Drama Books - Page 12

Rock 'n' Roll: A New Play

Tom Stoppard

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Less Intellect and More Drama, Please 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

On January 11, 2008, I saw Tom Stoppard's Rock `n' Roll on Broadway with Brian Cox and Sinead Cusack in starring roles. Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia and left with his family at an early age to escape from the Hitler terror. The play is about the Communist rule in his native country and the power of rock and roll to help breach cracks in the totalitarian regime. The music of the young was probably more influential and revolutionary than the endless petitions by the dissidents.
As usual with a Stoppard play, it is talky, clever, more focused on the political and philosophical than the truly dramatic. There's no question that Stoppard is bright and witty, but unfortunately his plays can be murky at times. The scenes in the play are separated by segments of rock and roll tracks by the Rolling Stones, the Plastic People, Pink Floyd, John Lennon, and others.
The women in this play and his "Coast of Utopia" are more vibrant, more dramatically potent, more believable, and draw more of an emotional response from the audience than his male characters who blather on and on, and who are more political, more theoretical, and ineffective. One scene near the end of Act One between Max and his wife Eleanor in which she confronts him with the cancer killing her is an emotionally draining one for the audience and the dramatic highpoint of the play. Stoppard's women get to you in your gut. His men at times seem to be drowning in gibberish.
There are few playwrights as daring, innovative, and intellectual as Stoppard, but there are other playwrights who are more dramatically and emotionally disturbing.
Nine Lives Too Many
The Daemon in Our Dreams
The Rice Queen Spy
Clawed Back from the Dead

Editorial Review:

Rock ’n’ Roll is an electrifying collision of the romantic and the revolutionary. It is 1968 and the world is ablaze with rebellion, accompanied by a sound track of the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Clutching his prized collection of rock albums, Jan, a Cambridge graduate student, returns to his homeland of Czechoslovakia just as Soviet tanks roll into Prague. When security forces tighten their grip on artistic expression, Jan is inexorably drawn toward a dangerous act of dissent. Back in England, Jan’s volcanic mentor, Max, faces a war of his own as his free-spirited daughter and his cancer-stricken wife attempt to break through his walls of academic and emotional obstinacy. Over the next twenty years of love, espionage, chance, and loss, the extraordinary lives of Jan and Max spin and intersect until an unexpected reunion forces them to see what is truly worth the fight.

The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd Edition

William Shakespeare

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

great as a textbook, wonderful for personal use 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare is excellent. I bought it as a textbook, but if I were looking for a complete works right now, I would buy it simply for its excellence.

Not only does it contain all of Shakespeare's works, but it has extensive notes on the text as well.

Great purchase! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Not only was the book a great price, but I received the book w/in days of my initial online purchase! I am really happy that I purchased this particular book from it's original owner. I was worried that the book would not reach me in time for the first day of classes. I actually received it the "weekend" before classes started! Thanks for the great experience!

Editorial Review:

The Second Edition of this complete collection of Shakespeare's plays and poems features two essays on recent criticism and productions, fully updated textual notes, a photographic insert of recent productions, and two works recently attributed to Shakespeare. The authors of the essays on recent criticism and productions are Heather DuBrow, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and William Liston, Ball State University, respectively.

Uncle Tom's Cabin: by George L. Aiken and George C. Howard, 1852

George L. Aiken

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 146 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A towering, very important American classic 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

For whatever reasons, I'm one of those who, over the years, never gave "Uncle Tom's Cabin" much thought. I'm afraid I dismissed the book based on the derogatory cliche of describing a complacent black man as an Uncle Tom. What a pleasure to find how wrong I was.

Although the style of narration, the punctuation style of the day and the evolution of contractions, compound words and other bits of syntax show this book to be from the mid 1800s, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a modern novel. It is largely without the stifling level of detail offered in other books of the time, and it pushes the concept of omniscient narrator (perhaps along the lines of Vonnegut in "Breakfast of Champions") to a level that would likely be absurd in another story and purpose.

