New Releases by Tennessee Williams

Seven previously unpublished stories of the Great Depression by America''s poet laureate of the lost

Tennessee Williams' lesser-known one act plays reveal a tantalising and fascinating perspective to one of the world's most important playwrights.

All of the author's previously published poems, including poems from the plays, are in this definitive edition that comes with a CD of the author reading some of his poems in his unmistakable Mississippi drawl. 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. It was as a young poet that Williams first came to the attention of New Directions’ founder James Laughlin, who initially presented some of Williams’ verse in the New Directions anthology Five Young American Poets 1944 (before he had any reputation as a playwright), and later published the individual volumes of Williams’s poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956, revised in 1964) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). In this definitive edition, all of the playwright’s collected and uncollected published poems (along with substantial variants), including poems from the plays, have been assembled, accompanied by explanatory notes and an introduction by Tennessee Williams scholars David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis. The CD included with this paperbook edition features Tennessee Williams reading, in his delightful and mesmerizing Mississippi voice, several of the whimsical folk poems he called his "Blue Mountain Ballads," poems dedicated to Carson McCullers and to his longtime companion Frank Merlo, as well as his long early poem, "The Summer Belvedere."

Two of Tennessee Williams's most revered dramas in a single paperback edition for the first time. Orpheus Descending is a love story, a plea for spiritual and artistic freedom, as well as a portrait of racism and intolerance. When charismatic drifter Valentine Xavier arrives in a Mississippi Delta town with his guitar and snakeskin jacket, he becomes a trigger for hatred and a magnet for three outcast souls: storekeeper Lady Torrance, “lewd vagrant” Carol Cutrere, and religious visionary Vee Talbot. Suddenly Last Summer, described by its author as a “short morality play,” has become one of his most notorious works due in no small part to the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift that shocked audiences in 1959. A menacing tale of madness, jealousy, and denial,the horrors in Suddenly Last Summer build to a heart-stopping conclusion. With perceptive new introductions by playwright Martin Sherman — he reframes Orpheus Descending in a political context and explores the psychology and sensationalism surrounding Suddenly Last Summer — this volume also offers Williams’s related essay, “The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps,” and a chronology of the playwright’s life and works.

This new volume gathers some of Williams' most exuberant early work and includes one-acts that he would later expand to powerful full-length dramas, including "The Pretty Trap," a cheerful take on "The Glass Menagerie," and "Interior: Panic," a stunning precursor to "A Streetcar Named Desire."

Now published for the first time as a trade paperback with a new introduction and the short story on which it was based. Williams wrote: “This is a play about love in its purest terms.” It is also Williams’s robust and persuasive plea for endurance and resistance in the face of human suffering. The earthy widow Maxine Faulk is proprietress of a rundown hotel at the edge of a Mexican cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the defrocked Rev. Shannon, his tour group of ladies from a West Texas women’s college, the self-described New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather, Jonathan Coffin (“the world’s oldest living and practicing poet”), a family of grotesque Nazi vacationers, and an iguana tied by its throat to the veranda, all find themselves assembled for a rainy and turbulent night. This is the first trade paperback edition of The Night of the Iguana and comes with an Introduction by award-winning playwright Doug Wright, the author’s original Foreword, the short story “The Night of the Iguana” which was the germ for the play, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar, Kenneth Holditch. “I’m tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent—yeah, that’s what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this…this…this angry, petulant old man.” —The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, from The Night of the Iguana

"There isn't a dull or conventional page, or an unlovely sentence in the book."--Scott Eyman, The Palm Beach Post

Meticulously edited and annotated, Tennessee Williams's notebooks follow his growth as a writer from his undergraduate days to the publication and production of his most famous plays, from his drug addiction and drunkenness to the heights of his literary accomplishments.

Social outcasts, misfit survivors, dangerous passions--Tennessee Williams fleshed out the characters and themes that would dominate his later work in Fugitive Kind, one of his earliest plays.

Back cover: As mirrors of his emotional and imaginative life, the plays of Tennessee Williams explore the darker side of human nature and are haunted by the pervasive theme of loneliness that is humanity's inescapable destiny. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, one of his masterpieces, seethes with the family tensions, suppressed sexuality and the less-than-secret whisper of scandal that lie beneath the civilized veneer of the American South. The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore is a passionate examination of a woman's life as she recounts her memoirs in the face of death. In The Night Of The Iguana a group of diverse people are thrown together in an isolated Mexican hotel, all imprisoned in their own way.

