In a volume containing 14 original plays – including three shadow-play adaptions of Gogol, Morton and Runyon classics – the author resurrects a sadly neglected theatre genre – the shadow play combining traditional shadow techniques with normal acting to create ‘full-bodied’ mainstream plays.
Every night, Shahrazad begins a story. And every morning, the Sultan lets her live another day -- providing the story is interesting enough to capture his attention. After almost one thousand nights, Shahrazad is running out of tales. And that is how Marjan's story begins.... It falls to Marjan to help Shahrazad find new stories -- ones the Sultan has never heard before. To do that, the girl is forced to undertake a dangerous and forbidden mission: sneak from the harem and travel the city, pulling tales from strangers and bringing them back to Shahrazad. But as she searches the city, a wonderful thing happens. From a quiet spinner of tales, Marjan suddenly becomes the center of a more surprising story than she ever could have imagined.
"This is absorbing, headlong reading, a play on classic horror with an inventiveness of its own... As with all the best illusions, you are left feeling not tricked, but full of wonder." – The New York Times The haunting new thriller from Alex North, author of the New York Times bestseller The Whisper Man You knew a teenager like Charlie Crabtree. A dark imagination, a sinister smile--always on the outside of the group. Some part of you suspected he might be capable of doing something awful. Twenty-five years ago, Crabtree did just that, committing a murder so shocking that it’s attracted that strange kind of infamy that only exists on the darkest corners of the internet--and inspired more than one copycat. Paul Adams remembers the case all too well: Crabtree--and his victim--were Paul’s friends. Paul has slowly put his life back together. But now his mother, old and suffering from dementia, has taken a turn for the worse. Though every inch of him resists, it is time to come home. It's not long before things start to go wrong. Paul learns that Detective Amanda Beck is investigating another copycat that has struck in the nearby town of Featherbank. His mother is distressed, insistent that there's something in the house. And someone is following him. Which reminds him of the most unsettling thing about that awful day twenty-five years ago. It wasn't just the murder. It was the fact that afterward, Charlie Crabtree was never seen again...
This new, expanded collection of Antonio Tabucchi's stories collects the best short fiction from the Italian author recognized as one of the masters of the form. Message From the Shadows is a new collection featuring Antonio Tabucchi's finest short stories, spanning the breadth of his career. These playful tales explore Tabucchi's signature themes, from his inventive, lyrical meditations on language, art, and philosophy, to his fascination with the passage of time, and the mystery of storytelling.
Journalist Maximillian Potter uncovers a fascinating plot to destroy the vines of La Romance-Conti, Burgundy's finest and most expensive wine. In January 2010, Aubert de Villaine, the famed proprietor of the Domaine de la Romance-Conti, the tiny, storied vineyard that produces the most expensive, exquisite wines in the world, received an anonymous note threatening the destruction of his priceless vines by poison—a crime that in the world of high-end wine is akin to murder—unless he paid a one million euro ransom. Villaine believed it to be a sick joke, but that proved a fatal miscalculation and the crime shocked this fabled region of France. The sinister story that Vanity Fair journalist Maximillian Potter uncovered would lead to a sting operation by some of France's top detectives, the primary suspect's suicide, and a dramatic investigation. This botanical crime threatened to destroy the fiercely traditional culture surrounding the world's greatest wine. Shadows in the Vineyard takes us deep into a captivating world full of fascinating characters, small-town French politics, an unforgettable narrative, and a local culture defined by the twinned veins of excess and vitality and the deep reverent attention to the land that runs through it.
What do you imagine when you hear the name . . . Bradbury? You might see rockets to Mars. Or bizarre circuses where otherworldly acts whirl in the center ring. Perhaps you travel to a dystopian future, where books are set ablaze . . . or to an out-of-the-way sideshow, where animated illustrations crawl across human skin. Or maybe, suddenly, you're returned to a simpler time in small-town America, where summer perfumes the air and life is almost perfect . . . almost. Ray Bradbury—peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors—is a literary giant whose remarkable career has spanned seven decades. Now twenty-six of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.
The New York Times bestseller “The Shadow of the Wind is ultimately a love letter to literature, intended for readers as passionate about storytelling as its young hero.” —Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice) “One gorgeous read.” —Stephen King Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Soon Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.
In a volume containing 14 original plays – including three shadow-play adaptions of Gogol, Morton and Runyon classics – the author resurrects a sadly neglected theatre genre – the shadow play combining traditional shadow techniques with normal acting to create ‘full-bodied’ mainstream plays. These plays do not use shadow puppetry-type techniques that need people contorting themselves, however wonderfully, to form shapes, but rather normal acting prowess together and usual props of mainstream theatre with the new back-lighting technologies. The result is plays which are realistic and yet overlain with the imaginative fantasies that figure theatre can bring… in a fallow area lying between mime and conventional stage plays… a rediscovered form of a modern staging that crosses between live and shadow effect, whether in workshopping for all ages and group-size or for professional productions. Shadow plays comprise the theatre landscape for live actors re-skilled to jump from behind-the-screen one-dimensional acting to front-of-the-screen three-dimensional acting at any moment of the play. They allow a new and exciting way of presenting the combination of the real and the surreal in ways that offer broadened audience and student experiences, under the master-of-storytelling of a shadow teller together with the master-of-pacing of a mobile light spotter.
2020 PRISM Award Winner! Year 2522. Lyra Daniels is dead. Okay, so I only died for sixty-six seconds. But when I came back to life, I got a brand new name and a snazzy new uniform. Go me! Seriously, though, it's very important that Lyra Daniels stays dead, at least as far as the murdering looters, know. While dying is the scariest thing that's happened to me, it morphed my worming skills. I can manipulate the Q-net like never before. But the looters have blocked us from communicating with the rest of the galaxy and now they believe we've gone silent, like Planet Xinji (where silent really means dead). A Protector Class spaceship is coming to our rescue, but we still have to survive almost two years until they arrive - if they arrive at all. Until then, we have to figure out how to stop an unstoppable alien threat. And it's only a matter of time before the looters learn I'm not dead and returns to finish what they started. There's no way I'm going to let the looters win. Instead I'll do whatever it takes to save the people I love. But even I'm running out of ideas...