung America than any of us really suspected." -- Seymour Krim, Washington Post Book World "By turns disturbing, moving, and funny; these stories help amplify Williams's tragic vision, for like the plays, they underline his preoccupation and insight into the conflicts of the human heart." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
A taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner. In 1956, Time magazine called Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll "just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited." The taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge, who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner in Tiger Tail County, Mississippi until she is "ready," has gained in humor and pathos over the years as society has caught up with the author’s savagely honest view of bigotry and lust in the rural South. But Tennessee Williams was first and foremost a writer for the stage, and this reissue of his original screenplay for the Elia Kazan movie of Baby Doll is now accompanied by the script of the full-length stage play, Tiger Tail, developed from that screenplay during the ’70s. The text, which incorporates the author’s final revisions, records the play as it was produced at the Hippodrome Theatre Workshop in Gainesville, Florida, in 1979.
All of the author's previously published poems, including poems from the plays, are in this definitive edition that comes with a CD of the author reading some of his poems in his unmistakable Mississippi drawl. Few writers achieve success in more than one genre, and yet if Tennessee Williams had never written a single play he would still be known as a distinguished poet. The excitement, compassion, lyricism, and humor that epitomize his writing for the theater are all present in his poetry. It was as a young poet that Williams first came to the attention of New Directions’ founder James Laughlin, who initially presented some of Williams’ verse in the New Directions anthology Five Young American Poets 1944 (before he had any reputation as a playwright), and later published the individual volumes of Williams’s poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956, revised in 1964) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). In this definitive edition, all of the playwright’s collected and uncollected published poems (along with substantial variants), including poems from the plays, have been assembled, accompanied by explanatory notes and an introduction by Tennessee Williams scholars David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis. The CD included with this paperbook edition features Tennessee Williams reading, in his delightful and mesmerizing Mississippi voice, several of the whimsical folk poems he called his "Blue Mountain Ballads," poems dedicated to Carson McCullers and to his longtime companion Frank Merlo, as well as his long early poem, "The Summer Belvedere."
"I yearned for a bad influence and boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny."―John Waters “I cannot write any sort of story,” said Tennessee [to Gore Vidal] “unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.” These transgressive Tales of Desire , including “One Arm,” “Desire and the Black Masseur,” “Hard Candy,” and “The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen,” show the iconic playwright at his outrageous best.
Seven previously unpublished stories of the Great Depression by America’s poet laureate of the lost These tales were penned by one Thomas Lanier Williams of Missouri before he became a successful playwright, and yet his voice is unmistakable. The reliable idiosyncrasies and quiet dignity of Williams’s eccentrics are already present in his characters. Consider the diminutive octogenarian of “The Caterpillar Dogs,” who may have just met her match in a pair of laughing Pekinese that refuse to obey; the retired, small-town evangelist in “Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite,” who wears bright-colored pajamas and receives a message from God to move to St. Louis and finally, finally go to the movies again; or the distraught factory worker whose stifled artistic spirit, and just a soupçon of the macabre, propel the drama of “Stair to the Roof.” Love’s diversions and misdirections, even autoerotic longings, are found in these delightful lagniappes: in “Season of Grapes,” the intoxicating ripeness of summer in the Ozarks acquaints one young man with his own passions, which turn into a fever dream, and the first revelation of female sexuality blooms for a college boy in “Ironweed.”Is there such a thing as innocence? Apparently in the 1930s there was, and Williams reveals it in these stories.