Best Selling Books by Tennessee Williams

Two of Tennessee Williams''s most revered dramas in a single paperback edition for the first time. Orpheus Descending is a love story, a plea for spiritual and artistic freedom, as well as a portrait of racism and intolerance. When charismatic drifter Valentine Xavier arrives in a Mississippi Delta town with his guitar and snakeskin jacket, he becomes a trigger for hatred and a magnet for three outcast souls: storekeeper Lady Torrance, “lewd vagrant” Carol Cutrere, and religious visionary Vee Talbot. Suddenly Last Summer, described by its author as a “short morality play,” has become one of his most notorious works due in no small part to the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift that shocked audiences in 1959. A menacing tale of madness, jealousy, and denial,the horrors in Suddenly Last Summer build to a heart-stopping conclusion. With perceptive new introductions by playwright Martin Sherman — he reframes Orpheus Descending in a political context and explores the psychology and sensationalism surrounding Suddenly Last Summer — this volume also offers Williams’s related essay, “The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps,” and a chronology of the playwright’s life and works.

These three dramatic works by Tennessee Williams explore the darker side of human nature and are haunted by a sense of isolation and regret. ''Suddenly Last Summer'' is the starkly told story of Catherine, who seemingly goes insane after her cousin Sebastian dies in grisly circumstances on a trip to Europe. ''The Milk Train Doesn''t Stop Here Anymore'' is a passionate examination of a wealthy old woman as she recounts her memories in the face of death, while in ''Small Craft Warnings'' a motley group of people - including a blowsy beautician, a discredited alcoholic doctor, a vulnerable waif and two gay men - sit around a seedy bar on the Californian coast, each contemplating their own desperate fate.

"There isn''t a dull or conventional page, or an unlovely sentence in the book."--Scott Eyman, The Palm Beach Post

In this masterful play, Tennessee Williams explores the meaning of loneliness and the need for human connection through the lens of four women and the designs and desires they harbor—for themselves and for each other. It is a warm June morning in the West End of St. Louis in the mid-thirties––a lovely Sunday for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. But Dorothea, one of Tennessee Williams’s most engaging "marginally youthful," forever hopeful Southern belles, is home waiting for a phone call from the principal of the high school where she teaches civics––the man she expects to fulfill her deferred dreams of romance and matrimony. Williams’s unerring dialogue reveals each of the four characters of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur with precision and clarity: Dorothea, who does even her "setting-up exercises" with poignant flutters; Bodey, her German roommate, who wants to pair Dotty with her beer-drinking twin, Buddy, thereby assuring nieces, nephews, and a family for both herself and Dotty; Helena, a fellow teacher, with the "eyes of a predatory bird," who would like to "rescue" Dotty from her vulgar, common surroundings and substitute an elegant but sterile spinster life; and Miss Gluck, a newly orphaned and distraught neighbor, whom Bodey comforts with coffee and crullers while Helena mocks them both. Focusing on one morning and one encounter of four women, Williams once again skillfully explores, with comic irony and great tenderness, the meaning of loneliness, the need for human connection, as well as the inevitable compromises one must make to get through "the long run of life."

Larger than life - a fable, a Greek tragedy, a comedy, a melodrama - the Tony Award-winning The Rose Tattoo is a valentine from Tennessee Williams to anyone who has ever been in love. In the midst of her anger and grief over news that her late husband had been unfaithful, Serafina delle Rose is courted by a Sicilian truck driver who has the virile body of her husband and the face of a clown - his name, Mangiacavallo, means "eat a horse" in Italian. Teary-eyed, he declares, "I am a human being that drives a truck for bananas." His clumsy flirting unlocks Serafina''s fiery passion, wit and eventually, her capacious love.

Thirteen previously unpublished short plays now available for the first time. Tennessee Williams had a distinct talent for writing short plays and, not surprisingly, this remarkable new collection of never-before-published one-acts includes some of his most poignant and hilarious characters: the indefatigable, witty and tough drag queens of And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens...; the strange little man behind the nom de plume Mister Paradise; and the extravagant mistress who cheats on her married man in The Pink Bedroom. Most were written in the 1930s and early 1940s when Williams was already flexing his theatrical imagination. Chosen from over seventy unpublished one-acts, these are some of Williams''s finest; several have premiered recently at The Hartford Stage Co., The Kennedy Center, the Manhattan Theatre Club and the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. Included in this volume: These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch Mister Paradise The Palooka Escape Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily? Summer At the Lake The Big Game The Pink Bedroom The Fat Man''s Wife Thank You, Kind Spirit The Municipal Abattoir Adam and Eve on a Ferry And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens... Long associated with Williams, acclaimed stage and film actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson provide a fresh and challenging foreword for actors, directors, and readers.

Tennessee Williams freely adapts Anton Chekhov''s Russian classic "The Seagull". From the master twentieth-century playwright Tennessee Williams-an adaptation of Chekhov''s The Sea Gull, never before available to the general trade. The Notebook of Trigorin is faithful to Chekhov''s story of longing and unrequited love. Set on a provincial Russian Estate, its peaceful environs offer stark contrast to the turbulent lives of its characters. Constantine, a young writer, must compete for the attention of his mother, a self-obsessed, often comical aging actress, Madame Arkadina, and his romantic ideal, Nina. His rival for both women is Trigorin, an established author bound to Arkadina by her patronage of his work, and attracted to Nina by her beauty. Trigorin cannot keep himself from consuming everything of value in Constantine''s life. Only in the final scenes do all discover that the price for love and fragility can be horribly high. But if the words in The Notebook of Trigorin are essentially Chekhov''s, the voice belongs firmly to Tennessee Williams. The dialogue resonates with echoes of the themes Williams developed as his signatures-compassion for the artistic soul and its vulnerability in the face of the world''s "successfully practiced duplicity" (Act I).

