The Birthday Party & The Room

Author

Samuel Beckett

The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men simply waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted...

Author	Joseph Conrad
ISBN	0192801694

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be "a simple...

Author	Dylan Thomas
ISBN	0811202097

Some works of literature just beg to be read out loud - This is the House that Jack Built and Hiawatha are two that most people are familiar with. Under Milk Wood too, is better appreciated read aloud.

Try it for yourself. A sample (read aloud with Welsh accent, sing-song, go up like a question at...

Author	Georg Büchner
ISBN	0809007274

The life of Georg Buchner was short, intense, and tragic—and extremely significant for the development of modern drama. His three plays, Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck, were greatly ahead of their time in their penetrating dramatic and psychological treatment. They served as...

Author	Richard Brautigan
ISBN	0224619330

Brautigan's poetic style is often surreal, often tender, with touches of humor. The poems are written in clear, straightforward free verse. Here is an example of his style from "The Chinese Checker Players": "When I was six years old/I played Chinese checkers/with a woman/who was ninety-three years...

Author

Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and 1970s whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imagination of young people everywhere. He came of age during the Haight-Ashbury period and has been called “the last of the Beats.” His early books became required...