Showing results by publisher "HarperAudio" in Parents & Adult Children

The Tempest was the last of Shakespeare's comedies, completed just before he retired to his native Stratford-upon-Avon; perhaps this delightful comedy was intended to signal the playwright's farewell to his beloved theater. The Tempest reflects Shakespeare's mature genius, with its story of innocence tempered by intrigue, hilarity bounded by melancholy. Audiences the world over still thrill to see The Tempest's dark comedy and magical fantasy.

Angela Nissel always wanted her mother’s approval. But two defining events created a barrier between them: renouncing Christianity and being admitted to a psychiatric ward— events that mirrored failed parenting to her mother. Beating her depression, Angela moved to Los Angeles where she quickly achieved success as a television writer but soon after found herself dead broke and enduring a painful divorce. It was at this low point that she received heartbreaking news: her mother had cancer.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Marilyn Ann Scales Underwood dreamed of becoming a fashion designer. Moving to New York City to study at the Traphagen School of Fashion, she became an assistant designer and eventually returned to her hometown where she began her career as the first Black female executive at Barmon Brothers Company. Independent and content with being single, she wasn’t interested in marriage until she met Lieutenant Frank Underwood.

This recently rediscovered and critically acclaimed 1937 novel tells the story of Janie Crawford, a long-legged, articulate, and fiercely independent African-American woman of the 1930s. Janie's quest for identity includes three marriages and a return to her roots. Despite her struggles, Janie never defines herself by regret, fear, or unrealistic dreams, and refuses to be anything but her own person.

Romeo and Juliet was Shakespeare's first great tragedy, a richly lyrical love story that has long been one of the author's most popular plays for performer and audience alike. Romeo and Juliet is a simple but dramatic cautionary tale about the blindness that both love and hate can engender. As performed by Claire Bloom and Albert Finney, this lively production captures the youthful exuberance and poetic passion that characterize all of Shakespeare's early work.

The Comedy of Errors is likely the very first play Shakespeare ever wrote, and for that reason alone it deserves a special place in literary history. Yet, despite the author's lack of maturity, the play is unmistakably the work of a burgeoning master. A farce of a type that was wildly popular in Shakespeare's day, The Comedy of Errors transcends its genre, and is as accessible and as entertaining as any of the Bard's later comedies.

The complete play in five acts.

I am a man more sinned against than sinning.

One of Shakespeare's final works, Cymbeline uses virtuoso theatrical and poetic means to dramatize a story of a marriage endangered by mistrust and painfully rebuilt, in a context of international conflict. This edition emphasizes the play's theatrical impact and pays close attention to its complex, evocative language.

In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare created one of the greatest verbal sparring matches in all of literature, echoes of which can be heard in the sophisticated dialogue of such late masters as George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward. Throughout the play, would-be lovers Beatrice and Benedick circle each other warily, until their scathing witticisms and sly innuendoes reach a feverish intensity that befits the passionate longing they both vainly seek to deny.

He after honor hunts, I after love. He leaves his friends to dignify them more, I leave myself, my friends and all, for love....