And Harriet Beecher Stowe did have a purpose - a daring, countervailing, completely forward-thinking challenge to the complacency of the day. The action of the story concludes in the second-to-last chapter. In the last chapter, called simply "Concluding Remarks," Stowe, referring to herself in third person, explains how she came to write the book, and in so doing pulls the reader beyond the realm of fiction in order to cap off her sermon. And a 500-page sermon is exactly what "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was and is.

To quote Stowe from the last chapter, "For many years of her life, the author avoided all reading upon or allusion to the subject of slavery, considering it as too painful to be inquired into, and one which advancing light and civilization would certainly live down. But, since the legislative act of 1850, when she heard, with perfect surprise and consternation, Christian and humane people actually recommending the remanding escaped fugitives into slavery, as a duty binding on good citizens,- when she heard, on all hands, from kind compassionate and estimable people, in the free states of the North, deliberation and discussions as to what Christian duty could be on his head,- she could only think, These men and Christians cannot know what slavery is; if they did, such a question could never be open for discussion. And from this arose a desire to exhibit it in a LIVING DRAMATIC REALITY [emphasis the author's]. She has endeavored to show it fairly, in the best and worst phases. In its BEST [emphasis the author's] aspect, she has, perhaps, been successful; but, oh! Who shall say what yet remains untold in that valley and shadow of death, that lies the other side?"


Within the narrative arts can be found a gray area between complete fiction and straightforwrad documenting. Within this area itself is a fine line of storytelling that sheds the fluff factor of fiction and the yawn factor of documentation. A story told along this line is not only compelling but offers to the receiver of the story a glimpse of what a life in the world depicted by the story must have been like. Or at the very least might have been like. This glimpse, whatever else it is, will be visceral, allowing the reader an actual emotional link. Finding this line is hard, staying on it harder and pulling off a finished work while remaining true to the line harder still. This is what Stowe did, a century before such a point of view emerged again in Americam media.

As such, Stowe explains that many of the characters are based on real people - yes, there really was a man as horrible as Simon Legree - and that most of the events in the book were based on true events known to her personally or through trusted reporting. This novelizing of reality was so compelling the book would be translated into twenty-two languages.


It would be relatively easy to take sentences and paragraphs out of context and reach the conclusion that Stowe decried slavery while holding the black race paternalistically. It's very possible to find any number of passages and label them as apologetic and paternalistic. There is, in fact, paternalism throughout the story, but this is a reflection of America ten years before the Civil War; and by the end of Stowe's "Concluding Remarks" this paternalism is gone.

I would describe the main apologist, St. Clare, who is keenly aware of the state of his own culture, as more of a rationalist. By making this character so, Stowe is able to open our eyes, as she opened many eyes of the day, to the subtler forms of defacto slavry - not at all to excuse slavery in general as some kind of natural order, but to bear witness to those toiling in other forms of captured work.

In 1851 the scullery maid of an English country home was not a slave, of course. Her employment was voluntary, after all, and at the end of a year she would have a few schillings to her name. But economically, perhaps even geographically, her freedom was largely unavailable to her, and so while not a slave under the law, the other side of her employment was the delivery of herself to twelve- or fifteen-hour days of scrubbing pots and pans. The delivery of herself to, at the end of any of those days, climbing three or four flights of a rear stairs to a garret; to a social life limited to the kitchen staff, which itself was a hierarchy that lorded over her; to little hope of marriage, if that's what she wanted, or to any sort of a life she might call her own. Why? To keep from starving to death.

And think about this today. Are you watching a 27" color TV with full remote that cost $199? Do you honestly think that set could have been made, boxed, shipped to a port in Asia, shipped by boat to the US, shipped by train and truck to your local StuffMart and sold to you profitably for one or two day's wages while every worker along the way was treated fairly? Do you care?


