Various Readers

Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge: The complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language are too limited. "The 30-Minute Shakespeare" is a new series of abridgements that tell the "story" of each play from start to finish while keeping the beauty of Shakespeare's language intact. Specific stage directions...

First published in the "First Folio" in 1623 and likely written in the 1590s, "King John" is one of William Shakespeare's best historical plays. It centers on the events of King John's reign of England during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. King John, son of Henry I of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, inherits the throne after the death of his older brother, King Richard I. John's claim to the throne is challenged by the King of...

Believed to have been written in 1599, William Shakespeare's "Henry V" forms the final installment of a tetralogy of plays, which includes "Richard II", "Henry IV, Part I", and "Henry IV, Part II". The play focuses on the events surrounding the Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years' War. Henry, who is introduced in the earlier plays as a wild and undisciplined youth, has now come of age and ascended to the thrown following the death of his...

Although one of his lesser known plays, Shakespeare's considerable abilities as a playwright are readily apparent in "Troilus and Cressida." This historical and tragic 'problem play', thought to be inspired by Chaucer, Homer, and some of Shakespeare's history-recording contemporaries, is initially a tale of a man and woman in love during the Trojan War. When Cressida is given to the Greeks in exchange for a prisoner of war, Troilus is determined to...

Classic Books Library presents this new beautiful edition of William Shakespeare's play, "Titus Andronicus" (1594). This edition features a specially commissioned new biography of William Shakespeare. Unlike Shakespeare's other plays based on Roman histories, the story of "Titus Andronicus" is a fictional work. The play dramatises the gruesome events that take place in the battle for a nation between the brutal Roman general Titus and his powerful...

Henry VIII - William Shakespeare - King Henry VIII has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. This edition offers a new perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play, revealing it as a complex meditation on the progress of Reformation which sees English life since Henry VIII's day as a series of bewildering changes...

The Tin Woodsman of Oz (1918), a bestseller upon its publication, was a welcome victory for its author L. Frank Baum. After nearly a decade of declining book sales, the twelfth book in Baum's Land of Oz series-and the last to be published in his lifetime-was a critical and commercial success that reinvigorated public interest in his iconic work. In the safety of his palace in Winkie Country-where he was made Emperor after the Wizard of Oz gave...

"In this compelling and thought-provoking debut novel, after a terrorist attack rocks the country and anti-Islamic sentiment stirs, three Black Muslim girls create a space where they can shatter assumptions and share truths."--Amazon. In Virginia, Sabriya has her whole summer planned-- until a terrorist attack near her home. When the terrorist is assumed to be Muslim and Islamophobia grows, Sabriya turns to her online journal for comfort. When the...

During her prolific career, popular English children's writer Edith Nesbit wrote or collaborated on over sixty books of fiction for children in her illustrious literary career. In "Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare" first published as "The Children's Shakespeare" in 1897, she turns her attention to a series of interpretations of several of William Shakespeare's best-known comedies and dramas. These retellings of many of Shakespeare's plays are written...

Gabriel Allon, the art restorer, spy, and assassin is poised to become the chief of Israel's secret intelligence service. But on the eve of his promotion, events conspire to lure him into the field for one final operation. ISIS has detonated a massive bomb in the Marais district of Paris, and a desperate French government wants Gabriel to eliminate the man responsible before he can strike again.