Aspiring playwright, Kate Gamble, is struggling to launch a script she's been secretly researching her entire life, mostly at the family dinner table. Her father is Christian Gamble, CEO of Buck Technologies, a private data integration company whose clients include the CIA and virtually every counter-terrorism organization in the Western World. Kate's father adores her, and a play about the dark side of Big Data would be the ultimate betrayal in his...

"From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia, an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception. Fates and Furies is a literary masterpiece that defies expectation. A dazzling examination of a marriage, it is also a portrait of creative partnership written by one of the best writers of her generation. Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes,...

Meg is eight-and-a-half months pregnant with twins when she and Michael host a Spanish playwright for the production of his play by one of Michael's graduate students. Then enters the dean of the English department and a man from the college president's office, who say Michael's student is not allowed to do his dissertation and that the play must be canceled. While discussing this, the dean is found murdered. Meg's house becomes a crime scene, and...

Kevin Kling, best known for his popular commentaries on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and his storytelling stage shows like Tales from the Charred Underbelly of the Yule Log, delivers hilarious, often tender stories to readers everywhere with his first book, he Dog Says How. Kling's autobiographical tales are as enchanting as they are true to life: hopping freight trains, getting hit by lightning, performing his banned play in Czechoslovakia,...

The "refreshing . . . laugh-out-loud" #1 New York Times bestseller about life in the suburbs that was adapted into a classic film comedy. One day, Tony Award–winning playwright Jean Kerr packed up her four kids (and husband, Walter, one of Broadway's sharpest critics), and left New York City. They moved to a faraway part of the world that promised a grassy utopia where daisies grew wild and homes were described as neo-gingerbread. In this collection...

In the 1920s, in an Italian villa called Il Piacere, the playwright Galeazzo D'Ascanio lived for his muse and mistress, Celia Sands. The night before she was to perform the leading role in his most original play, Celia disappeared. Now, 60 years later, his grandson is about to stage the play - and a promising young actress, named Celia is to star.

"In this poignant and deeply intimate memoir, Sarah Ruhl chronicles her experience with Bell's palsy after giving birth to twins. At night, I dreamed that I could smile. The smile felt effortless in my dreams, the way it did in my childhood. Happily married and in the flush of hard-earned professional success, with her first play opening on Broadway, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high risk pregnancy and given birth to twins when she discovers the...

Will in the World interweaves a searching account of Elizabethan England with a vivid narrative of the playwright's life. We see Shakespeare learning his craft, starting a family, and forging a career for himself in the wildly competitive London theater world, while at the same time grappling with dangerous religious and political forces that took less-agile figures to the scaffold. The basic biographical facts of Shakespeare's life have been known...

"August Wilson (1945-2005) was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who had a particular talent for capturing the authentic, everyday voice of Black Americans. As a child, he read off soup cans and cereal boxes, and when his mother brought him to the library, his whole world opened up. After facing intense prejudice at school from both students and some teachers, August dropped out. However, he continued reading and educating himself independently....

It seems that aspiring playwright Natalie and musician Reid have been in competition all their young lives, but when they are forced to compete for scarce school budget dollars they embark on an all-out prank war which backfires; now they are forced to cooperate, pool their talents and ambitions to produce a school musical--and not only is cooperation an unfamiliar role, but they are suddenly starting to have feelings for each other.