A chilling reenactment of the federal government’s anti-Communist investigationsThe testimony that Eric Bentley has gleaned for this book from the thirty-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee focuses on HUAC’s treatment of artists, intellectuals, and performers. This highly dramatic and compelling collection of significant excerpts from the hearings shows with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel that investigated possible subversive activities in a “digni...

A chilling reenactment of the Federal government’s anti-Communist investigationsEric Bentley has chosen highlights from the thirty-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee to demonstrate HUAC’s focus on artists, intellectuals, and performers. Volume 2: 1951–1952 includes the testimonies of Clifford Odets, Edward G. Robinson, Elia Kazan, Jose Ferrer, Bud Schulberg, Sterling Hayden, Abe Burroughs, Lillian Hellman, and many others. Thirty Years of Treason...

They are icons of the literary world whose soaring works have been discussed and analyzed in countless classrooms, homes, and pubs. Yet for most readers, the living, breathing human beings behind the classics have remained unknown—until now. In this utterly captivating book, Dr. Elliot Engel, a leading authority on the lives of great authors, illuminates the fascinating and flawed members of literature’s elite. In lieu of stuffy biographical sketches, Engel provides fascinating anecdotes.

Known as a "poet of the people," Carl Sandburg wrote verses infused with soulfulness and lyric grace, and his work was characterized with a love and compassion for the common man. Here is a collection of nearly 100 of his best poems, including "Chicago," "Fog," "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter," "Masses," and "The Great Hunt," as well as other verses featuring themes like love, war, death, loneliness, immigrant life, and the beauty of nature. These early poems— which earned him enormous popu...

Drawing upon everyday incidents, common situations, and rural imagery, Robert Frost fashioned poetry of great lyrical beauty and potent symbolism. His language is simple, clear, and colloquial, yet dense with meaning and wider significance. This brilliant collection features some of Frost's greatest works, including "The Road Not Taken," "Asking for Roses," "The Death of the Hired Man," "In the Home Stretch," "Into My Own," "Meeting and Passing," "Mending Wall," and more. These poems are b...

Carol Shields had a knack for turning the ordinary into the extraordinary and nowhere more than in this luminous collection of short stories. Throughout these stories runs Shields' preoccupation with identity—as in the title story, about a compacted day in the life of the world, in which a procession of characters try on new selves. Yet these stories and their quiet epiphanies reflect all the contrasts of human existence—from the bittersweet sexuality of "Eros" to the wicked skewering of p...

The sonnets of William Shakespeare are among the most famous love poems in the English language. For sustained dramatic intrigue and sophistication of plot, these works are at least the equal of Shakespeare's greatest plays. Compelling, subtle, and intellectually rigorous—yet taut with intense emotion—each poem invites study, interpretation, and awe, from one generation to the next.This recording presents them in their entirety, allowing a new generation to discover Shakespeare's e...

It’s Christmas Eve, 1938, and 15-year-old Cassidy Smith is very pregnant with the child of 40ish Reed Hooker. Cassidy is desperate to marry Reed, Reed is desperate to open Louisiana’s hottest new taxi-dancing emporium and neither are prepared for the arrival of Reed’s wife, Sue Jack Hooker, a dangerous beauty who has just been let out of the penitentiary. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley spins one of her most colorful tales, as she follows a hilarious band of ne’er-do-wells tr...

The original teleplay that became the classic Star Trek episode, with an expanded introductory essay by Harlan Ellison, The City on the Edge of Forever has been surrounded by controversy since the airing of an “eviscerated” version—which subsequently has been voted the most beloved episode in the series’ history. In its original form, The City on the Edge of Forever won the 1966–67 Writers Guild of America Award for Best Teleplay. As aired, it won the 1967 Hugo A...

A collection of classic love poetryComposed by many of the world’s best known and most celebrated poets—including William Blake, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Robert Frost, James Joyce, Christina Rossetti, William Butler Yeats, and others—Valentines spans not only the ages, but the full range of passionate expression of love in all its forms and stages.

They are icons of the literary world whose soaring works have been discussed and analyzed in countless classrooms, homes, and pubs. Yet for most readers, the living, breathing human beings behind the classics have remained unknown—until now. In this utterly captivating book, Dr. Elliot Engel, a leading authority on the lives of great authors, illuminates the fascinating and flawed members of literature’s elite. In lieu of stuffy biographical sketches, Engel provides fascinating anecdotes.

Crime, thriller, and noir fans will delight in this fourth volume of The Greatest Mysteries of All Time, an exciting series featuring short fiction by legendary writers, past and present. From Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, and Georges Simenon to Lawrence Block and Sara Paretsky, this unique collection— compiled and edited by multi-award-winning mystery connoisseur Otto Penzler— is a captivating mixture of mystery and suspense. The stories featured here are:• " The Cas...