An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet caf. A stranger at the next table who has had enough. And a dead man - with a lot of loose ends. So begins Dead Man's Cell Phone, a wildly imaginative new comedy by playwright Sarah Ruhl, recipient of a MacArthur ''Genius'' Grant and Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play The Clean House. A work about how we memorialize the dead - and how that remembering changes us - it is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world. Sarah Ruhl's plays have been produced at theaters around the country, including Lincoln Center Theater, the Goodman Theatre, Arena Stage, South Coast Repertory, Yale Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, among others, and internationally. She is the recipient of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (for The Clean House, 2004), the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, and the Whiting Writers' Award. The Clean House was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005. She is a member of 13P and New Dramatists.

This collection of twenty-nine original essays, surveys satire fromits emergence in Western literature to the present. Tracks satire from its first appearances in the prophetic booksof the Old Testament through the Renaissance and the Englishtradition in satire to Michael Moore’s satirical movieFahrenheit 9/11. Highlights the important influence of the Bible in the literaryand cultural development of Western satire. Focused mainly on major classical and European influences onand works of English satire, but also explores the complex andfertile cultural cross-semination within the tradition of literarysatire.

Twenty-six original essays by leading theorists and historians of the pre-seventeenth-century English stage chart a paradigmatic shift within the field. In contrast to the traditional emphasis on individual authors, the contributors to this storehouse of new historical information and critical insight explore the place of the stage within the larger society, as well as issues of performance and physical space, providing an innovative approach to both literary studies and cultural history.