In the dark of the blackout before the curtain rises, the theater holds its many worlds suspended on the verge of appearance. How can a performance sustain this sense of potentiality that grounds all live production? Or if a stage-world does begin, what kinds of future might appear within its frame? Conceiving of the theater as a cultural institution devoted to experimenting with the future, this book begins and ends on the dramatic stage; in between it traverses literature, dance, sculptu...

"We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us." - KrappSamuel Beckett’s most accessible play is also one of the twentieth century’s most moving dramas about aging, memory, and disappointment. Daniel Sack offers the first comprehensive survey of Krapp’s Last Tape(1958)with a general reader in mind.Structured around a series of questions, five approachable sections contextualize the play in the larger career of its Nobel-Prize-winning writer, exp...

Bloomsbury presents The Dignity of Difference by Jonathan Sacks, read by Daniel Epstein.‘Aims to define nothing less than a basis for religiously sensitive civilisation.’Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury‘The Dignity of Difference has a central and compelling vision: the magnificence and inspiring human diversity of our world ... The Chief Rabbi has made a convincing case for respecting people o...

Imagined Theatres collects theoretical dramas written by some of the leading scholars and artists of the contemporary stage. These dialogues, prose poems, and microfictions describe imaginary performance events that explore what might be possible and impossible in the theatre.Each scenario is mirrored by a brief accompanying reflection, asking what they might mean for our thinking about the theatre. These many possible worlds circle around questions that include:...

Bloomsbury presents Celebrating Life: Finding Happiness in Unexpected Places by Jonathan Sacks, read by Daniel Epstein.Following the painful loss of his father, former Chief Rabbi Sacks began to learn how to celebrate life in a new way.Based, in part, on Rabbi Sacks’s collection of columns in the UK's Times newspaper, Celebrating Life is a series of reflections on subjects such as morality, friendship, listening to others and giv...

Bloomsbury presents The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society by Jonathan Sacks, read by Daniel Epstein.Rabbi Sacks' thesis on the future of British society and the dangers facing liberal democracy. With a new foreword by Daniel Finkelstein.Arguing that global communications have fragmented national cultures and that multiculturalism, intended to reduce social frictions, is today reinforcing them, Sacks argues for a new approa...

One of the most respected religious thinkers of our time makes an impassioned plea for the return of religion to its true purpose—as a partnership with God in the work of ethical and moral living.What are our duties to others, to society, and to humanity? How do we live a meaningful life in an age of global uncertainty and instability? In To Heal a Fractured World, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks offers answers to these questions by looking at the ethics of responsibility. In his signature plainspoke...

Bloomsbury presents The Persistence of Faith: Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age by Jonathan Sacks, read by Daniel Epstein.Confidence in a faith is a subtle quality and lack of it shows in many ways, some contradictory. Dr Sacks has that confidence and the quiet charisma to communicate it.Sacks argues that faiths must remain open to criticism, keep alive their separate communities and still contribute far more to natio...

"Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically--even fraudulently--essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book. It's elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it's over much too soon." — Los Angeles TimesPulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's classic work of literary criticismLiving by Fiction is written for—and dedicated to—people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover...

Close Listening brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been surprisingly slight. This volume, featuring work by critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe, is th...

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference. In this Very Short Introduction the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object - either in art, in nature, or the human form - beautiful, and examining how we can compare differing judgements of beauty when it is evident all around...