Luces de Bohemia es una obra maestra escrita por Ramón del Valle-Inclán en 1920, que inauguró un nuevo género teatral conocido como el esperpento. La historia sigue al poeta ciego Max Estrella y su amigo Latino, mientras recorren el sórdido Madrid en una serie de eventos exagerados y grotescos que transcurren a lo largo de dos días.
Ambientada en un "Madrid absurdo, brillante y hambriento", esta obra es un comentario mordaz sobre la España de la Restauración, vista a través de una lente sistemáticamente deformada. El protagonista, Max, simboliza una mirada más lúcida, a pesar de su ceguera, y su viaje revela las injusticias y opresiones de su tiempo.
Valle-Inclán utiliza el esperpento para diseccionar la realidad de su época, presentando a España como una "deformación grotesca de la civilización europea". A través de imágenes distorsionadas y personajes arquetípicos, como el bohemio y anarquista Max, inspirado en el poeta modernista Alejandro Sawa, la obra explora las dificultades y grandezas del estilo de vida bohemio.
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence.
Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence, and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.
An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport, and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results; a history teacher who thinks he's a fool.
In Alan Bennett's classic play, staff room rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.
The History Boys premiered at the National in May 2004.
A Legacy of Madness is the story of a loving family coming to grips with its own fragilities. It relays the author's journey to uncover, and ultimately understand, the history of mental illness that led generations of his suburban American family to their demise.
Dede Davis had worried, fussed, and obsessed for the last time. Her heart stopped beating in a fit of anxiety. In the wake of his mother's death, Tom Davis knew one thing: Helplessly self-absorbed and severely obsessive-compulsive, Dede led a tormented life. She spent years bouncing around mental health facilities, nursing homes, and assisted-living facilities, but what really caused her death?
A Legacy of Madness portrays Tom Davis's captivating discoveries of mental illness throughout generations of his family. Investigating his mother's history led to that of Davis's grandfather, a top administrator at one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in the country; his great-grandfather who died of self-inflicted gas asphyxiation during the Depression; and his great-great-grandmother who, with her eldest son, completed suicide one tragic day.
Ultimately, four generations of family members showed clear signs of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and alcoholism—often mistreated illnesses that test one's ability to cope.
Through this intimate memoir, we join Davis on a personal odyssey to ensure that he and his siblings, the fifth generation, recover their family legacy by not only surviving their own mental health disorders but by getting the help they need to lead healthy, balanced lives. In the end, we witness Davis's powerful transition as he makes peace with the past and heals through forgiveness and compassion for his family—and himself.
Istanbul: Memories and the City is a shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer, Orhan Pamuk. Born in Istanbul, Pamuk still resides in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms.
His portrait of his city is also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes from living amid the ruins of a lost empire.
With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters—both Turkish and foreign—who would shape his consciousness of his city.
Like Joyce’s Dublin and Borges’ Buenos Aires, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.