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Some works of literature just beg to be read out loud - This is the House that Jack Built and Hiawatha are two that most people are familiar with. Under Milk Wood too, is better appreciated read aloud. Try it for yourself. A sample (read aloud with Welsh accent, sing-song, go up like a question at the end of the line, extend vowels, as in 'weeedkiller' and emphasis is usually on the first syllable.)FIRST VOICEMr Pugh, in the School House opposite, takes up the morningtea to Mrs Pugh, and whispers on the stairs MR. PUGHHere's your arsenic, dear.And your weedkiller biscuit.I've throttled your parakeet.I've spat in the vases.I've put cheese in the mouseholes.Here's your... [_Door creaks open_ ...nice tea, dear. MRS PUGHToo much sugar.Or try this, read by Richard Burton, who was also from the same area so has exactly the right intonation. full cast production of Under Milk Wood If you would like to listen to a young Richard Burton reading the play alone (which I much prefer), it is in two parts, part one and part two.When I read this play by Dylan Thomas, I hear the village life of my childhood come to life. He caught the lilt and cadence of the Valleys speech and the trivial preoccupations of the people perfectly. Of course it helps that like Dylan Thomas I am also from South Wales and have the accent down pat!A little known fact, apparent to all Welsh people but no-one else, is that the village of Llareggub which looks perfectly Welsh is actually the English Bugger All backwards. (If it had been Welsh it would have been Llanreggub and mean the Parish of St. Reggub).Dylan Thomas wasn't at all poetic, his poems are just as much for people who don't like poetry as those who like reading it and contemplating what the poet meant by his imagery. There is not such issue with Dylan Thomas, he says what he means and you get it straightaway. If you enjoyed the play, read Dylan Thomas's magnificent [book:Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night|6619539]. Considerably rewritten 18 October on being told the link to Under Milk Wood no longer worked.

In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.--jacket flap

A mysterious stranger and his retinue have astonished the locals of Stalin’s Moscow with the magic show to end all magic shows and have quite literally set the town alight. But what’s the real purpose behind their visit?

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now . . . Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.

A gritty, heart-wrenching novel about bruised innocence on the city's feral streets—the remarkable debut of a stunning literary talentHeather O'Neill dazzles with a first novel of extraordinary prescience and power, a subtly understated yet searingly effective story of a young life on the streets—and the strength, wits, and luck necessary for survival.At thirteen, Baby vacillates between childhood comforts and adult temptation: still young enough to drag her dolls around in a vinyl suitcase yet old enough to know more than she should about urban cruelties. Motherless, she lives with her father, Jules, who takes better care of his heroin habit than he does of his daughter. Baby's gift is a genius for spinning stories and for cherishing the small crumbs of happiness that fall into her lap. But her blossoming beauty has captured the attention of a charismatic and dangerous local pimp who runs an army of sad, slavishly devoted girls—a volatile situation even the normally oblivious Jules cannot ignore. And when an escape disguised as betrayal threatens to crush Baby's spirit, she will ultimately realize that the power of salvation rests in her hands alone.

Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices. Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose. Here is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented... and becoming whole.

Evie O’Neill has been exiled from her boring old hometown and shipped off to the bustling streets of New York City—and she is pos-i-tute-ly ecstatic. It’s 1926, and New York is filled with speakeasies, Ziegfeld girls, and rakish pickpockets. The only catch is that she has to live with her uncle Will and his unhealthy obsession with the occult.Evie worries he’ll discover her darkest secret: a supernatural power that has only brought her trouble so far. But when the police find a murdered girl branded with a cryptic symbol and Will is called to the scene, Evie realizes her gift could help catch a serial killer.As Evie jumps headlong into a dance with a murderer, other stories unfold in the city that never sleeps. A young man named Memphis is caught between two worlds. A chorus girl named Theta is running from her past. A student named Jericho hides a shocking secret. And unknown to all, something dark and evil has awakened.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.

