New Releases by Tennessee Williams

What’s not to like about Tennessee Williams’s most forthright work about homosexual love, with its gay figure skaters, runaways, and sex? An erotic, sensual, and comic novel that was a generation ahead of its time, Moise and the World of Reason has at its center the need of three people for each other: Lance, the beautiful black figure skater full of love and lust for young men as well as a craving for drugs; the nameless gay young narrator, a runaway writer from Alabama who lives near the piers of New York City’s West Village, c. 1975, frantically filling notebooks with his observations; and Moise, a young woman who speaks in riddles and can never finish her paintings or consummate her affairs. The long unavailable Moise and the World of Reason represents a kind of uncensored Williams, radically frank, fully articulated, and deeply tender: a true gem.

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.

Born out of the journals the playwright kept at the time, Tennessee Williams''s Vieux Carré is not emotion recollected in tranquility, but emotion re-created with all the pain, compassion, and wry humor of the playwright''s own 1938-39 sojourn in the New Orleans French Quarter vividly intact. The drama takes it form from the shifting scenes of memory, and Williams''s surrogate self invites us to focus, in turn, on the various inhabitants or his dilapidated rooming house in the Vieux Carré: the comically desperate landlady, Mrs. Wire; Jane, a properly brought-up young woman from New York making at last grab at pleasure with Tye, the vulgar but appealing strip-joint barker; two decayed gentlewomen politely starving in the garret; and the dying painter Nightingale, who tries to teach the young writer something about love--both of the body and of the heart. This is a play about the education of the artist, and education in loneliness and despair, in giving and not giving, but most of all in seeing, hearing, feeling, and learning that "writers are shameless spies," who pay dearly for their knowledge and who cannot forget. Building on two decades of Williams scholarship since Vieux Carré was originally published, Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, has provided a new introduction for this edition, giving the most authoritative account yet of its background and genesis.

A taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner. In 1956, Time magazine called Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll "just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited." The taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge, who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner in Tiger Tail County, Mississippi until she is "ready," has gained in humor and pathos over the years as society has caught up with the author’s savagely honest view of bigotry and lust in the rural South. But Tennessee Williams was first and foremost a writer for the stage, and this reissue of his original screenplay for the Elia Kazan movie of Baby Doll is now accompanied by the script of the full-length stage play, Tiger Tail, developed from that screenplay during the ’70s. The text, which incorporates the author’s final revisions, records the play as it was produced at the Hippodrome Theatre Workshop in Gainesville, Florida, in 1979.

This definitive collection establishes Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century. Tennessee Williams’ Collected Stories combines the four short-story volumes published during Williams’ lifetime with previously unpublished or uncollected stories. Arranged chronologically, the forty-nine stories, when taken together with the memoir of his father that serves as a preface, not only establish Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century, but also, in Gore Vidal’s view, constitute the real autobiography of Williams’ "art and inner life."

These three dramatic works by Tennessee Williams explore the darker side of human nature and are haunted by a sense of isolation and regret. ''Suddenly Last Summer'' is the starkly told story of Catherine, who seemingly goes insane after her cousin Sebastian dies in grisly circumstances on a trip to Europe. ''The Milk Train Doesn''t Stop Here Anymore'' is a passionate examination of a wealthy old woman as she recounts her memories in the face of death, while in ''Small Craft Warnings'' a motley group of people - including a blowsy beautician, a discredited alcoholic doctor, a vulnerable waif and two gay men - sit around a seedy bar on the Californian coast, each contemplating their own desperate fate.

"I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix" is a one-act play by Tennessee Williams. It presents a fictionalized version of the death of English writer D. H. Lawrence on the French Riveria; Lawrence was one of Williams'' chief literary influences. The play was completed in 1941, but was not published until 1951.The action of this play, which is imaginary, takes place in the French Riviera where D. H. Lawrence died.Not long before Lawrence''s death an exhibition of his paintu00adings was held in London. Primitive in technique and boldly sensual in matter, this exhibition created a little tempest. The pictures were seized by the police and would have been burned if the authorities had not been restrained by an injunction. At this time Lawrence''s great study of sexual passion, Lady Chatterly''s Lover, was likewise under the censor''s ban, as much of his work had been in the past.Lawrence felt the mystery and power of sex, as the primal life urge, and was the lifelong adversary of those who wanted to keep the subject locked away in the cellars of prudery. Much of his work is chaotic and distorted by tangent obsessions, such as his insistence upon the woman''s subservience to the male, but all in all his work is probably the greatest modern monument to the dark roots of creation.Einstein Books'' edition of "I Rise In Flame, Cried The Phoenix" contains supplementary texts:* Excerpt From "The Glass Menagerie", By T. Williams.* A Few Selected Quotes Of Tennessee Williams.* A Few Selected Poems Of D. H. Lawrence.

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

''He is, quite simply, indispensable'' Peter Shaffer Loneliness, sexual tension and the need for human kindness pervade these three plays by Tennessee Williams, as their characters rage against personal demons and the modern world. In ''Sweet Bird of Youth'' a drifter, Chance Wayne, returns to his home town with an ageing movie actress in search of the girl he loved in his youth, but with terrible, violent results. ''Period of Adjustment'' tells the story of two young newlyweds who visit the husband''s old army friend on Christmas Eve after unsuccessfully consummating their marriage, and unleash forbidden passion, while in ''The Night of the Iguana'' a diverse group of people, including a disturbed ex-minister and a troubled spinster, are thrown together in an isolated Mexican hotel for one eventful night. Sweet Bird of Youth/Period of Adjustment/The Night of the Iguana

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.

This early play about coal miners struggling to improve their lives helped establish a young Tennessee Williams as a powerful new voice in American theater.

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.

Features letters written by the American playwright, revealing his childhood experiences, college years struggling with goals, grades, and money, and his emerging relationships.

A crucible of so many elements that would later shape and characterize Williams''s work.--World Literature Today

Offers Williams'' adaptation of a late nineteenth-century drama about an actress'' rejection of the advances of a melancholy, lovesick young man.

THE STORY: The scene is a beach shack on Cape Cod, during the summer of 1940, where August, a fledgling playwright, is rewriting the play intended for his Broadway debut. He is distracted by his infatuation for Kip, a handsome Canadian dancer and d

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams.

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

This book is William''s symbol for the military-industrial complex and all the dehumanizing trends it represents from mindless cocktail party chatter to bribery of officials to assassination plots directed against those who won''t play the game, to attempted coups by right-wing zealots.

The interviews selected for this volume encompass five decades of an intense literary life and range from the standard and well-known to the more obscure and specialized. The interviews are filled with revealing insights into Williams'' works and career. Most of them employ the essay-interview format. The three dozen or so interviews in this volume have been chosen, in part, to retrace the progress of Williams'' long career by marking important dramatic productions and documenting telling moments in his personal and artistic life. ISBN 0-87805-263-1 (pbk.): $14.95.

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."

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.

Theatre of Tennessee Williams Vol. 2. The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real.