Nelle tenebre illuminate da candele, da più di tre secoli, il fantasma di Sir Simon si aggira tra le antiche stanze del castello di Canterville. Da buon fantasma usa tutte le armi in suo possesso per terrorizzare gli inquilini del castello fino a quando arriva un'audace famigliola americana che lo sconfiggerà a colpi di fionda e scetticismo. Il fantasma, ormai stanco e sconsolato, verrà aiutato dalla dolce Virginia che cambierà per sempre il suo destino.

Taking the reader in and out of London drawing rooms, to the heights of aestheticism, and to the depths of decadence, The Picture of Dorian Gray is not only a melodrama about moral corruption. Laced with bon mots and vivid depictions of upper-class refinement, it is also a fascinating look at the milieu of Wilde's fin-de-siècle world and a manifesto of the creed “Art for Art's Sake.”



The ever-quotable Wilde, who once delighted London with his scintillating plays, scandalized readers with this, his only novel. Upon publication, Dorian was condemned as dangerous, poisonous, stupid, vulgar, and immoral, and Wilde as a “driveling pedant.” The novel, in fact, was used against Wilde at his much-publicized trials for “gross indecency,” which led to his imprisonment and exile on the European continent. Even so, The Picture of Dorian Gray firmly established Wilde as one of the great voices of the Aesthetic movement, and endures as a classic that is as timeless as its hero.



Camille Cauti, Ph.D., is an editor and literary critic who lives in New York City. She is a specialist in the Catholic conversion trend among members of the avant-garde in London in the 1890s.

This collection also includes Oscar Wilde's most famous comedies, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband, as well as his poetic tragedy Salomé?all written between 1891 and 1895, Wilde's most creative period. George Bernard Shaw said of Oscar Wilde that he is ?our most thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theater.”

Kenneth Krauss received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He teaches drama at the College of Saint Rose, where he also directs and produces. His most recent book is The Drama of Fallen France, on French theater under the German Occupation.

A handsome Perennial Classics edition of America's favourite play, Our Town, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

First produced and published in 1938, this Pulitzer Prize–winning drama of life in the small village of Grover's Corners has become an American classic and is Thornton Wider's most renowned and most frequently performed play.

This Perennial Classics edition includes a foreword by Donald Margulies and contains an afterword with documentary material edited by Tappan Wilder.

Our Town was first produced and published in 1938 to wide acclaim. This Pulitzer Prize–winning drama of life in the town of Grover's Corners, an allegorical representation of all life, has become a classic. It is Thornton Wilder's most renowned and most frequently performed play.

It is now reissued in this handsome hardcover edition, featuring a new Foreword by Donald Margulies, who writes, 'You are holding in your hands a great American play. Possibly the great American play.' In addition, Tappan Wilder has written an eye-opening new Afterword, which includes Thornton Wilder's unpublished notes and other illuminating photographs and documentary material.

Drawing on such unique sources as the author's unpublished letters, business records, and obscure family recollections, Tappan Wilder's Afterword adds a special dimension to the reissue of this hilarious tale about goodness in a fallen world.

Meet George Marvin Brush -- Don Quixote come to Main Street in the Great Depression, and one of Thornton Wilder's most memorable characters. George Brush, a traveling textbook salesman, is a fervent religious convert who is determined to lead a good life. With sad and sometimes hilarious consequences, his travels take him through smoking cars, bawdy houses, banks, and campgrounds from Texas to Illinois -- and into the soul of America itself.

Drawing on such unique sources as Thornton Wilder's unpublished letters, journals, and selections from the extensive annotations Wilder made years later in the margins of the book, Tappan Wilder's Afterword adds a special dimension to the reissue of this internationally acclaimed novel.

The Ides of March, first published in 1948, is a brilliant epistolary novel set in Julius Caesar's Rome. Thornton Wilder called it 'a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic.' Through vividly imagined letters and documents, Wilder brings to life a dramatic period of world history and one of history's most magnetic, elusive personalities.

In this inventive narrative, the Caesar of history becomes Caesar the human being. Wilder also resurrects the controversial figures surrounding Caesar -- Cleopatra, Catullus, Cicero, and others. All Rome comes crowding through these pages -- the Rome of villas and slums, beautiful women and brawling youths, spies and assassins.

Continuously in print since 1948, Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde has long been established as the most comprehensive and authoritative single–volume collection of Wilde's works available, containing his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as his plays, stories, poems, essays, and letters—all in their most authoritative texts. Edited and introduced by Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson, this handsome volume also includes a comprehensive bibliography and a chronology of Oscar Wilde's life and work. With an Introduction by the editor.

Continuously in print since 1948, Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde has long been established as the most comprehensive and authoritative single–volume collection of Wilde's works available, containing his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as his plays, stories, poems, essays, and letters—all in their most authoritative texts. Edited and introduced by Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson, this handsome volume also includes a comprehensive bibliography and a chronology of Oscar Wilde's life and work. With an Introduction by the editor.

Marking the thirtieth anniversary of Theophilus North, this beautiful new edition features Wilder's unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.

The last of Wilder's works published during his lifetime, this novel is part autobiographical and part the imagined adventure of his twin brother who died at birth. Setting out to see the world in the summer of 1926, Theophilus North gets as far as Newport, Rhode Island, before his car breaks down. To support himself, Theophilus takes jobs in the elegant mansions along Ocean Drive, just as Wilder himself did in the same decade. Soon the young man finds himself playing the roles of tutor, spy, confidant, lover, friend, and enemy as he becomes entangled in the intrigues of both upstairs and downstairs in a glittering society dominated by leisure.

