The Seagull

Allegory about a sea gull who seeks to attain perfect flight. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

“Senelick’s accomplishment is astounding.”—Library Journal Anton Chekhov is a unique force in modern drama, his works cherished for their brilliant wit and insight into the human condition. In this stunning new translation of one of Chekhov’s most popular and beloved plays, Laurence Senelick presents a fresh perspective on the master playwright and his groundbreaking dramas. He brings this timeless trial of art and love to life as memorable characters have clashing desires and lose balance in the shifting eruptions of society and a modernizing Russia. Supplementing the play is an account of Chekhov’s life; a note on the translation; an introduction to the work; and variant lines, often removed due to government censorship, which illuminate the context in which they were written. This edition is the perfect guide to enriching our understanding of this great dramatist or to staging a production.

The Seagull' is a comic play by Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. It was written in the year 1895. It was first produced in 1896. It is generally considered to be the first of his four major plays. It dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Tréplev.

A hungry seagull will do anything for a lunch at the beach in this delightful read-aloud children’s book from comedic musician B.A. Johnston. It's a hot summer day and Gary is hungry. The beach is packed with people...and packed with people’s lunches. Though he’s been known to eat everything from minnows to garbage, it’s beach lunches Gary loves most of all. With his patented seagull cunning, Gary takes increasingly ridiculous measures to trick a young boy into sharing his lunch. Will the boy hand over his ketchup chips and watermelon? This uproarious read-aloud from beloved Ontario-based songwriter and entertainer, better known by his stage name, B.A. Johnston, will have parents hugging their beach coolers a little tighter and kids shouting “SHOO, BIRD! SHOO!” Halifax-based illustrator-cartoonist Paul Hammond provides bright and bold illustrations and hand-lettered embellishments for a salty good read. Praise for Gary the Seagull “An easy read that would be enjoyable for most kids. There are some bigger words that could make it useful for grade school-age children who are practicing reading. The bright and bold cartoon style illustrations depict all the colors that one would see at the beach. The wider beach scenes also show a diversity in the people who are there.” —Canadian Review of Materials

Compact, portable, and inexpensive, The Seagull Reader: Plays, Second Edition, offers 8 classic (and contemporary classic) plays, 2 of them--Death of a Salesman and A Raisin in the Sun--new to this edition.

“We need the theatre, couldn’t, couldn’t do without it. Could we?” A successful actress visits her brother’s isolated estate far from the city, throwing the frustrated residents unfulfilled ambitions into sharp relief. As her son attempts to impress with a self-penned play, putting much more than his pride at stake, others dream of fame, love and the ability to change their past. Chekhov’s darkly comic masterpiece is reignited for the 21st century by one of the most exciting new voices in British Theatre, Anya Reiss, Winner of the Most Promising Playwright at both the Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle awards.

In Blind Spot, Myriam Tadessé exposes the difficulty, even the impossibility, for France to truly understand and celebrate the lived realities of mixed or biracial French citizens. What the French word métis — which translates to ‘half-breed’ or ‘mixed-race’ — hides is how central the notion of race actually is in a society that claims to repudiate it. The French film and theatre world, in which Tadessé has made her career, appears unable to confront the individuality of the performers. They are required to correspond to categories — often based on race — that don’t allow for biracial identities. This classification not only contradicts France’s asserted ideals but also views as anomalies those who defy ethno-racial assumptions. Drawing on her personal experiences as a biracial Ethiopian-French woman and her family history, Tadessé explores the realities of life for mixed-race individuals in France through her searing and honest memoir. Praise for Blind Spot ‘Myriam Tadessé’s memoir combines formal innovation with a candid look back on her life and the harrowing experiences she’s had with discrimination in her chosen field — and in French society as a whole. Blind Spot feels like a distillation of its author’s life, and a powerful testament to her day-to-day reality.’ — Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

Nothing is right in the Land. King Matthew is indisposed, the city dominated by the malevolent Fang. Crops are dying and even the seagulls have lost direction. Leonardo Pegasus, retired magician, probes the murky depths of the Signal Network, where unseen forces vie for supremacy ... Ashleigh Brown, urban teenager, yearns for the open road, for the gaudy wagon of Wanderer Liam Blackwood ... Charles Bannister, wealthy businessman, plunders the Outer Isles, hunting for secret riches ... While across the Land, roaming bands of Seagull Drovers seek to guide lost gulls back to the coast - who may hold the key to all ills.

