Books like 'The Balcony'
Readers who enjoyed The Balcony by Jean Genet also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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Collected Poems by Federico García Lorca
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA revised edition of this major writer's complete poetical work"And I who was walkingwith the earth at my waist,saw two snowy eaglesand a naked girl.The one was the otherand the girl was neither."--from "Qasida of the Dark Doves"Federico García Lorca is the greatest poet of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world's most influential modernist writers... -
Short Stories by Anton Chekhov
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe thirty-four stories in this volume span Chekhov's creative career. They present a wide spectrum of comic and serious themes and a variety of techniques. (His short novels, available in another Norton volume, Seven Short Novels by Chekhov, have been omitted... -
The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 by T.S. Eliot
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThis omnibus collection includes all of the author’s early poetry as well as the Four Quartets, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and the plays Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party... -
The Selected Poems by Federico García Lorca
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsThe Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca has introduced generations of readers to mesmerizing poetry since 1955. Lorca (1898-1937) is admired all over the world for the lyricism, immediacy and clarity of his poetry, as well as for his ability to encompass techniques of the symbolist movement with deeper psychological shadings. But Lorca's poems are, most of all, admired for their beauty... -
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My Voice Because of You, by Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsEnglish, Spanish... -
Palestine's Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories by Ghassan Kanafani
Rated: 4.40 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsPolitics and the novel, Ghassan Kanafani once said, are an indivisible case. Fadl al-Naqib has reflected that Kanafani wrote the Palestinian story, then he was written by it. His narratives offer entry into the Palestinian experience of the conflict that has anguished the people of the Middle East for more than a century...Categorized as:
politics classics university fiction historical-fiction historical 20th-century colonization -
Bent by Martin Sherman
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsMartin Sherman's worldwide hit play Bent took London by storm in 1979 when it was first performed by the Royal Court Theatre, with Ian McKellen as Max (a character written with the actor in mind). The play itself caused an uproar. "It educated the world," Sherman explains. "People knew about how the Third Reich treated Jews and, to some extent, gypsies and political prisoners... -
The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer, Joseph Papp
Rated: 4.24 of 5 stars · 17 ratingsTHE NORMAL HEART is the explosive drama about our most terrifying and troubling medical crisis today: the AIDS epidemic. It tells the story of very private lives caught up in the heartrendering ordeal of suffering and doom - an ordeal that was largely ignored for reasons of politics and majority morality... -
Collected Poems [Of] W. H. Auden by W.H. Auden, Edward Mendelson
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsBetween 1927 and his death in 1973, W. H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face. Or rather, with several faces, since his work ranged from the political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral, from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plain-spoken.This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval... -
The Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe definitive short story collection that established Ernest Hemingway's literary reputation, originally published in 1938.Ernest Hemingway is a cultural icon—an archetype of rugged masculinity, a romantic ideal of the intellectual in perpetual exile—but, to his countless readers, Hemingway remains a literary force much greater than his image... -
Assassins by Stephen Sondheim, John Weidman
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsEvoking a fraternity of political assassins and would-be assassins across a hundred years of our history, Sondheim and Weidman daringly examine success, failure and the questionable drive for power and celebrity in American society. "Dark, demented humor, as horrifying as it is hilarious... -
The Bedbug and Selected Poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThis selection of Mayakovsky's work covers his entire career--from the earliest pre-revolutionary lyrics to a poem found in a notebook after his suicide. Splendid translations of the poems, with the Russian on a facing page, and a fresh, colloquial version of Mayakovsky's dramatic masterpiece, The Bedbug... -
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century by M.H. Abrams, Stephen Greenblatt
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFirmly grounded by the hallmark strengths of all Norton Anthologies--thorough and helpful introductory matter, judicious annotation, complete texts wherever possible--The Norton Anthology of English Literature has been revitalized in this Eighth Edition through the collaboration between six new editors and six seasoned ones... -
The Major Plays by Anton Chekhov, Rosamund Bartlett
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAnton ChekhovThe Major PlaysIvanov * The Sea Gull * Uncle Vanya * The Three Sisters * The Cherry Orchard“Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life,” Chekhov once declared. “For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time, their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up... -
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O Homem Elefante by Bernard Pomerance
