"For the first time, the world-renowned Arden Shakespeare is producing Performance Editions, aimed specifically for use in the rehearsal room. Published in association with the Shakespeare Institute, the text features easily accessible facing page notes - including short definitions of words, key textual variants, and guidance on metre and pronunciation; a larger font size for easier reading; space for writing notes and reduced punctuation aimed at...

"In a single, engaging volume, The Great Gatsby presents a helpful literary guide to one of America's most prized classic novels. First published in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby captured the spirit of the Jazz Age and examined the American obsession with love, wealth, material objects, and class. Considered one of the great novels of the 20th century, Fitzgerald s famous work remains relevant for its observations on the pursuit of...

"One of the most important works of the Modernist era, James Joyce's "Ulysses" was originally published serially in the American journal "The Little Review" from March 1918 to December 1920. Subsequently published as a book in 1922, "Ulysses" chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. While the novel appears largely unstructured at first glance it is in fact very closely paralleled to Homer's "Odyssey,"...

"An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, 'Pale Fire' offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreward and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit...

The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second World War, Stevens is oblivious of the real life that goes on around him -- oblivious, for instance, of the fact that his aristocrat employer is a Nazi sympathizer. Still, there are even larger matters at stake in this heartbreaking,...