Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 1

Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 1

Alan Bennett

Fiction / Writing / Books About Books

This collection of Alan Bennett's work includes his first play and West End hit, Forty Years On, as well as Getting On, Habeus Corpus, and Enjoy. Forty Years On 'Alan Bennett's most gloriously funny play ... a brilliant, youthful perception of a nation in decline, as seen through the eyes of a home-grown school play ... a classic.' Daily Mail Getting On Winner of the Evening Standard Best Comedy Award in 1971, Getting on is an account of a middle-aged Labour MP, so self-absorbed that he remains blind to the fact that his wife is having an affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law in dying, his son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool and that to everyone who comes into contact with him he is a self-esteeming joke. Habeus Corpus 'After two elegiac comedies about the decline of old England, Mr Bennett has now written a gorgeously vulgar but densely plotted facre that is a downright celebration of sex and the human body ... a combination of hurtling action...
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Happy Birthday and All That

Happy Birthday and All That

Rebecca Smith

Nonfiction / Language / Writing

Posy has always dreamt of being the heroine of a Francoise Sagan novel. But life seems to have her passed by and now here she is, a stressed-out mother of four. Although she's married to a man called Parouselli who comes from a long line of trapeze artists and they live in a large, romantic house, it's not quite as magical as it sounds. Frank's dream of being a musician is a reality of distributing BettaKleen catalogues, the house is falling to bits and there are slugs living under the bath. Posy wonders how everyone else manages. Struggling through the mess of family life, she dreams of being a member of The Thin Legs Club, with an immaculate house, children who don't get ill, and a human Renault Espace of a husband. If only!
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The Uncommon Reader: A Novella

The Uncommon Reader: A Novella

Alan Bennett

Fiction / Writing / Books About Books

From one of England's most celebrated writers, the author of the award-winningThe History Boys, a funny and superbly observed novella about the Queen of England and the subversive power of readingWhen her corgis stray into a mobile library parked near Buckingham Palace, the Queen feels duty-bound to borrow a book. Discovering the joy of reading widely (from J. R. Ackerley, Jean Genet, and Ivy Compton-Burnett to the classics) and intelligently, she finds that her view of the world changes dramatically. Abetted in her newfound obsession by Norman, a young man from the royal kitchens, the Queen comes to question the prescribed order of the world and loses patience with the routines of her role as monarch. Her new passion for reading initially alarms the palace staff and soon leads to surprising and very funny consequences for the country at large.
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Dead Girls

Dead Girls

Alice Bolin

Nonfiction / Writing / Essays

"Dead Girls is everything I want in an essay collection: provocative lines of inquiry, macabre humor, blistering intelligence... I love this book." — Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties"Bracing and blazingly smart, Alice Bolin's Dead Girls could hardly be more needed or more timely." — Megan Abbott, Edgar Award-winning author of You Will Know MeBest of summer 2018 - included on best-of lists by Bitch Magazine, Harpers Bazaar, The Millions, Esquire, Refinery29, Nylon, Book Riot, and CrimeReadsIn this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as...
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Trophy House

Trophy House

Anne Bernays

Language / Writing / Nonfiction

Trophy House is an extraordinary and complex novel, at one level a romantic thriller, at another a deeply satisfying story about the disintegration of a marriage and the consequences for all concerned -- that rare piece of fiction that is at once thrilling, grown-up and completely believable.It begins with the construction of a totally inappropriate and enormous house -- a "trophy house" -- which unexpectedly comes to threaten the tranquillity of what appears to be one woman's perfect life and marriage. Dannie Faber has lots of reasons to feel blessed. A children's book illustrator, she shares a loving marriage with Tom, an M.I.T. professor, with whom she divides her time between one of Boston's finest suburbs and a beloved beach house in Truro, on Cape Cod. And then, for reasons she could not possibly have foreseen, Dannie's life begins to unravel.With Trophy House, Anne Bernays -- author of Professor Romeo and Growing Up Rich -- delivers a poig...
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Hot And Heavy With My Dad's Best Friend (BBW Contemporary Taboo Romance)

Hot And Heavy With My Dad's Best Friend (BBW Contemporary Taboo Romance)