In her best-loved novel, The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence introduces Hagar Shipley, one of the most memorable characters in Canadian fiction. Stubborn, querulous, self-reliant – and, at ninety, with her life nearly behind her – Hagar Shipley makes a bold last step towards freedom and independence.As her story unfolds, we are drawn into her past. We meet Hagar as a young girl growing up in a black prairie town; as the wife of a virile but unsuccessful farmer with whom her marriage was stormy; as a mother who dominates her younger son; and, finally, as an old woman isolated by an uncompromising pride and by the stern virtues she has inherited from her pioneer ancestors.Vivid, evocative, moving, The Stone Angel celebrates the triumph of the spirit, and reveals Margaret Laurence at the height of her powers as a writer of extraordinary craft and profound insight into the workings of the human heart.From the Hardcover edition.

The Reader (German: Der Vorleser) is a novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink, published in Germany in 1995 and in the United States in 1997. The story is a parable, dealing with the difficulties post-war German generations have had comprehending the Holocaust; Ruth Franklin writes that it was aimed specifically at the generation Bertolt Brecht called the Nachgeborenen, those who came after. Like other novels in the genre of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the struggle to come to terms with the past, The Reader explores how the post-war generations should approach the generation that took part in, or witnessed, the atrocities. These are the questions at the heart of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses die and living memory fades.

Born into a magical Cree world in snowy northern Manitoba, Champion and Ooneemeetoo Okimasis are all too soon torn from their family and thrust into the hostile world of a Catholic residential school. Their language is forbidden, their names are changed to Jeremiah and Gabriel, and both boys are abused by priests.As young men, estranged from their own people and alienated from the culture imposed upon them, the Okimasis brothers fight to survive. Wherever they go, the Fur Queen--a wily, shape-shifting trickster--watches over them with a protective eye. For Jeremiah and Gabriel are destined to be artists. Through music and dance they soar.

'For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.'Willy Loman has been a salesman for 34 years. At 60, he is cast aside, his usefulness now exhausted. With no future to dream about he must face the crushing disappointments of his past. He takes one final brave action, but is he heroic at last?, or a self-deluding fool?

An intimate portrait of two men who cherish the slim bond between them and the dream they share in a world marred by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. Clinging to each other in their loneliness and alienation, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie dream, as drifters will, of a place to call their own—a couple of acres and a few pigs, chickens, and rabbits back in Hill Country where land is cheap. But after they come to work on a ranch in the fertile Salinas Valley of California, their hopes, like "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men," begin to go awry.Of Mice and Men also represents an experiment in form, as Steinbeck described his work, "a kind of playable novel, written in novel form but so scened and set that it can be played as it stands." A rarity in American letters, it achieved remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films. Steinbeck's tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of America's most widely read and beloved novels.--front flap

When Jack Kerouac’s On the Road first appeared in 1957, readers instantly felt the beat of a new literary rhythm. A fictionalised account of his own journeys across America with his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s beatnik odyssey captured the soul of a generation and changed the landscape of American fiction for ever.Influenced by Jack London and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac always wanted to be a writer, but his true voice only emerged when he wrote about his own experiences in On the Road. Leaving a broken marriage behind him, Sal Paradise (Kerouac) joins Dean Moriarty (Cassady), a tearaway and former reform school boy, on a series of journeys that takes them from New York to San Francisco, then south to Mexico. Hitching rides and boarding buses, they enter a world of hobos and drifters, fruit-pickers and migrant families, small towns and wide horizons. Adrift from conventional society, they experience America in the raw: a place where living is hard, but ‘life is holy and every moment is precious’.With its smoky, jazz-filled atmosphere and its restless, yearning spirit of adventure, On the Road left its mark on the culture of the late 20th century, influencing countless books, films and songs. Kerouac’s prose is remarkable both for its colloquial swing and for the pure lyricism inspired by the American landscape – ‘the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy’. This Folio Society edition is illustrated with evocative photographs of Kerouac and the landscapes of 1950s America. Now acknowledged as a modern classic, On the Road remains a thrilling and poignant story of the road less travelled.

The life of Anne Frank, from birth until being taken from the hidden attic by the Nazis, is presented in this haunting, meticulously researched picture book. It is a compelling yet easy-to-understand "first" introduction to the Holocaust as witnessed by Anne and her family. The stunningly evocative illustrations by Angela Barrett are worth a thousand words in capturing for young Americans what it must have felt like to be Anne Frank, a spirited child caught in the maelstrom of World War II atrocities. A detailed timeline of important events in Europe and in the Frank family is included.