For the vast majority of those reading this review slavery is an abstracted and distant topic. It is a practice from a long ago past that might be given two meetings in a high school American History class, a cursory survey from which students might understand the concept of the economics of buying, selling and breeding human beings, from which they might be encouraged to imagine the suffering implicit to such practices.

Stowe's great achievment in writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was to belie the nuts and bolts, the mere logistics and schematics of slavery. She established for the reader the point of view of the slave, of a human life set against the legally sanctioned bureaucracy of slavery. She successfully depicted a person - an individual, a human being - sold as a product, warehoused as a product, transported as a product, and then set to use as an organic machine that was discarded and replaced when it broke. More to the point, she allows us glimpses into the inner lives, thoughts and prayers of those sold, warehoused, transported and used up while their ties to family and place, while their smallest hopes, are given credence only as an afterthought that may never coalesce. Only if, after having purchased a brother or a mother, there should be enough money remaining to buy the sister or the child. Only if it should be convenient and expedient for the planter to do so, only if it should strike that planter's fancy one particular afternoon but
not another.

This book is as meaningful today, in new ways, as it was in 1851, and that is wholly remarkable.

Editorial Review:

The first American novel to sell over a million copies. By calling attention to the issue of slavery, it has become a part of our country's literary and historical heritage.

The Turn of the Screw

Jeffrey Hatcher

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 107 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Difficult reading 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Is it fair to review a book one has not finished? Well, I did not finish it, probably read one-third of the book. It's hard going, long sentences packed with commas, which became so confusing I could not begin to understand them. I understood about 1 in 3 sentences. It felt really good to put this book down.

I hope high schools are not assigning this for reading. It would be enough to turn students OFF to reading! Maybe it's available in Cliffs Notes.

Honestly? Don't read it for fun. 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

It's hard to know how to rate this. Of course, it's ridiculously presumptuous for me to give a classic of English literature anything less than the full rating, but honestly? It's hard to read. The sentences are so elliptical, and the sensibilities of the narrator so difficult for a modern reader to intuit, that I finally rated it for its appeal to a casual reader. Reading it now, I didn't really suffer any thrills of horror. The ghost story really hasn't been the same since Stephen King started writing. Instead, what struck me was the flightiness of the governess, her daisy-chains of inference, and at least two instances where she reports things to the housekeeper as facts that contradict elements of her own narrative. That's the beauty of the story for me, the deftness with which James instills doubt about the credibility of his narrator. So, as a foundation of the horror genre and part of the English lit cannon, may every library contain at least one copy. But it's probably best actually read in the context of a class, where it can be appreciated for its structure and significance and no one will expect reading it to actually be fun.

Editorial Review:

Henry James' short novels provide an overview of his entire career and serve as an excellent introduction to his singular art and imagination. This collection includes The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller, The Beast in the Jungle, An International Episode, The Aspern Papers and The Altar of the Dead. Major course adoption potential.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore

Martin McDonagh

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

More existentialist than Tarantino 4 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

With the Tony nomination for Best Play this year, there might be some renewed interest in buying this book (the most recent review on this site was in 2003). This is laugh-out-loud funny stuff, and well worth reading. While "existentialist" may be a bit pretentious, this play deals with absurdity and futility in an atmosphere of constant violence and death. That McDonagh can make this material so funny is a tribute to his gift. This play I believe is a companion piece to McDonagh's Oscar-winning short film Six Shooter (available for download on iTunes), which deals with some of the same subjects, and also reserves its only tenderness for pets. I can see why people make the Tarantino comparison, but I see Tarantino as more of a stylist who sets out intricate time sequences and is less concerned about traditional narrative structures. McDonagh, by comparison, is very much into formal plot devices and structure.

Definitely not for those who don't enjoy black humor. For those who enjoyed The Pillowman (on Broadway last year), this one is an earlier play and doesn't have nearly the creativity and ambition of Pillowman. But it is still very well worthwhile, and a lot of fun.

Editorial Review:

"Come on in ahead for yourselves. I'm just in the middle of shooting me Dad."

