Other books that might interest you

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  When You Cure Me (NHB Modern Plays)

  Jack Thorne

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  A painful - and painfully funny - play about being very young and in love - and coping with serious illness at the same time.
  Rachel and Peter are seventeen. They have been going out for six months. It's love's young dream. Then Rachel gets ill - seriously ill. She doesn't want her mum to fuss; she doesn't want Alice to pretend she's her best friend; and she certainly doesn't want Alice's boyfriend telling bad jokes at her bedside. The only person she wants is Peter, but Peter doesn't know what it is that he wants.
  When You Cure Me premiered at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2005.
  'In one of the year's finest pieces of new writing... a compassionate, gripping portrait of a fledgling relationship that is asked to bear more than many well-established marriages' Evening Standard
  'painstakingly honest... acutely observant of the petty rivalries and jealousies that sickness provokes' Guardian
  '[has] a merciless precision... a brave piece of writing that, with its damaged and angry heroine, unflinchingly shows us not a vision of saintly suffering, but a far more engagingly human struggle for survival'  The Times

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  The Goldfish - Poems

  Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi Degoul

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  The Goldfish is a sumptuous, surreal exploration of femininity. The poet inhabits the voice of a goldfish through a series of linguistically experimental poems which plunge us into the glass bowl and invite us to gaze out. The poems are in turn sensual, spiky, and queasy, as the poet satirizes the patriarchy and issues a rallying cry for women broken down by society. Halfway through the book, the scope opens out to the world beyond the goldfish bowl, via the story of a free spirit passing through customs, a paean "to our white husbands", and a letter which heals old wounds.

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  Embark

  Sean O'Brien

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  A new collection by Sean O’Brien – ‘Auden’s true inheritor’, and one of our wisest poetic chronographers – is not just a literary event, but also, invariably, a reckoning of the times. Given the nature of our times, his voice is an essential one: there is no other poet currently writing with O’Brien’s intellectual authority, historical literacy and sheer command of the facts. Embark also registers our unique cultural climacteric, where the larger crises of the planet – the pandemic and the terrifying spectre of revanchist nationalism among them – impact all of us, and where the illusion of a church-and-state separation of the personal and political can no longer hold. As the poet turns seventy, he shows us how the inevitable absences that age brings are assuaged by how we furnish them; the result is not just a logic made from loss and pain, but a music, a metaphysic, and finally a redemptive art. Embark reminds us of the enduring consolations of love, of friendship, of the freedoms and possible futures still afforded by the imagination – and, through O’Brien’s own exemplary model, of poetry itself.

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  The Columnist - A Play

  David Auburn

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  A new play from the Pulitzer- and Tony Award–winning author of Proof, coming to Broadway this AprilIn midcentury America, newspaper columnists are kings—and Joseph Alsop wears the biggest crown. Joe sits at the nexus of Washington life: beloved, feared, and courted in equal measure by the very people whose careers and futures he determines. But as the sixties dawn and America undergoes dizzying change, the intense political dramas Joe has been throwing his weight around in—supporting the war in Vietnam and Soviet containment, criticizing student activism—come to bear a profound personal cost.Based on the real-life story of Joe Alsop, whose columns at the time of his 1974 retirement were running three times a week in more than three hundred newspapers, David Auburn's The Columnist is a deft blend of history and storytelling. A hilarious, searing portrait of the glorious rewards and devastating losses that accompany ego, ambition, and the pursuit of power, The Columnist pens a vital letter from a radically changing decade to our own turbulent era.

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  Romance

  Andrew Lang

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  LibriVox volunteers bring you 16 readings of Romance by Andrew Lang, probably best known as Edward Elgar's song My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land. Interestingly, Lang initially refused permission for his words to be used as lyrics, and Elgar's wife Alice wrote alternative words Afar, amidst the Sunny Isles for the song. However, Lang later relented and gave permission for his poem to be used.  
  The poem was initially published in The Century Magazine, May 1882, and this is the version recorded here. Later collections of Lang's poetry omit the third verse. (Summary by Ruth Golding)

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  Captain Horatio Hornblower

  Hollywood Stage Productions

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  Hollywood is indelibly printed in our minds as the ‘go-to’ place for entertainment and has been for decades.  When there really did seem to be more stars in Hollywood than in Heaven Hollywood Stage had them performing films as radio plays – on the sponsors dime of course.  Classic films now become audiobooks with many featuring the original stars from way back when. Here's Captain Horation Hornblower starring Gregory Peck & Virginia Mayo.

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