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThe Elephant Man is based on the life of John Merrick, who lived in London during the latter part of the nineteenth century. A horribly deformed young man, who has been a freak attraction in traveling side shows, is found abandoned and helpless and is admitted for observation to Whitechapel, a prestigious London hospital... -
Crystal Boys by Pai Hsien-yung
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsCrystal Boys is the first Chinese novel on gay themes. A-qing, the adolescent hero, comes from an impoverished family. His father casts him out after learning that his son is gay. A-qing drifts into New Park, a gay hangout in Taipei, and begins his life as a hustler... -
Selected Poems by Boris Pasternak, Борис Пастернак
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsAleksandr Blok (1880-1921) lived through his country's savage wars and radical traumas trying to welcome the new order. Trotsky wrote, `Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him.' Pasternak said, `He is as free as the wind... -
Manto: Selected Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratings...Categorized as:
classics drama politics fiction anthologies literary-fiction 20th-century historical -
Amok and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA doctor in the Dutch East Indies torn between his medical duty to help and his own mixed emotions; a middle-aged maidservant whose devotion to her master leads her to commit a terrible act; a hotel waiter whose love for an unapproachable aristocratic beauty culminates in an almost lyrical death, and a prisoner-of-war longing to be home again in Russia... -
The Essential Plays by Anton Chekhov
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsBecause Chekhov’s plays convey the universally recognizable, sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic, frustrations of decent people trying to make sense of their lives, they remain as fresh and vigorous as when they were written a century ago... -
Miracle of the Rose by Jean Genet
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis is the third of Genet's prose works to be published in the United States, following Our Lady of the Flowers (1963) and The Thief's Journal (1964). It is, however, Genet's second novel, having been written in La Santé and Tourelles prisons in 1943, directly after Our Lady of the Flowers... -
Consider the Lilies of the Field: a Novel by Erico Verissimo
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsEnglish, Portugese... -
Regeneration by Pat Barker
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsRegeneration, one in Pat Barker's series of novels confronting the psychological effects of World War I, focuses on treatment methods during the war and the story of a decorated English officer sent to a military hospital after publicly declaring he will no longer fight. Yet the novel is much more... -
The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFirst published in 1935 and 1939, the two related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which make up The Berlin Stories are recognized today as classics of modern fiction... -
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Ardh Al Burtuqal Al Hazin: Short Stories in Arabic by غسان كنفاني, Ghassan Kanafani
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsGhassan Kanafani is an Arab Palestinian writer and fighter. In this literal Arab genri several short stories are included. These stories were written in the 1960's at Kuwait and Bairut-Lebanon, and reflect nostalgia for the home land, Palestine... -
A Dry White Season by André P. Brink
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsAs startling and powerful as when first published more than two decades ago, André Brink's classic novel, A Dry White Season, is an unflinching and unforgettable look at racial intolerance, the human condition, and the heavy price of morality.Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg in a dark time of intolerance and state-sanctioned apartheid... -
Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOne of the great masterpieces of Russian literature, the Red Cavalry cycle retains today the shocking freshness that made Babel's reputation when the stories were first published in the 1920s... -
American Beauty: The Shooting Script by Alan Ball, Sam Mendes
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOn a typical suburban street in a typical suburban town, there is an ordinary family living the American dream. But look closer. Lester Burnham's wife, Carolyn, regards him with contempt, his daughter, Jane, thinks he's a loser, and his boss is positioning him for the ax... -
Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsTennessee Williams' sensuous portrait of sexual repression is as sultry as the sweltering heat of its Mississippi setting. Alma Winemiller, the sheltered daughter of a minister, secretly harbors a lifelong love for the boy next door, Dr. John Buchanan. Alma seeks a spiritual love with just one man, but the rakish John is focused solely on sexual conquest... -
The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIt is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. The river that flows through Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's youth: High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student named Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene... -
Funeral Rites by Jean Genet
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsGenet's sensual and brutal portrait of World War II unfolds between the poles of his grief for his lover Jean, killed in the Resistance during the liberation of Paris, and his perverse attraction to the collaborator Riton. Elegaic, macabre, chimerical, Funeral Rites is a dark meditation on the mirror images of love and hate, sex and death... -
A Bright Room Called Day by Tony Kushner
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratings“One of the things that makes Kushner such a vibrant writer is the way he luxuriates in exuberance and sorrow, emotions that these intense Berliners have in spades. His intellectual characters are tremendously passionate and expressive, so it's hard not to care about what they care about, and what happens to them.” –Washington Post“A juggernaut of a play... -
