Oscar Wilde entirely dedicates this play to the exploration of the way a woman can be saved from destruction in this society of appearances. A woman was the victim of an imbroglio in the past and abandoned her daughter. This woman comes back and the daughter ignores her relation to her. She is brought back into societry by the daughter's husband who knows the truth but does not want his wife to know it. But there is some kind of malediction that flies over the heads of these women. The daughter nearly does the same mistake as her mother but she is saved by her mother who accepts to be tainted in her daughter's place. Bus Oscar Wilde must think there is some kind of reward for a good deed and all is well that ends well, and this play has a happy ending. In spite of all the melodramatic sentimentalese atmosphere, Oscar Wilde definitely explores in this play the great disadvantage of a woman in society. Men can do nearly all they want. Women are extremely limited and have to walk a very straight and narrow line. Oscar Wilde seems to be ahead of his time as for the fate of women: he seems to aspire for real equality for them, though he shows in all possible ways that this is impossible in his society.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan

My first experience reading Oscar Wilde... and certainly not my last.

Wilde's sardonic wit and ineffable satire had me enchanted from page one. Wilde writes with devastatingly appealing witticisms, and with a style and cleverness matched by few other authors. It is said that he is one of the more oft-quoted authors in the English language, and I now understand why.

In addition to axioms and aphorisms of pure genius, the plot both captivates and surprises the reader. Lady Windermere discovers that her husband has been cheating on her, and a folly of misunderstandings and poor advice then unfolds; all the while satirizing society.

This play is very interesting to read (according to me). I saw a lot of hypocracy and snobery of people in this play. But a lot of peole said that the plays of Oscar Wilde have no satire, means, there is no factor of politics, socials,etc. I think, what he wrote in this plays and other plays had something to critize the people in that time. I want more information about Lady Winderemere's Fan, I mean what is the background of Wilde wrote yhis novel. Is there any important effects so that he wrote this first play?

William Gordon did a fabulous job compiling this gem of a collection. This is a "must" for any writer for both inspiration and information. I reach for it often in my struggle to write my second book. I appreciate the varied resources from all kinds of backgrounds (and different ages), but most of all, they are writers who have gone down the same path as I.

Writers love words and Bill Gordon loves writers. Hehascompiledover 170 pages of categorized quotations from more than 600authors. This book is recommended to all writers, not just for yourown enjoyment but as a resource. When it is not on your nightstand, it will be within easy reach of your desk, next to your dictionary.

OK Shakespeare fans, this is the one reference book you will ever need for all you would ever want to know about the Bard. It covers everything related to Shakespeare minus information on whether he wore briefs or boxers. (Everything else, though, is covered here--trust me!)

And one thousand pages for $15? C'mon, this is well worth the price of a pizza! Of course, this is not something you would read word for word, but I have used it more than once to help me understand a play that I was about to see. However, you need to set aside the better part of an hour to read the article on the history and background of any one of his plays. There is also plenty of info on his other writings, including the sonnets. Besides visiting the reconstructed Globe theatre (which I have had the privilege of doing), owning this book is the only other requirement for the serious Shakespearean student/fan.

My sole complaint is that the lettering is rather small (is is 7 pt or 8 pt? my eyes couldn't tell--ouch!). But hey, what do you expect for $15? A 2,000-page book?

If you want a comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare this is a must buy! I used this book constantly while taking a Shakespeare class. I have already reccomended it to numerous others and they found it just as useful. I'm now on my second copy because I wore the other one out!

This is more than a collection of masterful song lyrics, the long introductions by Stephen Sondheim and Oscar Hammerstein make it something of a treatise on lyric-writing by two of the art's greatest practitioners.

Also recommended: "Pentatonic Scales for the Jazz Rock Keyboardist" by Jeff Burns.

"Othello" is one of my favorite Shakespearean plays, but even the best of things could use a little updating once in a while. That's why I was so excited when I found out about the comic book version. It is the play, the whole play, and nothing but the play, made easier for the layman to understand with interesting contemporary art.

This is the best poetry buy you can find for the money. This book is packed with more than 500 poems written since 1855 in the English language. It is behemoth of pages - thick and hefty. It will provide endless hours of entertainment. Every person should carefully study this volume before penning poetry.

