When the Internet-and the collective memory of the twenty-first century-crashes, the past is reassembled from the downloaded memories of Ginger, wife of ex-President Wilson.The transcripts take the reader on an intellectually breathtaking tour through David Mamet's baroque, fragmented world, where nothing is certain except the certainty bestowed by the academy.After the Cola riots, the fire at the Stop 'n' Shop, and the death of my kitten, what remains? Does the Joke Code still operate? Has anyone seen my copy of Bongazine? Can Jane of Trent unlock this paranoia? What were Chet and Donna doing in the boathouse? And just who does Ginger think she is? In playing with the ideas of perception, accuracy, and truth, Wilson dares to doubt them all.

"The finest American author of his generation." —Sunday Mail "Viewed as an indictment of journalism or the law—take your pick—The Penitent is timely and exciting and, in the best of ways, awfully depressing." —NBC New York "David Mamet is an American theater icon for good reason. He writes plays with nuance and depth that require the audience to really listen and think. About subjects that will stick to your ribs and keep your mind and your guts churning long after you leave the theater. The Penitent is no exception." —Front Row Center In David Mamet's searing new drama, Charles, a psychiatrist, is thrown into a firestorm of controversy when he refuses to testify on behalf of a gay client accused of killing ten people. He claims his refusal is a principled defense of the Hippocratic oath, enshrining the confidentiality of the doctor-client relationship. The client's defense claims it is bigotry. As Charles is subjected to a...

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross, here is a collection of thirty-two one act plays and short dramatic pieces that David Mamet himself considers to be some of the best writing he has ever done. In this single volume are all seven plays that make up Vermont Sketches, which Frank Rich of The New York Times has called “remarkable . . . as terrifying as a stranglehold." Here also are the six plays that The Blue Hour, The Spanish Prisoner, and Goldberg Street comprise, and seventeen more short pieces from one of our greatest living playwrights.Includes:Goldberg StreetCross PatchThe Spanish PrisonerTwo ConversationsTwo ScenesYes But So WhatVermont Sketches:“Conversations with the Spirit World"“Pint's a Pound the World Around"“Dowsing"“Deer Dogs"“In the Mall"“Maple...

Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet ranks among the century's most influential writers for stage and screen. His dialogue--abrasive, rhythmic--illuminates a modern aesthetic evocative of Samuel Beckett. His plots--surprising, comic, topical--have evoked comparisons to masters from Alfred Hitchcock to Arthur Miller. Here are two screenplays demonstrating the astounding range of Mamet's talents. The Spanish Prisoner, a neo-noir thriller about a research-and-development cog hoodwinked out of his own brilliant discovery, demonstrates Mamet's incomparable use of character in a dizzying tale of twists and mistaken identity. The Winslow Boy, Mamet's revisitation of Terence Rattigan's classic 1946 play, tells of a thirteen-year-old boy accused of stealing a five-shilling postal order and the tug of war for truth that ensues between his middle-class family and the Royal Navy. Crackling with wit, intelligent and surprising, The Spanish Prisoner and The...

Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school. With these words, one of our most brilliantly iconoclastic playwrights takes on the art of profession of acting, in a book that is as shocking as it is practical, as witty as it is instructive, and as irreverent as it is inspiring.Acting schools, “interpretation,” “sense memory,” “The Method”—David Mamet takes a jackhammer to the idols of contemporary acting, while revealing the true heroism and nobility of the craft. He shows actors how to undertake auditions and rehearsals, deal with agents and directors, engage audiences, and stay faithful to the script, while rejecting the temptations that seduce so many of their colleagues. Bracing in its clarity, exhilarating in its common sense, True and False is invaluable.From the Trade Paperback edition.