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The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsSet in France during the days immediately before World War II, this is the story of Mathieu, a French professor of philosophy obsessed with the idea of freedom. Translated from the French by Eric Sutton... -
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Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsHere, meine Damen und Herren, is Chrisopther Isherwood's brilliant farewell to a city which was not only buildings, streets and people, but was also a state of mind which will never come again.In linked short stories, he says goodbye to Sally Bowles, to Fraulein Schroeder, to pranksters, perverts, political manipulators; to the very, very guilty and to the dwindling band of innocents... -
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich by Bertolt Brecht, Tom Kuhn
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 15 ratingsAlso known as The Private Life of the Master Race, this is a sequence of twenty-four realistic sketches showing how "ordinary" life under the Nazis was subtly permeated by suspicion and anxiety. Written when Brecht was in exile in Denmark and first staged in 1938 it was inspired in part by his recent trip to Moscow where he had been researching tasks for the anti-Nazi effort... -
Five Modern No Plays by Yukio Mishima, Kan'ami Kiyotsugu
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsJapanese No drama is one of the great art forms that has fascinated people throughout the world... -
Travesties by Tom Stoppard
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsTravesties was born out of Stoppard's noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth century's most crucial revolutionaries -- James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin -- were all living in Zurich... -
Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThis special one-volume edition features five great plays by one of the most celebrated and fascinating dramatists of the twentieth century.Pirandello, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1934, was the playwright par excellence of the conflict between illusion and reality... -
The Maids / Deathwatch by Jean Genet
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe two plays featured in this volume represent Genet's first attempts to analyze the mores of a bourgeois society he had previously been content simply to vilify. In The Maids, two domestic workers, deeply resentful of their inferior social position, try to revenge themselves against society by destroying their employer... -
The Life to Come and Other Stories by E.M. Forster
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsOnly two were published in his lifetime. Most of the other stories remained unpublished because of their overtly homosexual themes; instead they were shown to an appreciative circle of friends and fellow writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, and T. E. Lawrence.The stories differ widely in mood and setting... -
Manon Lescaut by Vítězslav Nezval
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsEdition of the playForeword A. HoffmeisterPhoto M. Hák a J. LukasCaricatures A. Hoffmeister, V. Holub a F... -
Ellis Island by Fred Mustard Stewart
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThey were five young penniless people who came to America at the turn of the century--a land of shining hope and breathtaking challenge. They came to fulfill a glowing promise and take the fearful gamble of a new life in a land where anything was possible. Reissue... -
The Illusion by Tony Kushner, Pierre Corneille
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsFreely adapted by playwright Tony Kushner, The Illusion triumphs as a thoroughly modern rendering of Pierre Corneille's neoclassical French comedy, L'Illusion Comique. This adaptation offers readers the exquisite wordplay, beguiling comedy and fierce intelligence found in all of Kushner's work... -
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A Room of One's Own & The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsIn A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister: a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different.This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. But if only she had found the means to create, urges Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling... -
A Small, Good Thing by Raymond Carver
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsA Small, Good Thing is an award winning short story by American author Raymond Carver. It was included in the story collection Cathedral, published in 1983... -
Happy Days by Samuel Beckett
Rated: 3.89 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn 'Happy Days, ' Beckett pursues his relentless search for the meaning of existence, probing the tenuous relationships that bind one person to another, and each to the universe, to time past and time present... -
Hell Has No Limits by José Donoso
Rated: 3.86 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA reprint of the powerful novel by Chilean writers, José Donoso... -
Three Daughters of Madame Liang by Pearl S. Buck
Rated: 3.86 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAfter her husband takes a concubine, Madame Liang sets out on her own, starting an upscale restaurant and sending her daughters to America to be educated. At the restaurant, the leaders of the People's Republic wine and dine and Madame Liang must keep a low profile for her daughters' sake. Soon her two eldest daughters are called back to serve the People's Republic...Categorized as:
classics drama politics fiction historical-fiction historical literary-fiction 20th-century -
Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces by Samuel Beckett
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 20 ratingss/t: All That Fall; Embers; Acts Without Words, I and II; Mimes This collection of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s dramatic pieces includes a short stage play, two radio plays, and two pantomimes. The stage play Krapp’s Last Tape evolves a shattering drama out of a monologue of a man who, at age sixty-nine, plays back the autobiographical tape he recorded on his thirty-ninth birthday...
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