Narrated by the elderly North from a distance of fifty years, Theophilus North is a fascinating commentary on youth and education from the vantage point of age, and deftly displays Wilder's trademark wit juxtaposed with his lively and timeless ruminations on what really matters about life, love, and work at the end of the day -- even after a visit to Newport.

A timeless statement about human foibles . . . and human endurance, this beautiful new edition features Wilder's unpublished production notes, diary entries, and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.

Time magazine called The Skin of Our Teeth 'a sort of Hellzapoppin' with brains,' as it broke from established theatrical conventions and walked off with the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama. Combining farce, burlesque, and satire (among other styles), Thornton Wilder departs from his studied use of nostalgia and sentiment in Our Town to have an Eternal Family narrowly escape one disaster after another, from ancient times to the present. Meet George and Maggie Antrobus (married only 5,000 years); their two children, Gladys and Henry (perfect in every way!); and their maid, Sabina (the ageless vamp) as they overcome ice, flood, and war -- by the skin of their teeth.

This beautiful new edition features unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.

'On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.' With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world.

By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death -- and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.

This new edition of Wilder?s 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning novel contains a new foreword by Russell Banks.

Laura's family's first home in Minnesota is made of sod, but Pa builds a clean new house made of sawed lumber beside Plum Creek. The money for materials will come from their first wheat crop. Then, just before the wheat is ready to harvest, a strange glittering cloud fills the sky, blocking out the sun. Soon millions of grasshoppers cover the field and everything on the farm. In a week's time, there is no wheat crop left at all.

On the Banks of Plum Creek is the fourth book in the Laura Years series.

Enthralled by a portrait of himself, young Dorian Gray makes a Faustian bargain to exchange his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Thus he is able to indulge in his desires, as only the portrait bears the traces of his decadence and becomes a nightmarish picture of his soul.

Edited with an Introduction by Robert Mighall
Preface by Peter Ackroyd

Always daring Hollywood censors' limits on content, Billy Wilder directed greats such as Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Ginger Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, Kirk Douglas, Audrey Hepburn, and Gary Cooper. Billy Wilder: Interviews follows the filmmaking career of one of Hollywood's most honored and successful writer-directors and spans over fifty years.

Wilder, born in 1906, fled from Nazi Germany and established himself in America. Starting with a celebrated 1944 Life magazine profile, the book traces his progress from his Oscar-winning heyday of the 1940s to the 1990s, in which he is still witty, caustic, and defiant.

Often playful and sometimes outrageous, but just as often very serious, Wilder details his rise as a Berlin cub reporter to a fledgling screenwriter in Hollywood's 'Golden Age.' He tells the stories behind his brilliant direction of such classics as Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Stalag 17 (1953), Sabrina (1954), The Seven-Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960), among others.

A dazzling raconteur, Wilder gives the scoop on the royalty of cinema, from the maddening magic of Monroe to the uncanny empathy of frequent alter ego Lemmon. Though his natural tendency is to spin marvelous anecdotes on the subject of show business, Wilder also delivers penetrating and instructive observations on his craft. On screen, his special blend of cynicism and romanticism was always expressed in a style that avoided showiness.

Billy Wilder: Interviews includes in-depth profiles, spirited Q&A's, and on-the-set glimpses of the director at work. Taken together, the interviews form an unofficial memoir of a sophisticated artist once described by a colleague as the most unusual and amusing man in Hollywood.

Robert Horton is the film critic for The Herald in Everett, Washington. His work has been published in Film Comment, New York Newsday, American Film, and the Seattle Weekly.

When Berneetha decides to create a community garden on a vacant lot, 12 year-old Kate Sibley's just got to help make that dream a reality. But just as the garden and Kate are both beginning to bloom, a sign goes up: a parking garage will be built on the lot. Can Kate, Berneetha and their friends keep the garden and the dream alive?

Television chef and literary activist Curtis Aikens helps you select and prepare fresh produce for healthy and delicious dining. Sharing infromation gathered through his successful career in the produce business, Curtis Aikens reveals tips you need to become an informed consumer.

Known as one of the greatest comedies written in English, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest attacks Victorian manners and morals in what can only be described as the most maliciously delicious way. A witty satire of Victorian social hypocrisy, Wilde pulls the strings on his cast of late-Victorian characters making them appear, first and foremost, exactly as they are--superficial, upper class Englishmen bound and cinched by an artificial code of manners.

Jack Worthington has invented a rakish brother, Ernest, who calls Jack away from family duties and gives him an excuse to travel to London. Similarly, Algernon Moncrieff has created the persona of Bunbury, an invalid friend, who periodically requires his services in the country. Both young men cleverly use their invented alter egos to disguise their misdemeanors until Jack discovers that Algernon has been impersonating Ernest, to woo Jack's young ward, Cicely. To make things just a bit more complicated, Algernon's cousin Gwendolyn loves Jack, but thinks Jack's name is Ernest. This enduring comedy of manners rises on a farcical crescendo until true identities are revealed and both couples end up happily united.

This full-cast reading coaxes every nuance of pretension, self-importance, and double entendre from Wilde's lines.