With this screenplay David Mamet gives the traditional prison-break story his special blend of gripping suspense, slapdash buffoonery, and ingenious plotting.Bob, a vicious killer, cheats the electric chair by shooting his way out of the penitentiary, forcing two reluctant convicts to come along. Desperately dodging the cops, Ned and Jim reach a river that runs along the Canadian border. The bridge across it becomes their only hope of reaching safety, but a checkpoint guards the crossing. Mamet builds the tension to the breaking point with a series of sizzling surprises as time and again the escaped jailbirds fail by a hairsbreadth to slip past the guards.Disguised as priests, Ned and Jim are mistaken for two famous theologians attending the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows at a local monastery. The wickedly funny Mamet takes his two heroes down a dizzying course of serpentine adventures, demonstrating once again his peerless mas­tery of the art of cinematic suspense.

"Mamet remains American theater's most urgent five-letter word."—Guardian "The finest American author of his generation."—Sunday Mail "Mr. Mamet's talent for burying layers of meaning into simple, precisely distilled, idiomatic language can only be compared to Harold Pinter's."—The New York Times Acclaimed for spare, dark dramas and cutting comedies permeated with spiky confrontations, multi-award-winning playwright David Mamet once again proves nothing is quite what it seems in his latest work The Anarchist. With a nod to his mentor Harold Pinter, Mamet employs his signature verbal jousting in the story of two women: once involved with a Weather Underground-like group, a prisoner serving a life sentence desperately tries to make the case for her freedom to a prison governor. This newest play by the celebrated author of American Buffalo and Oleanna premiered in London in fall 2011 under the direction of Rupert Goold. David Mamet is a playwright, director, author, essayist, screenwriter, and film director. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, which also received a Tony Award nomination, along with Speed-the-Plow. His other plays include American Buffalo, A Life in the Theatre, Oleanna, The Cryptogram, and Race.

David Mamet has been a controversial, defining force in nearly every creative endeavor-now he turns his attention to politics. In recent years, David Mamet realized that the so-called mainstream media outlets he relied on were irredeemably biased, peddling a hypocritical and deeply flawed worldview.In 2008 Mamet wrote a hugely controversial op-ed for the Village Voice, Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'", in which he methodically attacked liberal beliefs, eviscerating them as efficiently as he did Method acting in his bestselling book True and False.Now Mamet employs his trademark intellectual force and vigor to take on all the key political issues of our times, from religion to political correctness to global warming. The legendary playwright, author, director, and filmmaker pulls no punches in his art or in his politics. And as a former liberal who woke up, Mamet will win over an entirely new audience of others who have grown irate over...

Pulitzer Prize--winning playwright David Mamet's Romance is an uproarious, take-no-prisoners courtroom comedy that gleefully lampoons everyone from lawyers and judges, to Arabs and Jews, to gays and chiropractors.It's hay fever season, and in a courtroom a judge is popping antihistamines. He listens to the testimony of a Jewish chiropractor, who's a liar, according to his anti-Semitic defense attorney. The prosecutor, a homosexual, is having a domestic squabble with his lover, who shows up in court in a leopard-print thong. And all the while, a Middle East peace conference is taking place. Masterfully wielding the argot of the courtroom, David Mamet creates a world in microcosm in which shameless fawning, petty prejudices, and sheer caprice hold sway, and the noble apparatus of law and order degenerates into riotous profanity.From the Trade Paperback edition.

"The finest American author of his generation."—Sunday MailThis complex new work from celebrated playwright David Mamet revolves around a wealthy man, his young fiancée, and an airplane. The man has just bought a new plane as a wedding present for the girl. He intends to go into semiretirement and enjoy himself. While in the process of leaving his office, and giving last minute instructions to his young assistant, he takes one final phone call.The new, widely anticipated play premieres on Broadway this fall, starring Tony and Academy Award-winning actor Al Pacino, for whom the play was written. Pacino described the role of billionaire Mickey Ross as "one of the most daunting and challenging roles I've been given to explore in the theater" and declared, "it blew me away."David Mamet is an American playwright, director, and screenwriter whose most notable works include Glengarry Glen Ross (Pulitzer Prize for Drama), American...