Tansy Trehearn was born and bred in the beautiful and little Cornish port of the village St. Ruthyn, where Martin Wyde was opening a small hotel, The Seagull's Cry. Tansy was falling in love with her employer Martin. She had never been so bewildered, she had met the one man she could ever love, and found that she had to fight her own sister in order to get him. And that was when she learned that the cry of the seagull was no more sad and tortured than the cry of her own heart. Because while Martin and Tansy's love softly flowered, several people were plotting to ruin their newfound happiness.

Smeagull the Seagull comes to the house near the shore every day and knocks on the sliding glass door. He knocks when he¿s hungry, and the people who live there feed him. Smeagull rules the roost! Keeping him fed is an exhausting job, but when Smeagull disappears, it makes clear what an important family member Smeagull has become. There are few places on earth without seagulls, both on shore and inland, and every child will find Smeagull captivating and yet familiar. Smeagull the Seagull teaches young children that animals are precious and have needs and feelings and family, just like us.This is a true story. Smeagull is a wild herring gull who does indeed knock at Valerie and Mark¿s house every day where he is fed scraps from sustainable seafood.The book is illustrated in full color by the graphic designer, Valerie Elaine Pettis. The text is written in rhyme by Mark Seth Lender, a published author and producer for wildlife content at Living on Earth, which is nationally broadcast on Public Radio.

Book Patsy and his friend, Harriet, were good seagull friends who loved living at the Jersey Shore. Patsy only had one leg but he could do anything that other birds could do. They also loved Happiness Lake in Pennsylvania. They were blown out there when they got caught up in hurricane winds a few years ago. It was strange for them but they met animals and birds they had never seen before, and began to see how beautiful a lake is with all of its differences. One day they decided to return to Happiness Lake to visit their friends. Mr. and Mrs. Duck remembered them and introduced them to their visiting relatives from Ohio, Lori and Steven. Immediately they began to make fun of Patsy with his missing leg. Read and see how Patsy and Harriet handled those mean ducks.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes includes Part One, Millennium Approaches and Part Two, Perestroika “Glorious. A monumental, subversive, altogether remarkable masterwork…Details of specific catastrophes may have changed since this Reagan-era AIDS epic won the Pulitzer and the Tony, but the real cosmic and human obsessions—power, religion, sex, responsibility, the future of the world—are as perilous, yet as falling-down funny, as ever.” –Linda Winer, Newsday "A vast, miraculous play... provocative, witty and deeply upsetting... a searching and radical rethinking of American political drama." - Frank Rich, New York Times "A victory for theater, for the transforming power of the imagination to turn devastation into beauty." - John Lahr, New Yorker “An enormously impressive work of the imagination and intellect, a towering example of what theater stretched to its full potential can achieve.” -Philadelphia Inquirer "Angels in America is the finest drama of our time, speaking to us of an entire era of life and death as no other play within memory. It ranks as nothing less than one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century." - John Heilpern, New York Observer “Some playwrights want to change the world. Some want to revolutionize theater. Tony Kushner is that rarity of rarities: a writer who has the promise to do both.” -New York Times This new edition of Tony Kushner's masterpiece is published with the author's recent changes and a new introduction in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of its original production. One of the most honored American plays in history, Angels in America was awarded two Tony Awards for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was made into an Emmy Award-winning HBO film directed by Mike Nichols. This two-part epic, subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," has received hundreds of performances worldwide in more than twenty-six languages. Tony Kushner’s plays include Angels in America; Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown; The Illusion, adapted from the play by Pierre Cornelle; Slavs!; A Bright Room Called Day; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln. His books include The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