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams.

A taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner. In 1956, Time magazine called Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll "just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited." The taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge, who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner in Tiger Tail County, Mississippi until she is "ready," has gained in humor and pathos over the years as society has caught up with the author’s savagely honest view of bigotry and lust in the rural South. But Tennessee Williams was first and foremost a writer for the stage, and this reissue of his original screenplay for the Elia Kazan movie of Baby Doll is now accompanied by the script of the full-length stage play, Tiger Tail, developed from that screenplay during the ’70s. The text, which incorporates the author’s final revisions, records the play as it was produced at the Hippodrome Theatre Workshop in Gainesville, Florida, in 1979.

First published in 1947, ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' is an American play by Tennessee Williams, an American playwright, and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O''Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama. It centers on a desolated woman named Blanche DuBois. Raised in Old South aristocratic traditions, she lived elegantly in the family homestead, married a man she adored, and pursued a career as an English teacher. But her life fell apart when she discovered that her husband, Allen Grey, was having a homosexual affair. Humiliated, he killed himself. Blanche sought comfort in the arms of other men, many men. After she had relations with one of her students, a 17-year-old, authorities learned of the encounter and fired her. Though scarred by her past, Blanche still tries to lead the life of an elegant lady and does her best, even lying when necessary, to keep up appearances. Top 10 Hardcover Library Books: A Wrinkle in Time (9789389440188) How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (9789387669161) Their Eyes Were Watching God (9789389440577) The Magic of Believing (9789388118217) Zen in the Art of Archery (9789354990298) A Cloud by Day, a Fire by Night (9789391181611) Siddhartha by Hermann hesse (9789387669116) The Richest Man in Babylon (9789354990717) The Book of Five Rings (9789389440553) The Knowledge of the Holy (9789389157239) Note: Search by ISBN

''He is, quite simply, indispensable'' Peter Shaffer Loneliness, sexual tension and the need for human kindness pervade these three plays by Tennessee Williams, as their characters rage against personal demons and the modern world. In ''Sweet Bird of Youth'' a drifter, Chance Wayne, returns to his home town with an ageing movie actress in search of the girl he loved in his youth, but with terrible, violent results. ''Period of Adjustment'' tells the story of two young newlyweds who visit the husband''s old army friend on Christmas Eve after unsuccessfully consummating their marriage, and unleash forbidden passion, while in ''The Night of the Iguana'' a diverse group of people, including a disturbed ex-minister and a troubled spinster, are thrown together in an isolated Mexican hotel for one eventful night. Sweet Bird of Youth/Period of Adjustment/The Night of the Iguana

Set in a run down bar on the Southern California coast, where a group of lonely and disparate individuals, rejected by "normal" society, come together in their need for human contact and understanding. One by one, each tells his story, revealing the desperate emptiness of his existence.

Back cover: As mirrors of his emotional and imaginative life, the plays of Tennessee Williams explore the darker side of human nature and are haunted by the pervasive theme of loneliness that is humanity''s inescapable destiny. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, one of his masterpieces, seethes with the family tensions, suppressed sexuality and the less-than-secret whisper of scandal that lie beneath the civilized veneer of the American South. The Milk Train Doesn''t Stop Here Anymore is a passionate examination of a woman''s life as she recounts her memoirs in the face of death. In The Night Of The Iguana a group of diverse people are thrown together in an isolated Mexican hotel, all imprisoned in their own way.

Three people - a tubercular man, his foolish new wife, and his virile half-brother - are caught in an isolated farmhouse in the path of a Mississippi flood.

This is the first collection of short stories by Williams ever to be published in England. It shows every facet of this author''s remarkable talent - his tenderness as in The Field of Blue Children, his capacity to shock in the terrifying One Arm, his gift for the macabre in The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly, his uncanny ability to get under the skins of sexual perverts in the pathetic but enormously amusing Two on a Party, and there can seldom have been a more persuasive portrait of a man going to pieces than Brick Pollitt in the volume''s title story.

"Summer and Smoke" is a two-part, thirteen-scene play by Tennessee Williams, originally titled Chart of Anatomy when Williams began work on it in 1945. In 1964, Williams revised the play as "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.""Summer and Smoke" is set in Glorious Hill, Mississippi from the "turn of the century through 1916," and centers on a high-strung, unmarried minister''s daughter, Alma Winemiller, and the spiritual/sexual romance that nearly blossoms between her and the wild, undisciplined young doctor who grew up next door, John Buchanan, Jr. She, ineffably refined, identifies with the gothic cathedral, "reaching up to something beyond attainment"; her name, as Williams makes clear during the play, means "soul" in Spanish; whereas Buchanan, doctor and sensualist, defies her with the soulless anatomy chart. By play''s end, however, Buchanan and Alma have traded places philosophically.Fuji Books'' edition of "Summer And Smoke" contains supplementary texts:* "I Rise In Flame, Cried The Phoenix", a one-act play by Tennessee Williams which presents a fictionalized version of the death of English writer D. H. Lawrence on the French Riveria; Lawrence was one of Williams'' chief literary influences.* An excerpt from "The Glass Menagerie", by Tennessee Williams.* A few selected quotes of Tennessee Williams.

A collection of short stories by this well known author.