Who knocked the cat belonging to "Mad Padraic" over on a lonely road on the island of Inishmore and was it an accident? He'll want to know when he gets back from a stint of torture and chip-shop bombing in Northern Ireland: he loves his cat more than life itself.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore premiered at the RSC's The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, in April 2001.

Martin McDonagh is one of Britain's finest young playwrights and won a prestigious Olivier Award for The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which has had successful runs in both the USA and the UK.

Fences (The August Wilson Century Cycle)

August Wilson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 83 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Summer Reading Goodness 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Interesting play. Good for a summer-reading assignment. I enjoyed the plot but it did end up being a bit depressing.

Used Books 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 11 people found this review helpful.

This book was okay. the pages were yellowing and some lines were highlighted, but it was as expected.

Fences 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The play by August Wilson is about a family life filled with happiness, sad and selfish moments. I chose the book named Fences because this book let me learn a lot on how relationships change between married couples and parents to sons. In the play, a man name Troy Maxson is the household of the family. He wants his son to play basketball in the college and he puts lot of hope on him, but one day he changes his mind about the dream. He thinks his son will not able to go to college; they always have fought on something. Troy always talks to his friend On Friday night. He wants to let people know he is the leader and can do anything he want. One time he has done something that makes his family hate him so mach because he destroy the family. Do you want to know what happen? Go to find out more and you can discuss with me. No one cares about him any more even his best friend. My family always had argument on something that cause us to get bad temper, no one in the house was happy about what was going on. People see each other everyday, but then their relationship will change, either good or bad, depending on how you see the situation. I always hear arguments in my house that makes me feel sad; I don't know what to do. The only thing I do is pretend nothing happen. Troy and his son have argues on something, then they change to not talk anymore and his son never come to see him anymore. So different people have different feeling on their emotion.

Editorial Review:

A Pulitzer Prize winner. Garbage collector Troy Maxson clashes with his son over an athletic scholarship.

Tracks

Louise Erdrich

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

It Changed the Course of my Life 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 14 people found this review helpful.

I read this book in a Native American Literature course about 12 years ago. My father is full blooded Native American and my teacher was white and I thought he couldn't teach me anything. I had a chip on my shoulder and my teacher knocked it off of me with this book. He told me he wanted ME to teach this book to the class so I had to read this book like I had never read any book before. Perhaps my unique connection to the book made me enjoy the book more than these other reviewers, but I think that it would still be one of my favorite books even if had not read it for class. I teach high school English and have read A LOT of books - all kinds of books, not just classics. Even if you read this and find that you can't fully understand it, that's OKAY. Part of the problem with my students is they are always looking for the AUTHOR"S interpretation or the TEACHER'S interpretation - just enjoy your own interpretation. The book is not that hard to understand, but the imagery and symbolism is deep. This is an important book, as pretty soon there will be no Native Americans left to tell our stories. Less than 1% of this nation is Native American and it's important to read these stories. The mixing of Christianity with Native traditions is particularly significant in this story. In fact, I based my Master's thesis on the themes in this work. I met Louise Erdrich a couple of years ago at a book signing and I wanted to tell her this book changed my life, but how cheesy would that be?

Romeo and Juliet (Classic Drama)

