Performing Adaptations: Conversations and Essays on the Theory and Practice of Adaptation brings together scholars and artists from across North America and the United Kingdom to contribute to the growing discourse on adaptation in the arts. An ideal text for students of theatre, drama, and performance studies, this volume offers a ground-breaking set of essays, interviews, and artistic reflections that assess adaptation from the perspective of live performance, an aspect of the field that has been under-explored until now. The diverse authors and interview subjects in this anthology take a variety of approaches to both creating and analyzing adaptations, demonstrating the form’s suitability for testing and speaking back to dominant models of creation, production, and analysis. Featuring articles by pioneering adaptation scholar Linda Hutcheon and critically acclaimed writer and critic George Elliott Clarke, Performing Adaptations advances the field of adaptation studies in new and exciting ways. The authors in Performing Adaptations do not comprise a comprehensive view of adaptation studies, but represent a collection of “gutsy” voices that use adaptation to test, and speak back to dominant models of creation, production, and analysis. Some of these perspectives include a group of artists from the African Diaspora, Europe, and Canada (the AfriCan Theatre Ensemble); the voice of Chinese-Canadian playwright, Marjorie Chan; the innovative storytelling of Beth Watkins, and her adaptation of letters written by transgendered student activist, Jesse Carr; the views of vanguard Canadian queer filmmaker, John Greyson; and African-Canadian poet, novelist, and critic, George Elliott Clarke. Their adaptation of sources to other genres, mediums, and cultural contexts represent the act of a radical, dialogical reading, writ large.

Here lies Lord Berners/One of life's learners, Thanks be to the Lord/He was never bored. So reads the epitaph on the gravestone of Lord Berners. In its witty way, it hints at his range of accomplishment. He was a composer (admired by Stravinsky), writer, painter, aesthete and eccentric, indeed in Mark Amory's words 'The Last Eccentric', famously dyeing the pigeons at his house, Faringdon, in vibrant colours, and, for a time, having a giraffe as a pet and tea companion. His literary and artistic milieu was glittering: Stravinsky, Picasso, Salvador Dali, Siegfried Sassoon, John Betjeman, the Sitwells, Harold Nicolson, Frederick Ashton and Gertrude Stein - they all belonged to it. In fiction, he was famously portrayed as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. 'As social history and a chronicle of a mad-cap English eccentric this long awaited, much needed and beautifully written book is, to use a simple cliché, indispensable.' Alexander Waugh, Literary Review 'In Amory, this engaging character has found the ideal biographer. Getting the exact measure of its subject throughout, written in a dry, wittily ironic prose ... the biography offers of sheer bliss.' Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times

Like The Bolter and Portrait of a Marriage, this beguiling, heady tale of a scandalous ménage à trois among England's upper classes combines memoir and biography to re-create an unforgettably decadent world. Among the glittering stars of British society, Sofka Zinovieff's grandparents lived and loved with abandon. Robert Heber-Percy was a dashing young man who would rather have a drink than open a book, so his involvement with Jennifer Fry, a gorgeous socialite famous for her style and charm, was not surprising. But by the time Robert met and married Jennifer, he had already been involved with a man—Gerald, Lord Berners—for more than a decade. Stout, eccentric and significantly older, Gerald was a composer, writer and aesthete—a creative aristocrat most at home in the company of the era's best and brightest minds. He also owned one of Britain's loveliest stately homes, Faringdon House, in Oxfordshire, which under his stewardship became a beacon of sybaritic beauty. Robert and Gerald made an unlikely couple, especially because they lived together at Faringdon House when homosexuality was illegal. And then a pregnant Jennifer moved into Faringdon in 1942, creating a formidable ménage à trois. In this gorgeous, entertaining narrative of bohemian aristocracy, Sofka Zinovieff probes the mysteries of her grandparents and the third man in their marriage: Gerald, the complex and talented heir to a legendary house, its walls lined with priceless art and its gardens roamed by a bevy of doves, where he entertained everyone from Igor Stravinsky to Gertrude Stein. What brought Robert and Jennifer together under his roof, and why did Jennifer stay—and marry Robert? Blending memoir and biography in her quest to lay old ghosts to rest, Zinovieff pieces together the complicated reality behind the scandals of revelry and sexuality. The resulting story, defined by keen insight, deep affection and marvelous wit, captures the glory and indulgence of the age, and explores the many ways in which we have the capacity to love.

When Helen Fielding first wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary, charting the life of a 30-something singleton in London in the 1990s, she introduced readers to one of the most beloved characters in modern literature. The book was published in 40 countries, sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, and spawned a best-selling sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. The two books were turned into major blockbuster films starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. With her hotly anticipated third instalment, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Fielding introduces us to a whole new enticing phase of Bridget’s life set in contemporary London, including the challenges of maintaining sex appeal as the years roll by and the nightmare of drunken texting, the skinny jean, the disastrous email cc, total lack of twitter followers, and TVs that need 90 buttons and three remotes to simply turn on. An uproariously funny novel of modern life, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a triumphant return of our favourite Everywoman.

Then in a beautiful cloud of Holy, I go out the door to meet with my people, to see if I really am. With the angelus and two and six in my pocket, I am a rich and holy possible Jesus. I stop and talk to everyone I meet: 'Hello, I might be Jesus.' Meet Pakie. An orphan, a storyteller, an adventurer, a survivor. He may not be the sharpest sandwich in the tool box, but Pakie knows a thing or two about the history of his native town – from the vicious Vikings, to the less-than Christian Brothers. Pakie's a laugh a minute . . . but he's got secrets. Secrets the God-fearing people of Oggle may not be ready to hear. Written by renowned Irish actor Peter Gowen, The Chronicles of Oggle is a hilarious and heartbreaking story of small towns and even smaller minds.