Dive into this classic from the singular mind of Edgar Allan Poe, who is widely regarded as the master of short horror fiction. "The Fall of the House of Usher" recounts the terrible events that befall the last remaining members of the once-illustrious Usher clan before it is -- quite literally -- rent asunder. With amazing economy, Poe plunges the reader into a state of deliciously agonizing suspense. It's a must-read for fans of the golden era of horror writing.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Владимирович Набоков [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr vlɐˈdʲimʲɪrəvʲɪtɕ nɐˈbokəf] (listen); 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1899 – 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (Russian: Владимир Сирин), was a Russian and American novelist, poet, translator and entomologist. His first nine novels were written in Russian (1926–38), but he achieved international prominence after he began writing English prose. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945.Nabokov's Lolita (1955) was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels in 2007; Pale Fire (1962) was ranked 53rd on the same list; and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951), was listed eighth on publisher Random House's list of the 20th century's greatest nonfiction. He was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction seven times.

From the celebrated author of The English Patient and Anil's Ghost comes a remarkable, intimate novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time. In the 1970s in Northern California a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is shattered by an incident of violence that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Divisadero takes us from San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada's casinos and eventually to the landscape of southern France. As the narrative moves back and forth through time and place, we find each of the characters trying to find some foothold in a present shadowed by the past.

This is Goethe's first novel, published in 1774. Written in diary form, it tells the tale of an unhappy, passionate young man hopelessly in love with Charlotte, the wife of a friend - a man who he alternately admires and detests. 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' became an important part of the 'Sturm und Drang movement, and greatly influenced later 'Romanticism'. The work is semi-autobiographical - in 1772, two years before the novel was published, Goethe had passed through a similar tempestuous period, when he lost his heart to Charlotte Buff, who was at that time engaged to his friend Johann Christian Kestner.

The procession that crosses Chaucer's pages is as full of life and as richly textured as a medieval tapestry. The Knight, the Miller, the Friar, the Squire, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and others who make up the cast of characters -- including Chaucer himself -- are real people, with human emotions and weaknesses. When it is remembered that Chaucer wrote in English at a time when Latin was the standard literary language across western Europe, the magnitude of his achievement is even more remarkable. But Chaucer's genius needs no historical introduction; it bursts forth from every page of The Canterbury Tales.If we trust the General Prologue, Chaucer intended that each pilgrim should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two tales on the way back. He never finished his enormous project and even the completed tales were not finally revised. Scholars are uncertain about the order of the tales. As the printing press had yet to be invented when Chaucer wrote his works, The Canterbury Tales has been passed down in several handwritten manuscripts.

A criminal pleads insanity and is admitted to a mental institution, where he rebels against the oppressive nurse and rallies up the scared patients.

1975 drama film based on the novel by Ken Kesey

In 1980s Italy, romance blossoms between a seventeen-year-old student and the older man hired as his father's research assistant.

Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning is a 2008 Canadian made-for-television drama film and the fourth and final film in Sullivan Entertainment's Anne of Green Gables series. It was released in 2008 on CTV. Before the broadcast, CTV had recently acquired the rights to the entire Anne catalogue including the 1985 miniseries.Created to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables novel, the film stars Barbara Hershey as the middle-aged Anne Shirley and 14-year-old Hannah Endicott-Douglas as a young Anne, with Shirley MacLaine playing matriarch Amelia Thomas. Kevin Sullivan wrote a completely new screenplay for the three-hour movie based on Montgomery's characters (serving as a prequel to his three previous miniseries movies broadcast originally on CBC) and not directly from her books. The story follows Anne's life before she arrives at Green Gables.

Leonardo is a blind teenager searching for independence. His everyday life, the relationship with his best friend, Giovana, and the way he sees the world change completely with the arrival of Gabriel.

2014 Brazilian drama film by Daniel Ribeiro

The warm, funny and achingly sad story of the 15-year-long love affair between Timothy Conigrave and the boy he fell in love with at high school, John Caleo.

A soon-to-be-father policeman falls for a gay fellow officer and his life starts falling apart.

Food Matters examines how the food we eat can help or hurt our health. Nutritionists, naturopaths, doctors, and journalists weigh in on such topics as organic food, food safety, raw foodism, and nutritional therapy.

In 1985 Dallas, electrician and hustler Ron Woodroof works around the system to help AIDS patients get the medication they need after he is diagnosed with the disease.

