It’s 11:30 a.m. and already it’s ninety-two degrees. At the bottom of a drained swimming pool, four ridiculous men connive, plot, and play for an unwinnable love, even as they face certain death at the hands of her returning husband. A riveting and savage take on the classic Greek myth of Penelope, wife of Odysseus.

"Essential Spirituality beautifully articulates the benefits of spiritual living in the material world."-Dan Millman, author, Everyday Enlightenment and The Way of the Peaceful Warrior "Deceptively simple. Its power is rooted not only in Dr. Walsh's formidable intellectual capacity to deal effectively with a vast body of religious literature but in his own deep spiritual practices in a multitude of disciplines over many years. An important contribution."-Ram Dass, author, Be Here Now "An absolute masterpiece . . . Essential Spirituality is helpful to both the unseasoned and seasoned seeker. The writing is deep, simple, and clear yet at the same time poetic and musical. A must read."-GERALD G. JAMPOLSKY, M.D. author, Love Is Letting Go of Fear "Energetic, engaged, and occasionally electrifying. . . . The field of spiritual books has been looking for its own Lewis Thomas or Carl Sagan, and I believe Roger Walsh may be that one."-KEN WILBER, author, One Taste and A Brief History of Everything Based on over twenty years of research and spiritual practice, this is a groundbreaking and life-changing book. In his decades of study, Dr. Roger Walsh has discovered that each of the great spiritual traditions has both a common goal and seven common practices to reach that goal: recognizing the sacred and divine that exist both within and around us. Filled with stories, exercises, meditations, myths, prayers, and practical advice, Essential Spirituality shows how you can integrate these seven principles into one truly rewarding way of life in which kindness, love, joy, peace, vision, wisdom, and generosity become an ever-growing part of everything you do.

Julie Walsh wanted to help people. But her life was overturned from the start when a virus took over and destroyed most of the world. Society stayed intact, thanks to the survivors and the technology of the suits. Fast-forward fifteen years and Julie is forced into a situation where she must question all that she understood and loved.

Irish Theatre in the Twenty-First Century is the first in-depth study of the subject. It analyses the ways in which theatre in Ireland has developed since the 1990s when emerging playwrights Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, and Enda Walsh turned against the tradition of lyrical eloquence with a harsh and broken dramatic language. Companies such as Blue Raincoat, the Corn Exchange, and Pan Pan pioneered an avant-garde dramaturgy that no longer privileged the playwright. This led to new styles of production of classic Irish works, including the plays of Synge, mounted in their entirety by Druid. The changed environment led to a re-imagining of past Irish history in the work of Rough Magic and ANU, plays by Owen McCafferty, Stacey Gregg, and David Ireland, dramatizing the legacy of the Troubles, and adaptations of Greek tragedy by Marina Carr and others reflecting the conditions of modern Ireland. From 2015, the movement #WakingTheFeminists led to a sharpened awareness of gender. While male playwrights showed a toxic masculinity on the stage, a generation of female dramatists including Carr, Gregg, and Nancy Harris gave voice to the experiences of women long suppressed in conservative Ireland. For three separate periods, 2006, 2016, 2020-2, the author served as one of the judges for the Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards, attending all new productions across the island of Ireland. This allowed him to provide the detailed overview of the 'state of play' of Irish theatre in each of those times which punctuate the book as one of its most innovative features. Drawing also on interviews with Ireland's leading theatre makers, Grene provides readers with a close-up understanding of Irish theatre in a period when Ireland became for the first time a fully modernized, secular, and multi-ethnic society.

This book is about the history of character in modern Irish drama. It traces the changing fortunes of the human self in a variety of major Irish plays across the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Through the analysis of dramatic protagonists created by such authors as Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, Friel and Murphy, and McGuinness and Walsh, it tracks the development of aesthetic and literary styles from modernism to more recent phenomena, from Celtic Revival to Celtic Tiger, and after. The human character is seen as a testing ground and battlefield for new ideas, for social philosophies, and for literary conventions through which each historical epoch has attempted to express its specific cultural and literary identity. In this context, Irish drama appears to be both part of the European literary tradition, engaging with its most contentious issues, and a field of resistance to some conventions from continental centres of avant-garde experimentation. Simultaneously, it follows artistic fashions and redefines them in its critical contribution to European artistic and theatrical diversity.

This volume represents perspectives on a number of aspects of modern Anglo-American drama and dramatists written by scholars from ex-Yugoslav republics, resulting from long years of common interest and cooperation in the field between the corresponding English Departments in the region. The volume was inspired by the Word across Cultures conference, organised by the Institute of Foreign Languages of the University of Montenegro in Podgorica, Montenegro, in July 2014. The researchers who participated in the conference’s literature section were testament to the growing interest in drama among regional literature scholars. The book will appeal to both an academic and non-academic readership. The former will, certainly, benefit from this book since English and, especially, American drama is not appropriately represented by the number of published books it deserves world-wide. The volume provides a South-East European perspective on Anglo-American drama, and represents a valuable addition to existing drama scholarship, since all the contributors are from the ex-Yugoslav republics and write from a standpoint of multiple othernesses. It will also be of interest to theatre and film scholars, as well as theatre and film enthusiasts, because of the variety of approaches adopted in the papers.

Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction examines the representation of selfhood in adolescent and children's fiction, using a Bakhtinian approach to subjectivity, language, and narrative. The ideological frames within which identities are formed are inextricably bound up with ideas about subjectivity, ideas which pervade and underpin adolescent fictions. Although the humanist subject has been systematically interrogated by recent philosophy and criticism, the question which lies at the heart of fiction for young people is not whether a coherent self exists but what kind of self it is and what are the conditions of its coming into being. Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction has a double focus: first, the images of selfhood that the fictions offer their readers, especially the interactions between selfhood, social and cultural forces, ideologies, and other selves; and second, the strategies used to structure narrative and to represent subjectivity and intersubjectivity.