William Shakespeare

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 90 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Romeo and Juliet-Warning: May Cause Pulmonary Problems 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Caution Scalawags: May Cause Pulmonary Failure!, July 29, 2004
Reviewer: Professor Emeritus Percy Q. Johnstone (Darkest India) - See all my
reviews
Yes dear reader, it is I, Professor Emeritus Johnstone. As you may have
divined, as Professor Emeritus of American Literature, I am well versed with
dramatic writings from our sister nation, England. Now, many of you are
unfamiliar with the work, as William Shakespeare is relatively unknown in
the bumpkin-ridden land you call "The Colonies". However, you
lucky few will discover a goldmine of quotes such as "Alack, Alack,
Alack" and other favorites. But I, Professor Emeritus Johnstone,
diverge. Yes yes. For those of you who wish to pursue the god-given purpose
of the most noble art of teaching American Literature, you must be familiar
with the works of Shakespeare. As you are stupid, and not a professor, like
I, Professor Emeritus Johnstone, you undoubtedly do not understand, but no
matter. The story of "Romeo and Juliet" is simple. it opens in a
court yard in Venice where the political rebels, Pyramus and Thisbe are
plotting to overthrow the evil fascist government (oh how I, Professor
Emeritus Johnstone know that feeling. I confess, dear reader, that once I,
Professor Emeritus Johnstone, lived in America until government stooges
exiled me to darkest India for poliical subterfuge. Suberfuge! Bah!). Alas,
Lord Capulet's men break into the meeting and arrest poor Pyramus and
Thisbe, casting them into the darkest dungeon. Ah, but fortune smiles on our
two heroes, for in the cell next to them are the "Star-burned
lovers" Romeo and Juliet, who were imprisoned for plotting to overthrow
the evil Capulet. Together, they escape the prison, kill all the
fascist-swine guards, and blow up the prison, bringing us, dear reader,
rather neatly to the end of Act I.
Act II opens in Lord Montague's (Lord Capulet's chief of security) hall,
where he has just made posters offering 5000 marks for the heads of the four
rebels. Enter the villain (mustache and all) Tybalt (cousin to Count Paris)
the bounty-hunter. Tybalt, in a scene that moved even I, Professor Emeritus
Johnstone, gives a heartrending "soliliquy" in which he mourns on
he pain of killing those whose politico agendas you support. Thus ends Act
II. In Act III, we find...ROMEO WORKING FOR LORD CAPULET! He has become a
traitorous lap-dog to the very system he despises (oh reader, how I,
Professor Emeritus Johnstone, know this feeling!). Pyramus and his rebel
army storm the palace, and in the final scene, Pyramus kills his traitorous
lover, Romeo, driving a dagger through his jugular...only to find out that
Romeo was a spy. Pyramus then jumps out the highest tower in penance to end
the play.
Genius. Every potential collegiate scamp should read this edition, for it
has a preface by one of the greatest scholars of our age...none other than
I, Professor Emeritus Johnstone.
Hark, I hear my Biddy calling me to gruel and morning prayers. As Hamlet
said, "Adieu Fair Readers!"

Bitterly,
--Professor Emeritus Percy Q. Johnstone

Editorial Review:

Romeo and Juliet, the 'star-crossed lovers' of Shakespeare's great romantic tragedy, fascinate audiences the world over in many different guises and adaptations, year after year. This recording, along with Hamlet, launched the Naxos AudioBooks series of complete dramatisations of the works of Shakespeare, in conjunction with Cambridge University Press. Michael Sheen is a passionate, impulsive Romeo and directs this superlative cast, including some of the most of the best known names in the British theatre world. Juliet is played with great charm and sensitivity by Kate Beckinsale, Fiona Shaw is a warmly humorous Nurse and Frances Barber plays an icy Lady Capulet. With its energy, passion and careful direction, this recording is an audio work of art.

The Sunset Limited

Cormac McCarthy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A bit of a Rorschach 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This year I have been working my way through all of his novels (only have one to go: The Orchard Keeper). It's been an experience. A friend of mine introduced me to Cormac McCarthy and says she believes that in 100 years, he'll be the only novelist writing today who will still be read. She may be right. There is much that is bleak about this body of work (so much so that "No Country For Old Men" is sort of a light comedy among Mr. McCarthy's other works.) The question I think his readers will be asking for a long time is: What hope, if any, does McCarthy hold out? If there is hope, where does it reside?

Although not close to being his best book, this one probably boils down that fundamental theme in McCarthy's work to the most basic. It's Black and White in this book in more ways than one. I finished the book a couple of hours ago and my initial reaction is that McCarthy's answer here is No. There is no hope. No meaning. But, as is so often the case with this writer, when you take time to think about his work, you realize that the answers don't offer themselves up that easily.