In the antebellum United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery.

2013 British-American historical drama film directed by Steve McQueen

A Pittsburgh woman with two jobs as a welder and an exotic dancer wants to get into ballet school.

1983 romantic musical drama film by Adrian Lyne

Having moved to Paris for university, Leevi returns to his native Finland for the summer to help his estranged father renovate the family lake house so it can be sold. Tareq, a recent asylum seeker from Syria, has been hired to help 

After a drunken house party with his straight mates, Russell heads out to a gay club. Just before closing time he picks up Glen but what's expected to be just a one-night stand becomes something else, something special.

2011 British romantic drama film directed by Andrew Haigh

Nine years after Jesse and Celine first met, they encounter each other again on the French leg of Jesse's book tour.

2004 American romantic drama film directed by Richard Linklater

A pair of childhood friends and neighbors fall for each other's sons.

When sex worker Tess falls pregnant, she has to fight to keep her past from swallowing her whole.

A young man is rocked by two announcements from his elderly father: that he has terminal cancer and that he has a young male lover.

Haunted by painful memories and increasing paranoia, a damaged woman struggles to re-assimilate with her family after fleeing an abusive cult.

Having renounced her ignominious past, a former streetwalker reunites with her son, but an extortion scheme endangers her aspirations for a decent bourgeois life. Can she protect him from the same snares that wounded her youth?

A war-hardened general, egged on by his ambitious wife, works to fulfill a prophecy that he would become lord of Spider's Web Castle.

American rock singer, songwriter and musician

Dogstarwas an American alternative rock group active from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. The band found moderate success but garnered significant media attention due the band's bass guitarist being leading Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves.The genesis of Dogstar was a chance encounter between Robert Mailhouse and Keanu Reeves in a supermarket in 1991. Mailhouse was wearing a Detroit Red Wings hockey sweater, and Reeves (an avid hockey fan and a keen player of the sport) asked if Mailhouse needed a goalie. As the two men formed a friendship, they began jamming together, and were joined by Gregg Miller as the original lead guitarist and singer in 1992. Reeves said that one thing led to another in the band's history:

Sam Roberts(born October 2, 1974) is a Canadian rock singer-songwriter who has released six albums and has been signed to Universal (Canada) since 2002. His debut EPThe Inhuman Condition, reached the Canadian charts in 2002. He is backed up by the Sam Roberts Band when performing live.Born in Westmount, to South African immigrants who had arrived in Montreal three weeks earlier, Roberts grew up on Cedar Avenue in Pointe-Claire, where his family moved to when he was five years old. Roberts is an alumnus of St. Edmund Elementary School, Beaconsfield, Loyola High School, N.D.G. and John Abbott College, Ste. Anne de Bellevue and McGill University. Roberts' first band was William in 1993, that changed into Northstar in 1998. As William they put out a single, "The Piranha" in 1996, while as Northstar they released a self-titled EP in 1998, but never got a major record contract and broke up in 1999.

An idiosyncratic FBI agent investigates the murder of a young woman in the even more idiosyncratic town of Twin Peaks.

American drama television series from 1990–1991

The story of young teenagers and pupils on Hartvig Nissens upper secondary school in Oslo, and their troubles, scandals and everyday life. Each season is told from a different person's point of view.

Follows the misadventures of four irreverent grade-schoolers in the quiet, dysfunctional town of South Park, Colorado.

A look at the home and family life of Ozzy Osbourne.

An Australian web-based cartoon series filled with crude Australian humour that follows the adventures of humanoid alien Big Lez as he finds himself in crazy situations.

Seasonal anthology series in which police investigations unearth the personal and professional secrets of those involved, both within and outside the law.

An English combat nurse from 1945 is mysteriously swept back in time to 1743.

A dramedy centering around the relationship between a thirtysomething single mother and her teen daughter living in Stars Hollow, Connecticut.

American comedy-drama series for The WB and The CW (2000–2007)

Jimmy Fallon hosts the Tonight Show and interviews celebrities, plays games with them and has a musical or comedic guest perform.

-A Quebec talk-show (in Canada), about what happened the week before. Every Sunday, at 8pm at Radio-Canada, Guy A. Lepage hosts this show with Dany Turcotte.

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