Bøger af Richard Nelson

Burke, a middle-aged college English professor, and his lover, Mia, an unmarried mother in her mid-20s, seem in no way made for each another and yet, it seems, can't live without each other. "In his remarkable new two-character play, LIFE SENTENCES, Richard Nelson explores an intimate relationship between two people no dating service would ever put together and makes their connection tender, believable and as complex as most relationships usually are." -Gloria Cole, U P I "Richard Nelson has a penchant for writing about characters who can talk with considerable brilliance about almost anything except what's really on their minds." -Barbara Siegel & Scott Siegel, Drama-Logue "Full of Nelson's sad, wry wisdom, and his odd way of looking at life through a two-way mirror." -Clive Barnes, New York Post

The Left is personified in Richard Nelson's idealistic and intellectual characters, whose fascinating friendships are as fraught as the political history through which they've lived. "You can't watch [LEFT] without thinking about Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and Diana Trilling. Richard Nelson ... hasn't brought the famous, undignified Hellman/McCarthy/Trilling feud directly onstage, but he invokes their noisy ghosts. They resonate. It's uncanny. Imagine I'M NOT RAPPAPORT with Simon Gray's wit and Doris Lessing's brains. We first meet Marianne, a retired college president, and Eddie, who writes essays on pornography for The New York Review of Books, in the Adirondacks. They are waiting for Elinor, an editor at a Manhattan publishing house, to arrive by motorboat and explain her memoir. In her memoir, Elinor savages her oldest friend, Marianne, as typical of a whole class of I'm-all-right-Jack Upper West side intellectuals who betrayed their youthful idealism in the dreary Cold War years. Eddie, an ex-husband as well as an ex-radical, has been deleted, even from Elinor's index. From the beginning of their ménage à trois, Eddie has always been the odd man out. [LEFT] is as much consumed by female friendship as it is by left history. Almost immediately, we flash back fifty years to their first visit to the Adirondacks, fresh from college politics in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, looking for money to start a magazine a lot like Partisan Review. We'll go back and forth the rest of the play, until all six of them, the pure of heart and their revised editions, are in the same room, at the same time, a crowd of regrets. These people talk about Joseph Stalin and the Sierra Club, Amnesty International and Saran Wrap, South Africa and skinny-dipping. What they're really talking about is friendship in history. If the person is political, how much so, at what cost and is there any forgiveness? I felt like a spy, switching sides so often in my sympathies." -John Leonard, New York Magazine

Here is Nelson's luminously wise account of his exploration of an unnamed island in the Pacific Northwest. This book revises our own relationship with nature, allowing us to observe it and also to participate in it with reverence and a sense of wonder.

Explores the reasons why someone may want to take their own life. This book offers advice on the warning signs, explains when and how to seek help, and encourages teens to get their schools and local communities involved in suicide awareness and prevention.

"In the play I portray a disgusting, selfish, provincial fellow who for twenty years has been reading works on art but understanding nothing about the subject-a man who brings despondency and gloom to all those near him, who is not accessible to laughter and music-and who, despite all this, is undoubtedly happy." Anton Chekhov

Damaged Language contains four radio plays by Richard Nelson:LANGUAGES SPOKEN HERE Giles Cooper Award winner "a morally ambiguous comedy…an American in London thinks he's translating a novel by a penniless Polish emigre, only to find, after befriending and patronizing him, that the Pole has ditched his benefactor for another hack… True and funny as well." Paul Ferris, The Observer "A neat, beautifully written, serious comedy about translation, exile and betrayal-one of the very best on Radio 3 last year." Nigel Andrews, The Listener "A rare sort of treat…a very funny play, delicate in its touches, but sharp as a needle." Gillian Reynolds, The Daily TelegraphEATING WORDS Giles Cooper Award winner "Totally enthralling… Richard Nelson is God's gift (or at least America's) to English radio drama." Nigel Andrews, The Listener "A thoroughly absorbing account of two writers on a drunken tour of London." Plays and Players ADVICE TO EASTERN EUROPE "A masterly short play-a post-Cold War romance that is witty [and] technically bold-examines how one woman's Utopia may be another person's capitalist nightmare." Quentin Curtis, The Independent on SundayTHE AMERICAN WIFE "A reminder that Nelson is the sharpest observer around of the gulf separating Britain and America." Michael Billington, The Guardian