THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher and educational outreach entity, was founded in 1979 with grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Although its mission was a well-grounded and no-nonsense business approach to publishing, it essentially was fulfilling a long-held dream by the great critic Edmund Wilson and others. The United States of America, they felt, ought to have a publications series of high standards and high quality of production for its national literature, and it ought to reflect the diversity and traditions of all of its writing.
The first books appeared in 1982, when I first began selling new books in an independent book store here in Carlisle. (The founding of Whistlestop Bookshop was three years away.) I still have my copies of Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. I won’t tell you how many of the 300+ to date I have acquired, but I am happy to say I never regretted one. The books are remarkably beautiful and efficient and scholarly and finely-made. They are sometimes the only respectable edition available (beware of photo-offset print-on-demand editions!). The accompanying chronologies and notes and textual discussions of every volume are a joy and an education. I cannot praise them too highly.
This listing is what I carry in the store. If you would like other volumes, send me an e-mail or call the store. Enjoy browsing, buying, and owning landmark definitive editions of great writers or great American subjects.
The listings are alphabetical by author except for new or recent anthologies at the top. Older anthologies are at the bottom of the page.
All James Baldwin titles and Ursula K. Le Guin titles are on the respective pages of the authors.
John Guare: Plays
John Guare: Plays
Tony Kushner presents a career-spanning collection of 14 masterworks by the Tony Award-winning author of Six Degrees of Separation
The very best plays by one of the foremost American playwrights of his generation
“More than any other American playwright, John Guare’s work feels uncannily prophetic,” observes Tony Kushner. “His plays, with an original combination of realism, dream state, psychopathology, vision, delusion, humor, compassion, grief, and terror, map out the landscape of what life feels like in the here and now.”
Here is an indispensable one-volume retrospective of an essential American playwright. It includes:
A selection of one-act plays from the 1960s that show Guare exploring, on a small scale, the subjects that would continue to preoccupy him
Guare’s breakout Off-Broadway hit, The House of Blue Leaves, a daring, darkly hilarious comedy that presciently takes aim at the excesses of celebrity worship in America.
Carefully plotted to yield unexpected surprises, plays such as Rich and Famous and Landscape of the Body that delve into the nature of envy and longing amid an ostentatiously affluent society
Dramas set in the past, such as the Lydie Breeze trilogy and the later A Free Man of Color, take a broader historical view of America’s utopian longings and racial hypocrisies.
His best-known work, Six Degrees of Separation, which shows itself to be an enduring landmark of the American stage, a stunning fusion of comic and tragic elements and a subtle, emotionally powerful investigation into the depths of deception and authenticity.
For the first time, Guare’s short play “Woman at a Threshold, Beckoning” as well as his acclaimed screenplay for Louis Malle’s film Atlantic City.
This deluxe collector’s edition gathers cherished masterpieces and rare and hard-to-find gems by one of our greatest living playwrights.