The Peasants Bible

The Peasants Bible
Author: Dario Fo
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2004
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780802140692

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dario Fo is one of the world's most important contemporary playwrights, forging subversive wit and unusual linguistic experimentation into a comedy of complete originality. The Peasants' Bible is a collection of five monologues drawn from Italian folklore but filtered through Fo's delightfully singular lens-for example, an Adam and Eve who are passionately entwined like peas in a pod; a race between two classes of men struggling for power that resembles the legend of the Hare and the Tortoise-to form a Bible of the common man. In The Story of the Tiger, we find a Fourth Army soldier injured fighting Chiang Kai-shek's army, saved from starvation by being suckled by an enormous tiger, who then comes back to defeat Kai-shek by using model tigers in combat. Together the pieces are an extraordinary addition to Fo's body of work.

Blind Love

Blind Love
Author: Wilkie Collins
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2003-12-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1770483284

Blind Love is Wilkie Collins’s final novel. Although he did not live to complete the work, he left detailed plans for the last third of this absorbingly plotted novel which were faithfully executed by his colleague, the popular author Walter Besant. The novel is set during the Irish Land War of the early 1880s and tells the story of Iris Henley, an independent young woman who marries the “wild” Lord Harry Norland, a member of an Irish secret society, and becomes unhappily drawn into a conspiracy plot. The Broadview edition of Blind Love includes a critical introduction and primary source materials that address the novel’s focus on movements for Irish independence. Appendices include newspaper accounts of Ireland during the Land War and of the fraud case on which Collins based his story, articles reacting to Collins’s sudden death, Punch cartoons depicting the English attitudes toward the Irish, and contemporary reviews.