The influence of Euripides on the development of the dramatic genre cannot be overstated. Along with Sophocles and Aeschylus he is regarded as one of the three great Greek tragedians from classical antiquity. One of the most important of Euripides' surviving dramas is "Medea", the story of its title character, the wife of Jason of the Argonauts, who seeks revenge upon her unfaithful husband when he abandons her for a another bride. Set in Corinth...

"'The Divine Comedy' begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity. Allen Mandelbaum's astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece that genius whom...

"¿Por qué hay que leer Crimen y castigo ? Pues porque Crimen y castigo es el producto de un genio cuyo mundo gira entre la muerte y la locura, porque Dostoievski era un tío que retornaba vivo de aquellos tenebrosos mundos (sus ataques) directamente para escribir historias que también puedan ser devoradas por la juventud del siglo XXI. Y porque Fiódor Mijáilovich Dostoievski ha sido el escritor que ha compuesto los análisis psicológicos más...

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known popularly by his stage name Molière, is regarded as one of the masters of French comedic drama. When Molière began acting in Paris, there were two well-established theatrical companies, those of the Htel de Bourgogne and the Marais. Joining these theatrical companies would have been impossible for a new member of the acting profession like Molière and thus he performed with traveling troupes of actors in the French...

The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

Born in Skien, Norway in 1828, Henrik Ibsen has often been referred to as the founder of modern drama and modernism in theatre. Ibsen was widely known as an atheist and political radical, and channeled some of those sentiments into his works. "Peer Gynt" captures humankind's unsure, imperfect and opportunistic nature in many memorable scenes: a portrait so intimate and accurate that the play has become a classic in Norwegian literature. This five...

We have Czech writer Karel Čapek to thank for the invention of the word robot and generally for the introduction of the idea of artificial intelligence to the world of literature. His play, "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)" was first performed in 1921 and was an instant success. While the "robots" of the play could be more accurately described as cyborgs, Čapek's influence on the science fiction genre with this play would be profound. "R.U.R."...

After all, the "Moscarda" he believed himself to be was different when he was alone, or with his wife, his tenant, or his friends. And, there were hundreds-no, thousands-of additional Moscardas in the minds of everyone who had met or heard of him. Moscarda grappled with this new knowledge: that he was not who he thought he was, nor who anyone else thought he was. And, the people around him? They were not who he thought they were either. So he decided,...

Oratory is a novel of a brilliant sculptor long regulated to the shadows of the art world. The protagonist Giacomo Serpotta was a genius. The story of his trials and the high points of his career are set among changes of government, plague, and religious fervor of the 17th and 18th centuries in Palermo, Sicily. His work which is only found in Palermo, Alcomo, and Agrigento are wedding cake like confections of white stucco in a banquet of baroque and...

Where are all those movements you made, those passions, those sighs, those sentences, those monologues? They're still here somewhere, in this air, in this space. Things like that don't just vanish. (from Shades of Babel) Goran Stefanovski (1952-2018) was an internationally recognised ex-Yugoslav playwright. Four of his five plays published here have never been available in English before. They all illustrate Stefanovski's characteristic use of source...