This remarkably illuminating portrait of Tennessee Williams lifts the veil on the heart and soul of his artistic inspiration: the unspoken collaboration between playwright and actor. At a low moment in Williams’s life, he summoned to New Orleans a young twenty-year-old writer, James Grissom, who had written him a letter asking for advice. After a long, intense conversation, Williams sent Grissom on a journey on his behalf to find out if he or his work had mattered to those who had so deeply mattered to him. Among the more than seventy women and men with whom Grissom talked were giants of American theater and film: Lillian Gish, (“the escort who brought me to Blanche”), Jessica Tandy (the original Blanche DuBois on Broadway), Eva Le Gallienne (“She was a stone against which I could rub my talent and feel that it became sharper”), Maureen Stapleton, Julie Harris, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, and many more. Follies of God provides dazzling insight into how Williams conjured the dramatic characters and plays that so transformed American theater.

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Biography Category National Book Award Finalist 2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award A Chicago Tribune 'Best Books of 2014' USA Today: 10 Books We Loved Reading Washington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014 The definitive biography of America's greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker. John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life—his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin—Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen. The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life. Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

It's not that the dignified and rarefied old Episcopal Church quit believing in God. It's that the God you increasingly hear spoken of in Episcopal circles is infinitely tolerant and given to sudden changes of mind - not quite the divinity you thought you were reading about in the scriptures. Episcopalians of the twenty-first century, like their counterparts in other churches of the so-called American mainline - such as Methodists and Presbyterians - seem to prefer a God that the culture would be proud of, as against a culture that God would be proud of. While they work to rebrand and reshelve orthodox Christianity for the modern market, exponents of the new thinking are busy reducing mainstream Christian witness to a shadow of its former self. Mortal Follies is the story of the Episcopal Church's mad dash to catch up with a secular culture fond of self-expression and blissfully relaxed as to norms and truths. An Episcopal layman, William Murchison details how leaders of his church, starting in the late 1960s, looked over the culture of liberation, liked what they saw, and went skipping along with the shifting cultural mood - especially when the culture demanded that the church account for its sins of heterosexism and racism. Episcopalians have blended so deeply into the cultural woodwork that it's hard sometimes to remember that it all began as a divine calling to the normative and the eternal.

The actress best known for her work on "3rd Rock from the Sun" traces the story of her career and the personal difficulties that challenged her after "3rd Rock" ended.

Although the venue Off Broadway has long been the birthplace of innovative and popular musicals, there have been few studies of these influential works. Long-running champs, such as The Fantasticks and Little Shop of Horrors, are discussed in many books about American musicals, but what of the hundreds of other Off-Broadway musicals? In Off-Broadway Musicals since 1919, Thomas Hischak looks at more than 375 musicals, which are described, discussed, and analyzed, with particular attention given to their books, scores, performers, and creators. Presented chronologically and divided into chapters for each decade, beginning with the landmark musical Greenwich Village Follies (1919), the book culminates with the satiric The Toxic Avenger (2009). In this volume, any work of consequence is covered, especially if it was popular or influential, but also dozens of more obscure musicals are included to illustrate the depth and breadth of Off Broadway. Works that introduced an important artistic talent, from performers to songwriters, are looked at, and the selection represents the various trends and themes that made Off Broadway significant. In addition to essential data about each musical, the plot and score are described, the success (or lack of) is chronicled, and an opinionated commentary discusses the work's merits and influences on the musical theatre in general. The first book of its kind, this highly readable volume will please both the theatre scholar and the average musical theatre patron or fan.

A collection of 180 personal, true-life accounts from NPR's National Story Project reflects the work of men and women of all ages, backgrounds, and walks of life and is accompanied by a look at the role of storytelling in our lives.

Return to the world of Rivers of London in this first short story collection from bestselling author, Ben Aaronovitch. Tales from the Folly is a carefully curated collection that gathers together previously published stories and brand new tales in the same place for the first time. Each tale features a new introduction from the author, filled with insight and anecdote offering the reader a deeper into this absorbing fictional world. This is a must read for any Rivers of London fan. Join Peter, Nightingale, Abigail, Agent Reynolds and Tobias Winter for a series of perfectly portioned tales. Discover what’s haunting a lonely motorway service station, who still wanders the shelves of a popular London bookshop, and what exactly happened to the River Lugg... With an introduction from internationally bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse series, Charlaine Harris. This collection includes: The Home Crowd Advantage The Domestic The Cockpit The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Granny King of The Rats A Rare Book of Cunning Device A Dedicated Follower of Fashion Favourite Uncle Vanessa Sommer’s Other Christmas List Three Rivers, Two Husbands and a Baby Moments One-Three Praise for the Rivers of London series: “Ben Aaronovitch has created a wonderful world full of mystery, magic and fantastic characters. I love being there more than the real London” –Nick Frost “A superlative blend of whimsy and grit...Jim Butcher meets Douglas Adams” —Publishers Weekly “...my favorite current series... delightful, compulsive and fresh—with a love of multicultural London evident on every page, wonderfully diverse characters, magic, mystery, and mayhem. Once you start, you will literally not be able to put them down.” —Lavie Tidhar in Washington Post “...recounted with deadpan British wit and irony...packed with fascinating historical detail... Lively and amusing and different.” —Kirkus