Back-stage pass in hand, Richard Halpern offers an excruciatingly funny close-reading of selected moments in Shakespeare, Sade, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan. But this is rough intellectual going for anyone not initiated in the finer pleasures of literary criticism. Readers should begin with an awareness, for example, of the commonplace that the diminutive, perfect perfume bottle in Shakespeare's Sonnet 5 "is the male womb of Shakespearean verse." Halpern proposes that the image of the perfume bottle replaces the strange process of baby-making with "the even more mysterious process whereby the young man's sexual substance - his semen - is distilled into poetry." If, for Shakespeare, the proper 'use' of semen isn't the creation of life but the creation of beauty, then perhaps we should conclude that "Shakespearean homosexuality is the aesthetic sublimate of sodomy." What, you will ask, about the dark remainder? The waste? It is there in the poem, living in "the half-light of wordplay, implication, and insinuation." In other words, "The Shakespearean sonnet gives off a perfume that contains just the slightest hint of feces." Halpern clarifies this subtle point with an account of the Sadean sublime: is there really any difference between sex with an old woman of indifferent personal hygiene and a brisk mountain walk in rugged terrain? Who can say?

The three remaining chapters recapitulate and strengthen Halpern's thesis that in poetry, sodomy and the sublime are, perhaps not at all paradoxically, related. A brisk rehearsal of the the old Derrida-Foucault debate about reason and madness appears in a reading of Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." Here, Halpern teases out the sexual subtext of Derrida's 1996 anniversary tribute to his late teacher, in which he (Derrida) confesses to feeling intense, multiple repercussions deep inside. These must be "the aftershocks of theoretical sodomy," Halpern writes. After all, Derrida "is nothing if not a pushy bottom." In a stunning chapter on Freud's reading of Leonardo da Vinci's "St. Anne with Two Others," Halpern draws on Lacan's analogy of the map in his "Seminar on the Purloined Letter" to note that the infamous vulture on Anne's lap "does not occupy the representational depth of the painting but rather is splayed flatly across the surface of the canvas, at once obvious and invisible." It persists, Halpern writes, as a dead leftover - presumably a smelly one at that. In a strangely sober analysis of Lacan's reading of an icky, twelfth-century poem by Arnaut Daniel (involving the proposed ingesting of bodily waste as part of a test to win a fair lady's hand....whatever), Halpern concludes that as a vessel, the anus is considered "improper" because it can't hold seed. In the discourse of sodomy, he continues, "the anus is the paradigmatically empty space, the vessel as absolute void."

Halpern's point, finally, is that poets and sodomites share a creative process that is something quite different from a procreative process. I was left wondering what T.S. Eliot would say about this and turned to "The Waste Land" (which covers much the same rugged terrain as Halpern's book); I imagine he would simply cry "Jug jug" to dirty ears.

I first read the "Silver Kings: The Lives and Times of MacKay, Fair, Flood, and O'Brien, Lords of the Nevada Comstock Lode", because there was a family story that James G. Fair might be a lost relative. If he is it's quite distant, but the book was so interesting that I've since read everything I could get my hands on about the Comstock Lode and it's characters. Virginia City really did more as the birth place of the myths and truths of the Old West than did Tombstone or Dodge City. I am also an "Earp" buff and have read much available on the "Gun Fight" related characters. Even Samuel Clemens, later known as Mark Twain, was a reporter for the Virginia City newspaper during his early days. The book was fantastic. I'm glad to see it in reprint as I will give it as gifts to some of my friends. I had hunted long and hard for my old copy. If you like stories of the Old West you will enjoy this one. And the stories are true.
Senator Mike Fair
Oklahoma State Senator

Your title confounds me putting you at a distant,
A pedestal of immortality, but I want you in the here and now; in the existent.
Assigning you 4-stars is akin to the betrayal of a friend.
For your dog-eared pages has backpacked peaks with me; your spine water-stained with a tendency to distend.
But you try too hard capturing poets and poetry alike through the ages.
There is too much of you and too little of Cummings, of Lowell, of Whitman among the other sages.
There is no poet's life and who and where
There is only the poet's strife and your title's cavalier.
But I dog you no further down for your dog-eared pulp has brought me much not leaving my wallet forsaken,
For in your ambition you have failed not to include Housman, Santayana, and Aiken.

The poems are listed in chronological order of author birthdate which gives an interesting perspective of the history of the english language. It has two indices that list the poems by author and first line which can be very handy when you are trying to find something. It does not contain any modern work still in copyright, but has most of my favourites (Daffodils, The Traveller, Shall I compare thee..., Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, The Jaberwocky).

I own various anthologies of American, British, and modern poetry, but none of them are as portable and densely packed with soul-moving poetry as this six dollar book. You may find it regrettable that the book lacks some of your favorite poems. Sandburg appears but without Chicago, and Poe but no Raven. However, each one of the poems stirs in such a way that you will find the titular adjective "immortal" quite apropriate. My copy has traveled with me over three continents, and now rests on my nightstand. As someone who loves poetry, its the one book that I don't leave home without.