German author Friedrich Ani combines deep sorrow, human darkness, and breath-taking tension in his latest crime novel. Happiness is extinguished completely one cold November night when eleven-year-old Lennard Grabbe fails to return home. Thirty-four days later, he is found to have been murdered, and former inspector Jakob Franck, the protagonist of Friedrich Ani's previous novel The Nameless Day, is entrusted with delivering the most horrible news any parent could ever dream of, setting off a chain reaction of grief among family and friends. As the special task force is unable to make any progress in the case and the family is unable to deal with the loss, Franck--driven by the need to bring them clarity but also by the painful memories of all the unsolved murder cases from when he was still on active duty--buries himself in witness statements and reports up to the point of exhaustion. He spends hours at the crime scene and employs his special technique of "thought sensitivity," an abstract, intuitive process that may very well lead him to the "fossil"--that crucial piece of information he needs to solve the case. Once again, Ani combines deep sorrow, human darkness, and breath-taking tension in a novel whose melancholy can hardly be surpassed.

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[In this novel by the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature], "a benign old monk listens to a prospective novice's tale of depravity, violence and carnivorous excess while a nice little family drama--in which nearly everyone dies--unfurls ... As his dual narratives merge and feather into one another, each informing and illuminating the other, Mo Yan probes the character and lifestyle of modern China."--Publisher's description.

Citizens of Tokyo is the first collection in English of plays by one of Japan's most important contemporary playwrights, Oriza Hirata, whose works have been performed all over the world. The first part of Citizens of Tokyo, "At Home and Abroad," presents two plays--Toyko Notes and Kings of the Road--that are exemplary of Hirata's unique neorealist dramaturgy, which created one of the most important trends in Japanese theater since the 1990s: Quiet Theatre. The second part of the book presents two short comedies that satirize the politics of decision-making in Japan and abroad: "Loyal Rōnin: The Working Girls' Version" and "The Yalta Conference." The final part, "Robots and Androids are People Too," presents two short plays created in collaboration with Ishiguro Hiroshi and the Osaka University Robot Theatre Project. The plays are accompanied by a context-setting introduction from editor and cotranslator M. Cody Poulton.

When Elisapee's father brings home a baby seagull, Elisapee falls in love with the bird right away. She feeds and cares for her new friend, named Nau, and even helps Nau learn how to fly! Nau grows, and grows, and grows some more, until she's big enough to fly all over town and play with the other seagulls. Soon, it seems like Nau is ready to leave home for good, and Elisapee has to learn how to say goodbye. Based on the author's childhood experience, this charming story about learning to care for animals will delight young readers.

Two men talk in Tokyo. One, a Belgian, is a diplomat. The other, Dutch, is a photographer. What, they wonder, is the real face of Japan? How can they get beyond the European idea of the nation and its people--with its exoticism--and see Japan as it truly is? The Belgian has an idea: he helps the photographer find a model to shoot in front of Mount Fuji as the "typical Japanese." The plan works better than either had imagined--in fact, it works too well: the photographer falls in love, neglects his friend and his career, and, feeling out of place and disillusioned in Holland, returns to Japan as often as possible over the next five years. A reunion is planned: the three will meet again at Mount Fuji. Time, it seems, has stood still . . . except the woman has a secret, and plans of her own. This moving novel of obsession and difference is the latest masterwork from one of the greatest European writers working today, redolent with the power of desire and alive to the limits of our understanding of others.

There is nothing interesting about Ray Eccles. He knows it himself. On the morning of his fortieth birthday, he goes for a walk because he’s just learned of a dormant Second World War explosive offshore, and he’s the kind of man who thinks a bomb might be good company. As he gazes at the sea, a woman in the distance suddenly turns to face him—and a dying seagull falls from the sky, knocking him unconscious. When Ray wakes up, he’s inexplicably compelled to paint the woman’s image, obsessively and repeatedly: initially on any paper he can find in his house, and thereafter on the walls, using any materials that come to hand, including food and bodily fluids. Discovered by a power couple of Outsider Art, he becomes one of the most celebrated artists of the century, and soon even small-town newspapers are covering his work—which is how Jennifer, the woman on the beach, discovers she’s the subject of the paintings that have set the world on fire, leading her to wonder if a man she’s never met is the only person who has ever really seen her. Man with a Seagull on His Head is a novel about the impossibility of ever really knowing anyone, and the electric charge that comes from real if unexpected connection. Beautiful, lyrical, and strangely moving, it heralds a wonderful and original new voice.