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  The Importance of Being Earnest

  Oscar Wilde

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  The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personæ to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways. Contemporary reviews all praised the play's humour, though some were cautious about its explicit lack of social messages, while others foresaw the modern consensus that it was the culmination of Wilde's artistic career so far. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde's most enduringly popular play. The successful opening night marked the climax of Wilde's career but also heralded his downfall. The Marquess of Queensberry, whose son Lord Alfred Douglas was Wilde's lover, planned to present the writer with a bouquet of rotten vegetables and disrupt the show. Wilde was tipped off and Queensberry was refused admission. Soon afterwards their feud came to a climax in court, where Wilde's homosexual double life was revealed to the Victorian public and he was eventually sentenced to imprisonment. His notoriety caused the play, despite its early success, to be closed after 86 performances. After his release, he published the play from exile in Paris, but he wrote no further comic or dramatic work.

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  Night of the Republic - Poems

  Alan Shapiro

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  Poetry about places—from a supermarket to a strip club to a suburban home—from a poet who “seeks what lies at the deepest level of the human heart” (Chicago Tribune).   In Night of the Republic, Alan Shapiro takes us on an unsettling night tour of America’s public places—a gas station restroom, shoe store, convention hall, and race track, among others—and in stark Edward Hopper–like imagery reveals the surreal and dreamlike features of these familiar but empty night spaces. Shapiro finds in them not the expected alienation but rather an odd, companionable solitude rising up from the quiet emptiness.   In other poems, Shapiro writes movingly of his 1950s and ’60s childhood in Brookline, Massachusetts, with special focus on the house he grew up in. These meditations, always inflected with Shapiro’s quick wit and humor, lead to recollections of tragic and haunting events such as the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of JFK. While Night of the Republic is Shapiro’s most ambitious work to date, it is also his most timely and urgent for the acute way it illuminates the mingling of private obsessions with public space.   “His poems are both artful and unpretentious.” —Boston Review  

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  Siberia

  James Clarence Mangan

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  LibriVox volunteers bring you 20 recordings of Siberia by James Clarence Mangan. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for September 2, 2012.James Clarence Mangan wad born in Dublin.  He was educated at a Jesuit school where he learned the rudiments of Latin, Spanish, French, and Italian. He attended three different schools until the age of fifteen. Obliged to find a job in order to support his family, he became a lawyer's clerk, and was later an employee of the Ordnance Survey and an assistant in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. (Summary from Wikipedia)

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  The Three Sisters

  Anton Chekhov

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  Three Sisters is a naturalistic play about the decay of the privileged class in Russia and the search for meaning in the modern world. It describes the lives and aspirations of the Prozorov family, the three sisters (Olga, Masha, and Irina) and their brother Andrei. They are a family dissatisfied and frustrated with their present existence. The sisters are refined and cultured young women who grew up in urban Moscow; however for the past eleven years they have been living in a small provincial town. Moscow is a major symbolic element: the sisters are always dreaming of it and constantly express their desire to return. They identify Moscow with their happiness, and thus to them it represents the perfect life. However as the play develops Moscow never materializes and they all see their dreams recede further and further. Meaning never presents itself and they are forced to seek it out for themselves. (Summary by wikipedia) 
  The Three Sisters Cast:ANDREY SERGEYEVITCH PROSOROV -  Joe SpyNATALIA IVANOVA (NATASHA), his fiancée, later his wife - AvailleOLGA - Elizabeth KlettMASHA - Arielle LipshawIRINA - Elizabeth BarrFEODOR ILITCH KULIGIN, high school teacher, married to MASHA -  mb ALEXANDER IGNATEYEVITCH VERSHININ, lieutenant-colonel in charge of a battery -  Bruce PirieNICOLAI LVOVITCH TUZENBACH, baron, lieutenant in the army -  John Fricker  VASSILI VASSILEVITCH SOLENI, captain -  Denny SayersIVAN ROMANOVITCH CHEBUTIKIN, army doctor -  Algy PugALEXEY PETROVITCH FEDOTIK, sub-lieutenant - RakenVLADIMIR CARLOVITCH RODE, sub-lieutenant - Elizabeth KlettFERAPONT, door-keeper at local council offices, an old man - David LawrenceANFISA, nurse -  AnaNarrator/Stage Directions -  Mary Herndon Bell Audio edited by Arielle Lipshaw

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  The Poetic Edda

  Jeramy Dodds

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  Gods, giants, violence, the undead, theft, trolls, dwarves, aphorisms, unrequited love, Valkyries, heroes, kidnapping, dragons, the creation of the cosmos and a giant wolf are just some of the elements dwelling within these Norse poetic tales. Committed to velum anonymously in Iceland around 1270, they were flash frozen from much-older oral versions that had been circulating throughout Northern Europe for centuries. The Poetic Edda is an epoch-making cache of mythological and heroic tales that have compelled Wagner, Tolkien, Borges and Auden, among many others. It is one of the few extent sources that provide a periscope into the Viking Age consciousness.
   
  In this rousing line-by-line translation, award-winning poet Jeramy Dodds transmits the Old Icelandic text into English, placing it in the hands of poetry fans and academics alike, without chipping the patina of the original.
   
  ‘Jeremy Dodds's instinctive irony and musicality is a particularly apt fit for the idiosyncratic syntax and symbolism of Old Norse.’
   
  – ARC Poetry Magazine

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  Daisy Miller (dramatic reading)

  Henry James

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  Daisy Miller is an 1878 novella by Henry James first appearing in Cornhill Magazine in June–July 1879, and in book form the following year. It portrays the courtship of the beautiful American girl Daisy Miller by Frederick Winterbourne, a sophisticated compatriot of hers. His pursuit of her is hampered by her own flirtatiousness, which is frowned upon by the other expatriates when they meet in Switzerland and Italy. (Summary by Wikipedia)CastFrederick Winterbourne: Brett W. DowneyDaisy Miller: Amanda FridayRandolph Miller: Arielle LipshawMrs. Miller: Libby GohnMrs. Costello: Elizabeth KlettMrs. Walker: MaryankaEugenio: tovarischGiovanelli: Denny SayersServant: Halle KillWinterbourne's Friend: Richard FridayNarrator: Bob NeufeldAudio edited by Michele Eaton

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