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It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared—57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s.

Who better than America's elder statesman of the theater, Williams' contemporary Arthur Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire? Miller's rich perspective on Williams' singular style of poetic dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable new edition of A Streetcar Named Desire. This definitive new edition will also include Williams' essay "The World I Live In," and a brief chronology of the author's life.

No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Menagerie was Williams’s first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by prominent Williams scholar Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: “More than fifty years after telling his story of a family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation, Williams’s mellifluous voice still resonates deeply and universally.” This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams’s essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, “The Catastrophe of Success,” as well as a short section of Williams’s own “Production Notes.” The cover features the classic line drawing by Alvin Lustig, originally done for the 1949 New Directions edition.

This sequel to the original best-selling takes a literary tour through some of the darkest writing in New Orleans history.

Предлагаемая книга крупнейшего американского писателя и драматурга Теннесси Уильямса (1911–1983) могла бы иметь подзаголовок «Теннесси Уильямс, шокирующий Америку»: здесь собраны «запретные» и «полузапретные» плоды его творчества — интервью, пьесы и рассказы, в которых он предстает как «крутой» автор.

Крупнейший американский писатель драматург ХХ века Теннесси Уильямс (1911–1983) всегда представал перед русскоязычным читателем сильно подрумяненным»: его шокирующие пьесы либо вообще у нас не ставились, либо шли с большими купюрами; из рассказов выбирались самые невинные, переводчики опускали не только «крепкое словцо», но и тщательно вымарывали целые абзацы из его произведений.

А между тем Уильямс нередко эпатировал самих американцев, которые считают его одним из самых «крутых» писателей страны. Предлагаемая книга могла бы иметь подзаголовок «Теннесси Уильямс, шокирующий Америку»: здесь собраны «запретные» или «полузапретные» плоды его творчества.