New Releases by Tennessee Williams

A collection of poetic works by the eminent playwright features substantial piece variants, poems from his plays, and accompanying explanatory notes, in a volume that is complemented by a CD recording of the author''s reading of his "Blue Mountain Ballads" and other works.

Profiles the works of Tennessee Williams and provides information on his life and writing career.

Volume I of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams ends with the unexpected triumph of The Glass Menagerie. Volume II extends the correspondence from 1946 to 1957, a time of intense creativity which saw the production of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Following the immense success of Streetcar, Williams struggles to retain his prominence with a prodigious outpouring of stories, poetry, and novels as well as plays. Several major film projects, including the notorious Baby Doll, bring Williams and his collaborator Elia Kazan into conflict with powerful agencies of censorship, exposing both the conservative landscape of the 1950s and Williams'' own studied resistance to the forces of conformity. Letters written to Kazan, Carson McCullers, Gore Vidal, publisher James Laughlin, and Audrey Wood, Williams'' resourceful agent, continue earlier lines of correspondence and introduce new celebrity figures. The Broadway and Hollywood successes in the evolving career of America''s premier dramatist vie with a string of personal losses and a deepening depression to make this period an emotional and artistic rollercoaster for Tennessee. Compiled by leading Williams scholars Albert J. Devlin, Professor of English at the University of Missouri, and Nancy M. Tischler, Professor Emerita of English at the Pennsylvania State University, Volume II maintains the exacting standard of Volume I, called by Choice: "a volume that will prove indispensable to all serious students of this author...meticulous annotations greatly increase the value of this gathering."

A crucible of so many elements that would later shape and characterize Williams''s work.--World Literature Today

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

This book is William''s symbol for the military-industrial complex and all the dehumanizing trends it represents from mindless cocktail party chatter to bribery of officials to assassination plots directed against those who won''t play the game, to attempted coups by right-wing zealots.

The interviews selected for this volume encompass five decades of an intense literary life and range from the standard and well-known to the more obscure and specialized. The interviews are filled with revealing insights into Williams'' works and career. Most of them employ the essay-interview format. The three dozen or so interviews in this volume have been chosen, in part, to retrace the progress of Williams'' long career by marking important dramatic productions and documenting telling moments in his personal and artistic life. ISBN 0-87805-263-1 (pbk.): $14.95.

A classic play by Tennessee Williams in a definitive, author-approved edition.

THE STORY: As in its later and substantially re-written version (entitled ORPHEUS DESCENDING), the play deals with the arrival of a virile young drifter, Val Xavier, in a sleepy, small town in rural Mississippi. He takes a job in the dry goods stor

An alternate version of an experimental, partially autobiographical play by Tennessee Williams. The characters, Felice and Clare, are two actors on tour, as well as brother and sister. Left behind by the rest of the company, they try to present a show, making up what has been forgotten or not yet written.

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.

Theatre of Tennessee Williams Vol. 2. The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real.

"First published as New Directions Paperbook 287, 1970; published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited."--T.p. verso.

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.

Here are the eleven remarkable stories of Tennessee Williams''s first volume of short fiction, originally published in 1948 and reissued as a paperbook in response to an increasingly insistent public demand. It was this book which established Williams as a short story writer of the same stature and interest he had shown as a dramatist. Each story has qualities that make it memorable. In "One Arm" we live through his last hours and memories with a ''rough trade" ex-prizefighter who is awaiting execution for murder. "The Field of Blue Children" explores some of the strange ways of the human heart in love, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" is a luminous and nostalgic recollection of characters who figure in "The Glass Menagerie," while "Desire and the Black Masseur" is an excursion into the logic of the macabre. "The Yellow Bird," well known through the author''s recorded reading of it, which tells of a minister''s daughter who found a particularly violent but satisfactory way of expiating a load of inherited puritan guilt, may well become part of American mythology.

Few writers achieve success in more than one genre, and yet if Tennessee Williams had never written a single play he would still be known as a distinguished poet. The excitement, compassion, lyricism, and humor that epitomize his writing for the theater are all present in his poetry. ufeffTennessee Williams''s fame as a playwright has unjustly overshadowed his accomplishment in poetry. This paperback edition of In The Winter of Cities-his collected poems to 1962-permits a wider audience to know Williams the poet. The poems in this volume range from songs and short lyrics to personal statements of the greatest intensity and power. They are rich in imagery and illuminated by the psychological intuition which we know so well from Williams''s plays.

This character drama pits the aging, wealthy and vicious Mrs. Goforth, frantically trying to finish her memoirs before her death, against the calm young man named Chris Flanders, a poet who is too virtuous to be seduced by the elderly women he visits.

For use in schools and libraries only. Tennessee Williams'' classic drama studies the emotional disintegration of a Southern woman whose last chance for happiness is destroyed by her vindictive brother-in-law.

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.