Stairs to the Roof

Stairs to the Roof

Author: Tennessee Williams

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 9780811214353

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A play produced only twice in the 1940s and now published for the first time reveals that Tennessee Williams anticipated the themes of Star Trek by decades.


The Theatre of Tennessee Williams

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams

Author: Tennessee Williams

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9780811211963

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Volume III of the series includes Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). The first, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Award, has proved every bit as successful as William's earlier A Streetcar Named Desire. The other two plays, though different in kind, both have something of the quality of Greek tragedy in 20th-century settings, bringing about catharsis through ritual death.


A Dragon on the Roof

A Dragon on the Roof

Author: Cecile Alix

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2019-09-24

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 3791373919

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A brave young girl, a whimsical house, and a ticklish dragon help young readers see the world through Gaudí's eyes. Set in Casa Batlló, one of Antoni Gaudí's most renowned buildings, this joyful story introduces young readers to the architect's work, inciting their curiosity and imagination along the way. While her nanny is sleeping, young Paloma hears a noise. She climbs the stairs of her house until she reaches the roof, where a dragon is perched. Unafraid, Paloma reaches out to pet the dragon--but he is ticklish, and as he laughs, he spews a myriad of sea animals that he had unwittingly swallowed. The house is transformed into a dreamy aquarium and the dragon settles into a deep sleep on the roof. Cécile Alix's playful story and Fred Sochard's boldly graphic illustrations are the perfect accompaniment to Gaudí's exuberant vision. As readers make their way through Paloma's home, they are introduced to its fabulous elements--columns shaped like elephant legs; marine-inspired tiles, glass, and ironwork; and of course the spectacularly undulating, iridescent roof, which resembles a sleeping dragon. The end of the book includes a brief history of Gaudí's career and provides helpful background to Paloma's story. Kids will want to linger over the pictures and imagine what their own house would be like if a dragon were living on their roof.


Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer

Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer

Author: Tennessee Williams

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2012-12-11

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0811225321

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Two of Tennessee Williams's most revered dramas in a single paperback edition for the first time. Orpheus Descending is a love story, a plea for spiritual and artistic freedom, as well as a portrait of racism and intolerance. When charismatic drifter Valentine Xavier arrives in a Mississippi Delta town with his guitar and snakeskin jacket, he becomes a trigger for hatred and a magnet for three outcast souls: storekeeper Lady Torrance, “lewd vagrant” Carol Cutrere, and religious visionary Vee Talbot. Suddenly Last Summer, described by its author as a “short morality play,” has become one of his most notorious works due in no small part to the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift that shocked audiences in 1959. A menacing tale of madness, jealousy, and denial,the horrors in Suddenly Last Summer build to a heart-stopping conclusion. With perceptive new introductions by playwright Martin Sherman — he reframes Orpheus Descending in a political context and explores the psychology and sensationalism surrounding Suddenly Last Summer — this volume also offers Williams’s related essay, “The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps,” and a chronology of the playwright’s life and works.


The Traveling Companion and Other Plays

The Traveling Companion and Other Plays

Author: Tennessee Williams

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780811217088

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"Collected here for the first time, these twelve plays embrace what Time magazine called "the four major concerns of Williams' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival"--Back cover.


A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur

Author: Tennessee Williams

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1980-05-17

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 0811225410

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In this masterful play, Tennessee Williams explores the meaning of loneliness and the need for human connection through the lens of four women and the designs and desires they harbor—for themselves and for each other. It is a warm June morning in the West End of St. Louis in the mid-thirties––a lovely Sunday for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. But Dorothea, one of Tennessee Williams’s most engaging "marginally youthful," forever hopeful Southern belles, is home waiting for a phone call from the principal of the high school where she teaches civics––the man she expects to fulfill her deferred dreams of romance and matrimony. Williams’s unerring dialogue reveals each of the four characters of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur with precision and clarity: Dorothea, who does even her "setting-up exercises" with poignant flutters; Bodey, her German roommate, who wants to pair Dotty with her beer-drinking twin, Buddy, thereby assuring nieces, nephews, and a family for both herself and Dotty; Helena, a fellow teacher, with the "eyes of a predatory bird," who would like to "rescue" Dotty from her vulgar, common surroundings and substitute an elegant but sterile spinster life; and Miss Gluck, a newly orphaned and distraught neighbor, whom Bodey comforts with coffee and crullers while Helena mocks them both. Focusing on one morning and one encounter of four women, Williams once again skillfully explores, with comic irony and great tenderness, the meaning of loneliness, the need for human connection, as well as the inevitable compromises one must make to get through "the long run of life."


The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

Author: Tennessee Williams

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2013-10-25

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 081122046X

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Tennessee Williams's first novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams. Published in 1950, his first novel was acclaimed by Gore Vidal as "splendidly written, precise, short, complete, and fine." It is the story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow recently a famous stage beauty, but now "drifting." The novel opens soon after her husband's death and her retirement from the theatre, as Mrs. Stone tries to adjust to her aimless new life in Rome. She is adjusting, too, to aging. ("The knowledge that her beauty was lost had come upon her recently and it was still occasionally forgotten.") With poignant wit and his own particular brand of relish, Williams charts her drift into an affair with a cruel young gigolo: "As compelling, as fascinating, and as technically skillful as his play" (Publishers Weekly).


Spring Storm

Spring Storm

Author: Tennessee Williams

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780811214223

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A crucible of so many elements that would later shape and characterize Williams's work.--World Literature Today


Not about Nightingales

Not about Nightingales

Author: Tennessee Williams

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780811213806

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One of Tennessee Williams's first plays, "Not About Nightingales" portrays the lives of inmates in a Pennsylvania prison who were steamed to death after leading their fellow prisoners on a hunger strike.