The Woods, described by the Chicago Daily News as a “beautifully conceived love story," is a modern dramatic parable in which a young man and woman who spend a night in his family's cabin experience passion, then disillusionment, but are in the end reconciled by mutual need.In Lakeboat, eight crew members aboard a merchant ship exchange their wild fantasies about sex, gambling, and violence.In Edmond, a man set morally adrift leaves an unfulfilling marriage to find sex, adventure, companionship, and, ultimately, the meaning of his existence.Of The Woods, Richard Eder of The New York Times wrote that Mamet's “language has never been so precise, pure, and affecting."Michael Feingold in The Village Voice praised Lakeboat for its “richly overheard talk and its loopy, funny construction."Jack Kroll of Newsweek called Edmond “a riveting theatrical experience...

Having put his personal stamp on the contemporary theater, David Mamet now performs the supremely audacious feat of reinventing the theater of the past. He does so by telling his own ingenious and eerily moving version of the tragedy of Dr. Faustus.Mamet’s Faustus—like Marlowe’s and Goethe’s before him—is a philosopher whose life’s work has been the pursuit of “the secret engine of the world.” He is also the distracted father of a small, adoring son. Out of the clash between love and intellect and the fatal operation of Faustus’ pride, Mamet fashions a work that is at once caustic and heart-wrenching and whose resplendent language marries metaphysics to conman’s patter. A meditation on reason and folly, fathers and sons, and a breathtaking display of magic both literal and theatrical, Faustus is a triumph.From the Trade Paperback edition.Review“No modern playwright has been bolder or more brilliant.” —*The New Yorker“Pinter, Albee, Miller. They’re all looking over Mamet’s shoulder.” —New York*From the Trade Paperback edition.About the AuthorDavid Mamet was born in Chicago in 1947. He studied at Goddard College in Vermont and at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater in New York. He has taught at Goddard College, the Yale Drama School, and New York University, and lectures at the Atlantic Theater Company, of which he is a founding member. He is the author of the plays The Cryptogram, Oleanna, Speed-the-Plow, Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, and Sexual Perversity in Chicago. He has also written screenplays for such films as House of Games and the Oscar-nominated The Verdict, as well as The Spanish Prisoner, The Winslow Boy, and Wag the Dog. His plays have won the Pulitzer Prize and the Obie Award.

A big-shouldered, big-trouble thriller set in mobbed-up 1920s Chicago—a city where some people knew too much, and where everyone should have known better—by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Untouchables and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross.Mike Hodge—veteran of the Great War, big shot of the Chicago Tribune, medium fry—probably shouldn't have fallen in love with Annie Walsh. Then, again, maybe the man who killed Annie Walsh have known better than to trifle with Mike Hodge.In Chicago, David Mamet has created a bracing, kaleidoscopic page-turner that roars through the Windy City's underground on its way to a thunderclap of a conclusion. Here is not only his first novel in more than two decades, but the book he has been building to for his whole career. Mixing some of his most brilliant fictional creations with actual figures of the era, suffused with trademark "Mamet Speak," richness of voice, pace, and...

David Mamet is one of America's most celebrated playwrights. The author of plays, screenplays, poetry, essays, and children's books, he has won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross.The Obie award-winning Sexual Perversity in Chicago is about two office workers, Danny and Bernie, on the make in the swinging singles scene of the early 1970s. Danny meets Deborah in a library and soon they are not only lovers but roommates, and their story quickly evolves into a modern romance in all its sticky details.The Duck Variations is a dialogue between two old men sitting on a park bench. The conversation turns to the mating habits of ducks, but soon begins to reveal their feelings about natural law, friendship, and death. New York magazine has called The Duck Variations “a gorgeously written, wonderfully observant piece whose timing and atmosphere are close to flawless."

Winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, David Mamet's scalding comedy is about small-time, cutthroat real esate salesmen trying to grind out a living by pushing plots of land on reluctant buyers in a never-ending scramble for their fair share of the American dream. Here is Mamet at his very best, writing with brutal power about the tough life of tough characters who cajole, connive, wheedle, and wheel and deal for a piece of the action — where closing a sale can mean a brand new cadillac but losing one can mean losing it all. This masterpiece of American drama is now a major motion picture starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alan Arkin, Alex Baldwain, Jonathan Pryce, Ed Harris, and Kevin Spacey.