ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.'Peter Brook's seminal book, an acknowledged classic of theatre writing, sets out many of the ideas about theatre which informed his lifelong work as a theatre director, from his iconic 'white box' production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and his ground-breaking adaptation of The Mahabharata, to his work at the International Centre for Theatre Research.Available as an ebook for the first time sin...

In this spiritual sequel to his influential Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks examines the dangerously alluring power of storytelling.“There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.” So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s reckoning with today’s flourishing cult of story.Forty years after publishing his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his important contribution...

**A NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINALDiscover 9 classic short stories by the giant of French literature—whose work inspired Dostoyevsky, Henry James, and Marcel Proust—with this collection showcasing Balzac’s impressive range.**Characters from every corner of society and all walks of life—lords and ladies, businessmen and military men, poor clerks, unforgiving moneylenders, aspiring politicians, artists, actresses, swindlers, misers, parasites, sexual adventurers, crackpots, and more—...

A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.

The first new translation in over a century of the brilliant epic novel that inspired Les MisérablesSensational, engrossing, and heartbreaking, The Mysteries of Paris is doubtless one of the most entertaining and influential works to emerge from the nineteenth century. It was one of France’s first serial novels, and for sixteen months, Parisians rushed in droves to the newsstands each week for the latest installment. Eugène Sue’s intricat...

The Oxford Handbook of Pain Management is the essential resource for all clinicians involved in the management of pain. Organised into sections dealing with basic principles of treatment, therapeutic interventions, including non-medical management of pain, and specific clinical situations, the Handbook emphasises the multimodal treatment options available for patients with pain conditions and brings them together to provide a truly biopsychosocial approach to management. Covering both chro...

In The Quality of Mercy, one of the world's most revered theatre directors reflects on a fascinating variety of Shakespearean topics.In this sequence of essays, Peter Brook debates such questions as who was the man who wrote Shakespeare's plays, why Shakespeare is never out of date, and how actors should approach Shakespeare's verse. He also revisits some of the plays which he has directed with notable brilliance, such as King Lear, Titus Andronicus and, ...

"Brook is someone prepared to dream, take risks, fail and then try again, succeed and still try again: a genius, and a creative one." Benedict Nightingale, Times Literary SupplementThis unusually candid volume of Brook in dialogue provides an uninhibited encounter with contemporary theatre's most influential director.The result of 12 hours of spontaneous question and answer sessions, Between Two Silences shows Brook responding to points rai...

Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way.Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters ...

In this enthralling re-creation of American novelist Henry James' famous ten-month trip around the United States, lauded critic Peter Brooks brings to life both the literary giant and America in its Gilded Age.In 1904, after two decades of living and travelling abroad, Henry James returned to the United States to discover a world drastically different from the one he had left behind. Suddenly, the future of the world seemed to be in his native land, which he had on...

'the social kaleidoscope was shifting' The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, provides a transition from the realm of adolescence into the adult social world of Belle Epoque Paris. Its pages buzz with worldly conversations, with bravado and posturing, infatuation, scandal, prejudice, and intrigue. To the fore is Proust's ear for spoken language and how it provides a stage for human foibles as well as inventiveness ...