I enjoyed the book and appreciated the experiment with the dramatic form.

For those, like me, who have been bitten by the Cormac Bug, but are just getting started: You're in for quite a ride. And, be sure to read Suttree.

Editorial Review:

A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made.

In that small apartment, “Black” and “White,” as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men–though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it.

Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life.

Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.

The Canterbury Tales (Classic Literature with Classical Music)

Geoffrey Chaucer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 84 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Not the complete Canterbury Tales 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Please note: The Bantam version (translated by Hieatt) only contains the most popular of the Tales. (Use the "Inside this Book" feature to check the table of contents, as I, alas, did not.) The facing page translation is just what I was looking for, but really wanted the complete set.

canterbury tale review 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

What would it be like if you had to make a very long journey on horse back? Pretty boring, right? But what if someone had the brilliant idea of telling stories on the way there? That would make the trip go a lot faster. This is the premise of the Canterbury Tales. There are a lot of people who all want to go to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. They all met at a pub when the pub owner said that they should all tell one story on the way there and one on the way back. The version of the Canterbury tales only consists of four of the one hundred twenty eight that were told.
The first story that is told by the Nun's priest. This story is about a poor widow who lives on a farm. As you get further in this story it starts retelling the story of a chicken and a hen. This chicken had many wonderful hens around him. "This noble rooster ruled over seven hens, whose work it was to please him. They were his sisters and his wives." (pg. 20) But there was one hen named Lady Pertelote that he liked the most. One night he had a dream about a fox eating him. The next morning he told Lady Pertelote and she thought it didn't mean anything. A couple of days later a fox tricked him to shut his eyes and then the fox snuck up behind him and snatched him in his mouth. He was saved by the widow.
The next person to tell was the pardoner. His story was about greed. There were three people who were searching for death because they heard of all the horrible things he had done and wanted to kill him. While on their way they met an old man who told the men, "If you're so anxious to find Death, turn up this crooked road. I left him in that grove, under a tree and there he'll stay." (pg. 41) So that's what they did. When they got there they saw a sack full of gold and decided not to chase after Death but take the gold by night. They decided for one of them to go into the city and get wine to celebrate. The person that went was the youngest of them all. While he was gone the two thought up a plan to kill the third one so that they only had to split the money between them. The third boy wanted the money all to himself so he poisoned two of the bottles of wine and left one free of poison for himself. As he got the tree the two men killed him and they celebrated by drinking the wine and they died too. In the end they all got there wish. They met Death.
Those two were my favorite and the next two are by the Wife of Bath and the Franklin. The wife of Bath is about a man who threatens the life of another if they don't tell him what women want. The franklin's tale is about women who loved a man who left her and she was very sad. Nothing could make her feel better. If you want to know what happens at the end of these stories you'll have to read the book.
Historically this book is very good. It is based in the year of 1386. It show the life style of people who lived in the middle ages. It taught me that not all people were rich back then. It is historically spot on but the thing about this book is because it was written in the middle ages all the living conditions are right but it's very whimsical. Chickens can't talk, and Death isn't a person. In a way it shows how people thought back then. It tells us that some people might have wanted to meet death. Maybe in a physical way because they wanted to die or they just wanted to see someone death took away from them.
The reason I liked this book was because of the old English. I like taking in the metaphors and deciphering it. If you like Shakespeare then you'll most likely like this book. It is very whimsical and magical. It shows the people in the middle ages in a very metaphorical way. This book shows how life can be mystical and great even when you don't except it.

Editorial Review:

Chaucer's greatest work, written towards the end of the fourteenth century, paints a brilliant picture of medieval life, society and values. The stories range from the romantic, courtly idealism of 'The Knight's Tale' to the joyous bawdy of the Miller's. All are told with a freshness and vigour in this modern verse translation that make them a delight to hear.