Coupland's iconic novels brought to life in two full-cast adaptationsBursting onto the literary scene in 1991 with his debut Generation X, Douglas Coupland's novels swiftly established themselves as modern classics and brought the term 'Gen X' into the mainstream. His work still has resonance in today's world, with his vivid explorations of identity and creativity in the post-Baby Boomer generations. These pitch perfect adaptions probe our modern popular c...

Anne-Marie Duff stars as Blanche DuBois in BBC Radio 3’s landmark production of Tennessee Williams’ masterpieceTennessee Williams's iconic play tells the story of a catastrophic confrontation between fantasy and reality, embodied in the characters of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski.Blanche DuBois arrives unexpectedly on the doorstep of her sister Stella and her explosive brother-in-law Stanley. Over the course of one hot and steamy New Orleans summer, B...

Arthur Miller’s most famous play, Death of a Salesman, has become a key text in Western literature. This unusually powerful recording, made for radio in 1953, was directed by Elia Kazan who premiered the play. It features Thomas Mitchell and Arthur Kennedy as father and son. Willy, a travelling salesman, based in New York, relentlessly chases material success. As the disappointing nature of his reality crowds in upon him, Willy and his family suffer the tragic cost of his delusions of grea...

Samuel Beckett, one of the great avant-garde Irish dramatists and writers of the second half of the twentieth century, was born on 13 April 1906. He died in 1989. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His centenary will be celebrated throughout 2006 with performances of his major plays, but the most popular of them all will be, without doubt, the play with which he first made his name, Waiting for Godot. It opened the gates to the theatre of the absurd as four men appear on the st...

This new translation of the great classic of Ancient Greece starts a cycle of drama recordings by Naxos AudioBooks. The anguished tale of Oedipus, who having solved the riddle of the Sphinx and become King of Thebes, gradually realises the crimes he has, unwittingly, committed, remains a drama of unremitting power 2,500 years after it was written. With full drama values, Naxos AudioBooks the atmosphere of the Greek amphitheatre to the soundworld of CD, with the outstanding young actor Mich...

Kenneth Branagh heads an outstanding cast in playing one of Shakespeare’s strongest characters. The eighth production in the widely admired series of Shakespeare plays presented by Naxos AudioBooks in association with Cambridge University Press.

Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson; on the relationship between art and obscenity; and on the shape of music, film, and media generally, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture.Naked Lunch is the unnerving tale of Bill Lee, addicted to hustlers and narcotics, and his monumental descent into Hell. His...

A fiftieth-anniversary edition of Ken Kesey's searing American classic.Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Turning conventional notions of sanity and insanity on their heads, the novel tells the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving ...

A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother.As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others, the novel ranges in mood from da...

...if you prick us do we not bleed? - Shylock. A Shakespeare Recording Society Production. The complete play in five acts.The beautiful Portia has many suitors within Venetian society, among them the young nobleman Bassanio, who has squandered his fortune. Desperate to win Portia’s heart, Bassanio borrows money from Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, and turns to Antonio, a wealthy merchant who has helped him in the past, to guarantee the loan. Shylock agree...

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all timeRalph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching--yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. It is a book that has a great d...

Macbeth, Shakespeare’s last great tragedy, has remained one of the most popular plays since it’s first performance in 1606 probably in front of King James. This exciting new audiobook production is directed with fresh imagination by Fiona Shaw who breaks the conventional strait jacket that has hampered the development of Shakespeare on audio. We are as much in the twenty-first century as in medieval Scotland the tensions, the politics, the struggle for power and dark ambition is part of ou...