New Releases by Tennessee Williams

Seven previously unpublished stories of the Great Depression by America's poet laureate of the lost

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.

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."

"Spring Storm" is a 1937 play written by American playwright Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams wrote Spring Storm when he was twenty-six years old, in 1937, while studying as an apprentice. "Spring Storm" received poor reviews in Williams's playwriting course, and it did not receive its first production until 1995 in Berkeley, California. The European premiere took place at the Royal & Derngate Northampton on 15 October 2009, running alongside Beyond the Horizon by Eugene O'Neill. Both productions subsequently transferred to the Royal National Theatre in 2010. Written and rewritten between 1937 and 1938, this full-length play depicts life and conflicted love in a small Mississippi Delta town during the Great Depression.The play's original title was "April is the Cruelest Month," which was also the opening line from T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land." When Williams presented Spring Storm to his playwriting class in April 1938, he wrote in his diary that the class, "Read the final version of my second act and it was finally, quite, quite finally rejected by the class because of Heavenly's weakness as a character. Of course, it is very frightening and discouraging to work on a thing and then have it fall flat. There is still a chance they may be wrong- all of them- I have to cling to that chance...."Fuji Books' edition of "Spring Storm" contains supplementary texts:* An excerpt from "Not About Nightingales", by Tennessee Williams."Not About Nightingales" is a three act play written by Tennessee Williams in 1938. The play itself focuses on a group of inmates who go on a hunger strike in attempt to better their situation. Although the play was originally written in the 1930s, it wasn't discovered until the late 1990s when British actress, Vanessa Redgrave, made it her personal mission to track it down. * A few selected quotes Of Tennessee Williams.

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."

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

These three dramatic works by Tennessee Williams explore the darker side of human nature and are haunted by a sense of isolation and regret.

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.

Thirteen previously unpublished short plays now available for the first time.

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.

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

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 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.

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

Length: 4 scenes.

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."

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.'

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.

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

"As described by New York critic Clive Barnes: "Superficially the play is about the painter--famous, rich and lost--and his wife, who find themselves in a Tokyo hotel. The wife, wildly promiscuous, tries to seduce the Japanese barman in the hotel bar. The artist is in his room, naked on a canvas with a spray-gun, trying to develop a new technique, almost confident that he has invented color. Almost confident, but not quite, for he lacks confidence the way an anemic man lacks blood. The artist, in the final stages of some spiritual or physical dissolution, at last joins his wife in the bar. But she has sent to Manhattan for his picture dealer and friend. She then goes out, presumably to find a man. A few days later the dealer arrives in Tokyo. The wife, determined to be free, tries to persuade the friend to take the artist back to New York, under sedation if necessary. But the artist foils her plans by dying. Suddenly, with the bleakness of loss, she finds that she too has nowhere to go."--Publisher's description.