National Network for Equitable Library Service

'There are no lost women, only women who've forgotten their scripts.' RM Vaughan's play about Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner comes off the stage and onto the page in this handsome edition from Coach House Books. An insightful look at the gender politics behind the cameras and studios of the golden age of cinema.

It's a time of passion and confusion. Virtue is barely holding down its petticoats. People are bursting their corsets with unbridled desire. It's 1885, and the typewriter and the suffrage movement are sending things topsy-turvy. In the midst of it all, five ambitious New Women and one Newish Man struggle to find their way. Miss Mary Barfoot runs a school for secretaries with her young lover, Miss Rhoda Nunn. But when the Misses Madden - spinsters Virginia and Alice and beautiful young Monica - arrive, along with the attractive Dr. Everard Barfoot, things can never be the same.

Dr. Thoughtless Actions, a young geneticist, awakes one morning to find a cardboard box secured to his head. Unable to wrench it off, he attempts suicide, not only failing but also, unbeknowst to himself, cloning himself, creating Dr. Wishful Thinking. The two losers fall in love, fall in science, and fail to make a baby. Their conversation, an intricately woven semantic circus, traverses boxedness, love, and the more ridiculous areas of metaphysical speculation.

David French's award-winning plays Leaving Home, Of the Fields, Lately and Salt-Water Moon are available for the first time in a special one-volume edition, with an introduction by Albert Schultz. Set in the 1950s, Leaving Home tells the story of the Mercers, a Newfoundland family who have emigrated to the mainland and lost all sense of their place in the world. In Of the Fields, Lately, the emotionally charged sequel to Leaving Home, young Ben Mercer returns home after being gone for two years and confronts the family he left behind.

Mr. Kim is a first-generation Korean immigrant and the proud owner of Kim’s Convenience, a variety store located in the heart of downtown Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood. There, he spends his time serving an eclectic array of customers, catching petty thieves, and helpfully keeping the police apprised of illegally parked Japanese cars. As the neighbourhood quickly gentrifies, Mr. Kim is offered a generous sum of money to sell — enough to allow him and his wife to finally retire.

<p>The year is 1964 and first-time film director Alan Schneider is about to embark on a project combining the talents of Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. When Alan visits the home of Keaton to discuss the project, titled simply Film, he discovers the former star engaged in an imaginary card game with the long-deceased Irving G. Thalberg.</p> <p>It doesn’t take long for Alan to realize that he has entered into an altered universe resembling the surreal world of the Buster Keaton film, a world where doors solve problems and card games provide lessons in life.

<p>Second Prize Winner, Canada's National One-Act Playwriting Competition (1994)</p> <p><i>Shylock</i> is an award-winning play about a Jewish actor who finds himself condemned by his own community for his portrayal of Shakespeare’s notorious Jew.

<p>Four disparate people confront each other--their memory and their responsibility--at the emergency room of a hospital when brought together by the crisis of a teenager suffering a psychiatric episode.</p> <p><i>Tortoise Boy</i> is a “chamber play,” four monologues, or mon-dialogues, if you will. Through these four voices, four instruments--a quartet--these characters confront numerous existential quandaries: Can we have a future without a past? Is there meaning to a past that has no future? When do our memories open doors, and when do they close them?

Based on the true story of an Irish family with seven sons and one daughter immigrating to Biddulph Township near London, Ontario, in 1844, The Donnellys tells the tale of mystery and truths stranger than fiction. It is the story of a secret society and a massacre that shocked the Canadian public, a story overlooked by the artistic community until Reaney’s play elevated the events to the level of legend. First published in 1975, this script takes its place among other true Canadian classics on university and college course listings and in the hearts of drama lovers everywhere.

David French's first play is a classic in Canadian drama. The first part of what has come to be known as the Mercer Series, Leaving Home tells the story of a Newfoundland family that has emigrated and lost all sense of its place in the world. Leaving Home was named one of the 100 Most Influential Canadian Books by the Literary Review of Canada.