Ava May

Nonfiction / Writing / Essays

Get your Taboo Romance fix NOW with this naughty standalone Older Man Younger Woman Romance between a BBW and her Dad's Sexy Best Friend.When Jenna finds herself stranded on a deserted road in the middle of the night, she knows she’s stuck. Her cellphone is as dead as the area, and there’s no traffic in sight. Just as she starts to worry that this is a classic “girl in distress” horror flick setup, her savior arrives.Nick can’t believe his best friend’s daughter looks so hot. Typically demure Jenna has turned him on for years. Jenna in sexy clothes drives him crazy. He’d like to do a lot more than just taking her home. But will their age difference cause them both to lose out? Warning: contains mature themes and language. Intended for 18+ readers only.Standalone. No Cliffhangers.
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Four Stories

Four Stories

Alan Bennett

Fiction / Writing / Books About Books

The Laying on of Hands, the painfully observant account of a memorial service for a masseur to the famous. The Clothes They Stood Up In, the comic tale of an elderly couple's trials after their flat is stripped completely bare. Father! Father! Burning Bright, the savage satire on the family of a dying man who rules over them from his hospital bed. The Lady in the Van, the true story of the eccentric old woman who is invited to live in a homeowner's front garden. She stays there, in her van, for fifteen years. The home is Alan Bennett's. It became a West End hit, starring Maggie Smith.Like everything Bennett does, these stories are playful, witty and painfully observant of ordinary people's foibles. They all have brilliant twists, are immensely entertaining and highly moral. And all are modern classics.
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Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 2

Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 2

Alan Bennett

Fiction / Writing / Books About Books

This second volume of plays by Alan Bennett includes his two Kafka plays, one an hilarious comedy, the other a profound and searching drama. Also included is An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution. The fascination of these two plays lies in the way they question our accepted notions of treachery and, in different ways, make a sympathetic case for Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.
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American Like Me

American Like Me

America Ferrera

Nonfiction / Writing / Essays

From award-winning actress and political activist America Ferrera comes a vibrant and varied collection of first person accounts from prominent figures about the experience of growing up between cultures.America Ferrera has always felt wholly American, and yet, her identity is inextricably linked to her parents' homeland and Honduran culture. Speaking Spanish at home, having Saturday-morning-salsa-dance-parties in the kitchen, and eating tamales alongside apple pie at Christmas never seemed at odds with her American identity. Still, she yearned to see that identity reflected in the larger American narrative. Now, in American Like Me, America invites thirty-one of her friends, peers, and heroes to share their stories about life between cultures. We know them as actors, comedians, athletes, politicians, artists, and writers. However, they are also immigrants, children or grandchildren of immigrants, indigenous people, or people who otherwise grew up...
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Untold Stories

Untold Stories

Alan Bennett

Fiction / Writing / Books About Books

Alan Bennett's first collection of prose since Writing Home takes in all his major writings over the last ten years. The title piece is a poignant family memoir with an account of the marriage of his parents, the lives and deaths of his aunts and the uncovering of a long-held family secret. Also included are his much celebrated diaries for the years 1996 to 2004. At times heartrending and at others extremely funny, Untold Stories is a matchless and unforgettable anthology. 'Funny, moving and true.' Blake Morrison, Guardian 'I have never read a book of this length where I have turned the last page with such regret. It is intelligent, educated, engaging, humane, self-aware, cantankerous and irresistibly funny. You want it to go on forever.' John Carey, Sunday Times 'I can only join the mighty chorus of praise.' Nicholas Hytner, Sunday Telegraph 'Alan Bennett, with his combination of pitiless observation and gentle understatement, is perhaps the best loved of English writers alive...
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The Man on the Third Floor

The Man on the Third Floor

Anne Bernays

Language / Writing / Nonfiction

Walter Samson is a successful book editor in post World War Two New York. He has more than enough money, an interesting wife, Phyllis, two smart children and reason to believe he's leading the good American life. That is, until he meets Barry Rogers by chance. Barry is blue collar, handsome, single and poor. Walter is instantly drawn to Barry and, despite the considerable risks, installs him in the Samson's three storey house on the Upper East Side, where the two men try to keep their amorous relationship secret. Against a backdrop of McCarthy-era fear with its doleful consequences and with society's pervasive homophobia, Walter manages to alter the direction and course of his life, losing much, gaining more.
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