Twenty-first-century media and political discourse sometimes makes "strangers" - refugees, immigrants, minorities - the scapegoats for social and economic disorder. In this heated climate, theatre has the potential to promote greater compassion and empathy for outsiders.A study of cultural difference in contemporary Canadian theatre, Staging Strangers considers how theatre facilitates an understanding of distant places and issues. Theatre in Canada, and especially in Toron...

Selected contributions to the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, which took place in July 2011 in Prague, represent the contemporary state of Shakespeare studies in thirty-eight countries worldwide. Apart from readings of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, more than forty chapters map Renaissance contexts of his art in politics, theater, law, or material culture and discuss numerous cases of the impact of his works in global culture from the Americas to the Far East, including stage productions...

The Wanted, Barry Freeman's new novel, is a crime thriller for thoughtful readers. The book features respected lawyer, Benjamin Diamond, who is pushing 70 and retiring after many successful years as the head of an esteemed Chicago law firm. He lives with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two golden retrievers in their Highland Park, Illinois, steel and glass dream house on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.One Sunday, mid-August morning, Ben and Liz take their dogs for a romp on the be...

Dark spells. Haunted souls. Secrets too terrifying to forget… ️ Enter the forbidden realms of witchcraft, restless spirits, and cursed tomes in The Book of Shadows—a spine-tingling collection of short stories from acclaimed and emerging voices in supernatural horror. Each tale conjures a unique nightmare, drawing from occult traditions, urban legends, and timeless fears. Inside This Terrifying Collection: Ghostly visitations that defy explanation ️ Sinister spellbooks and ancient ...

Assassination in Santo Domingo is a combination of political satire and action/adventure taking place in the Dominican Republic, a banana republic with a blotchy history of dictators and military takeovers. It is the story of Raphael Trompero, a narcissistic dunce with autocratic ambitions and a corrupt mentality, who is elected president of the country in furtherance of a nefarious plan by Iran to gain influence in Central America. When Trompero outlives his usefulness to Iran, the Irania...

Security chief for a private airport sounded like the perfect job for Ross Coe. Washed-out fighter pilot at 24, retired military cop at 30, and Private Investigator at 40, he has a chance to begin again on the home airfield he left twenty years before. His antique airplane is without wings, his family home is torched by persons unknown and he is forced to live in a barn converted to an airplane hangar with two cats without names.At the Wilson Airpark crimes begin on the ground and ...

Have you ever looked beneath a stone or a plant pot in your garden, and discovered a family of snails living there? Have you wondered what they do all day, and what they think of us, those strange creatures living in the big house at the end of their garden? Now's your chance to find out! Snail Tales gives a snail's eye view of their world - and ours!

A Tale of Two Lawyers is a combination of an entertaining fictional story with the educational revelations of informative nonfiction. After practicing law for forty seven years in Chicago, the author has a lot to say about the profession, and he says it in this book. It describes the colorful lives and loves of two Chicago attorneys, along with an in-depth, authentic exposé of the much maligned business of law and its most flagrantly practiced attorney/client conflict of interest—hourly bi...

Who could have imagined that a pile of old nuts and bolts in a garden shed could have a life of their own? Well, prepare to be amazed as we follow the gravel path by the orchard fence, where young Morris Wainwright once searched for fossils among the polished stones, to an old garden shed with a green pitched roof. It's half hidden by moss and ivy and sheltered from the summer heat by overhanging apple boughs. The window looks onto a garden of tall yellow weeds where a line of shirts and s...

Ahmed, born and raised in war-torn Yemen, is recruited by Al-Qaeda and sent by them to attend college in the US to join a group planning a terrorist attack on nearby Naval Station Great Lakes. During the months before the attack, he falls in love with Fida, a group member also from Yemen, Together they have committed to become martyrs in the name of Islam and thus achieve Paradise in the course of the attack. In pursuit of needed extra cash, Ahmed applies for an extension of his student vi...

Why theatre now? Reflecting on the mix of challenges and opportunities that face theatre in communities that are necessarily becoming global in scope and technologically driven, In Defence of Theatre offers a range of passionate reflections on this important question.Kathleen Gallagher and Barry Freeman bring together nineteen playwrights, actors, directors, scholars, and educators who discuss the role that theatre can – and must – play in professional, community, and educ...

Back in 1970, during the Vietnam War, Ray Auler brought four female exotic dancers from Chicago to live in a Saigon villa and perform for GIs in an adjacent nightclub called The Office. The book begins as the four ladies walk out of the villa and head for the American Embassy. There they tell sordid tales of imprisonment and forced prostitution that ultimately lead to the Chicago indictment and prosecution of Ray and his friend, Craig Poulter, for violations of the Mann Act: transporting a...