Winner of the Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters, Modern Language Association, 2001. When first published in 2000, Volume I of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams was hailed as "indispensable" (Choice), "a carefully researched, fully documented study," (Buffalo News) and "a model edition of a significant set of letters by one of America's leading writers" (MLA citation for the Morton N. Cohen Award). This volume will help a widening circle of the great American playwright's readers appreciate that he was also "a prodigy of the letter" (Allan Jalon, San Francisco Chronicle) and that "his letters are among the century's finest" (John Lahr, The New Yorker). Tennessee Williams wrote to family, friends, and fellow artists with equal measures of piety, wit, and astute self-knowledge. Presented with a running commentary to separate Williams's often hilarious, but sometimes devious, counter-reality from truth, the letters form a virtual autobiography of the great American dramatist. Volume I of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: 1920-1945 includes 330 letters written to nearly seventy correspondents and chosen from a group of 900 letters collected by two leading Williams scholars: Albert J. Devlin, professor of English at the University of Missouri, and Nancy M. Tischler, Professor Emerita of English at Pennsylvania State University.

One of Tennessee Williams's first plays, "Not About Nightingales" portrays the lives of inmates in a Pennsylvania prison who were steamed to death after leading their fellow prisoners on a hunger strike.

A play that reflects on the author's life during the summer of 1940, when he was on the brink of becoming a successful playwright, as viewed from the perspective of time.

A collection of short stories by this well known author.

A collection of letters from Williams to his most trusted friend reveal his feelings, opinions, and details of his everyday life.

Through Tennessee Williams' genre-defining gift for melodrama, family secrets are revealed and emotional truths mined in this Pulitzer-winning American classic.

This definitive collection establishes Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century.

Written at various times over the last twenty-five years but never produced, the four scripts included in Tennessee Williams's Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays encompass both the realistic style of "the early Williams" (the author's quotes) and the more experimental dramatic devices of many of his "later" plays. Two screenplays from the fifties, All Gaul Is Divided and The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, remained in the files of Williams's New Orleans apartment until a thorough cleaning uncovered them in the mid-seventies. Thus, All Gaul, an expanded version of the story of a St. Louis teacher's dreams of love told in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1978) actually predates that play. A companion piece in mood and style, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond lyrically evokes the late twenties debutante society of Memphis and the Delta plantations. Adapted from the graphic short story of the same name, One Arm concerns a young male hustler awaiting execution for murder. Because much of the visual action is combined with a voice-over narration, Williams considered the form of this "film-play" from the late sixties somewhat experimental. In Stopped Rocking (1977), Williams returns to a familiar theme, the institution as the last haven of those who cannot cope with daily conflict and have "resigned from life." He was confident that this play, like so many of his others, would eventually find its audience: "I know that the 'dark' of the work is more than balanced by its humanity, and that this light of humanity will tip the balance favorably, as a natural act of grace."

Focusing on one morning and one encounter of four women. Williams once again skillfully explores, with comic irony and great tenderness, the meaning of loneliness, the need for human connection, as well as the inevitable compromises one must make to get through 'the long run of life.'

Serafina delle Rose is a widow whose intense and absorbing instinct for love drives everything before it. Her story, and that of the lover she chooses and the daughter she denies, are forged into a play of power, humanity and soaring emotion in this Tony-winning Tennessee Williams classic.

Chronologically arranged these essays cover thirty years of the playwright's career from the beginning through his triumphs and failures -- from a lyric poet to his first success with$ The Glass Menagerie;$from box office disaster to Politzer Prize; from a dingy apartment in St. Louis to his current retreat in Key West. Written with characteristic honesty, the essays explore the possibilities and limitations of the body, of the spirit, and of the human condition, each possessing a special charm as well as an undercurrent of humor and tenderness.

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.

Volume III of the series includes Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). The first, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Award, has proved every bit as successful as William's earlier A Streetcar Named Desire. The other two plays, though different in kind, both have something of the quality of Greek tragedy in 20th-century settings, bringing about catharsis through ritual death.