Levin's best-known play is Deathtrap, which holds the record as the longest-running comedy-thriller on Broadway.
Seemingly comfortably ensconced in his charming Connecticut home, Sidney Bruhl, a successful writer of Broadway thrillers, is struggling to overcome a "dry" spell which has resulted in a string of failures and a shortage of funds. A possible break in his fortunes occurs when he receives a script from a student in the seminar he has been conducting at a nearby college a thriller which Sidney recognizes immediately as a potential Broadway hit.
Sidney's plan, which he devises with his wife's help, is to offer collaboration to the student, an idea which the younger man quickly accepts.
Thereafter suspense mounts steadily as the plot begins to twist and turn with devilish cleverness, and with such an abundance of thrills and laughter, that audiences will be held enthralled until the final, startling moments of the play.
About the Author
Ira Levin was twenty-two when he wrote his first novel, the award-winning thriller A Kiss Before Dying, and twenty-five when, fresh from military service, he wrote his first play, the smash-hit adaptation of Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants.
In the years since, he has continued to work both sides of the literary street. His plays include the comedy hit Critic's Choice, the musical Drat! The Cat! and the thriller Veronica's Room. Among his novels are Rosemary's Baby, generally credited or blamed for having sparked the current revival of occultism, The Stepford Wives, and the international best seller The Boys from Brazil.
A native-born New Yorker, Mr. Levin is an alumnus of New York University and has three sons.
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*Alternate cover edition can be found here
Melody, old Mintakan musical alien, keeps Tarot cards while saving universe. First willing transfer volunteer is busty human Solarian Yael. Enemy galaxy Andromeda forces transfers, damages hosts, Officers in Milky Way spaceship fleet. Bird of Dash is her Kirlian aura equal; his planet hides secret. Like her ancestor Outworlder Flint, foes give in to aura attraction.* Views: 445
Sun-Blazed Beaches
With languid tropical breezes caressing her breathtakingly beautiful face, Bettina Verlaine stood before the mast, sailing westward to fulfill a promise her heart never made--marriage to a Count her eyes had never beheld. Then in a moment of swashbuckling courage, the pirate Tristan swept her away and the spell of his passion was cast over her heart forever. But many days--and fiery nights--must pass before their love could flower into that fragile blossom a woman gives to only one man. Views: 433
Arranged marriages force twin sisters to forge their own destinies in this breathtaking historical saga from the award-winning author of Jasmine Moon. Marigold and Maranta are the beautiful, twin daughters of a privileged plantation family, raised to be gracious and modest. Marigold's dazzling golden tresses and Maranta's gorgeous ivory skin and deep dark eyes give the two young sisters a high value in the marriage market, and they find themselves sold into loveless marriages they did not choose. In this spellbinding tale of passion and cruel fate, love will not be held prisoner as Marigold and Maranta fight to be together with the men they truly desire... Views: 426
Up-and-coming painter, Sandra Telford, races down the platform to catch her train to London.Two hours later she's found dead at her seat. At her feet is a portfolio containing millions of pounds worth of unlisted artwork - and a single sprig of sea lavender.Inspector Piet Deventer, an art lover himself, is put on the case. The victim is the former lover of an escaped convict, the mastermind behind one of the largest gold robberies of the century - and Piet suspects the two cases might be connected.Struggling for leads, Piet enlists the help of Sally Graham, a friend of the victim, to help with his investigation. But with a dangerous criminal on the loose, Piet will need all his wits about him - so it doesn't help that he finds himself falling in love . . .A Sprig of Sea Lavender is J.R.L. Anderson's first mystery featuring Piet Deventer, and is an unmissable read for all lovers of English crime. Views: 416
Anastasia's tenth year has some good things, like falling in love and really getting to know her grandmother, and some bad things, like finding out about an impending baby brother. Views: 413
Hailed upon its publication as "a classic for readers not yet born" (Philadelphia Inquirer), Birdy is an inventive, hypnotic novel about friendship and family, dreaming and surviving, love and war, madness and beauty, and, above all, "birdness." It tells the story of Al, a bold, hot-tempered boy whose goals in life are to life weights and pick up girls, and his strange friend Birdy, the skinny, tongue-tied perhaps genius who only wants to raise canaries and to fly. While fighting in World War II, they find their dreams become all too real—and their lives are changed forever.
In Birdy, William Wharton crafts an unforgettable tale that suggests another notion of sanity in a world that is manifestly insane. Views: 407
With these tales, the author pays homage to the lives of King Arthur, the Round Table knights and their ladies, while introducing inspired new twists to the stories of old.
Thomas Berger has previously written "Little Big Man", "Killing Time" and "Changing the Past". Views: 402
There is an ancient Turkish tradition which promises a place in paradise to anyone who sets a small bird free. Three boys start up a bird-catching business to enable people to free them in order to secure their place in heaven, but the city-dwellers have become sceptical, and tragedy lies in wait for the boys. Views: 401
Vixen 03 is down. The plane, bound for the Pacific carrying thirty-six Doomsday bombs — canisters armed with quick-death germs of unbelievable potency — vanishes. Vixen has in fact crashed into an ice-covered lake in Colorado.
Dirk Pitt, who heroically raised the Titanic, discovers the wreckage of Vixen 03. But two deadly canisters are missing. They're in the hands of a terrorist group. Their lethal mission: to sail a battleship seventy-five miles up the Potomac and blast Washington, D.C., to kingdom come. Only Dirk can stop them.
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The noted critic and a Palestinian now teaching at Columbia University,examines the way in which the West observes the Arabs. Views: 379
Ian McEwan is known to skirt the edge with his writing; the fringes of society, to test the limits of what we can handle perhaps in our worlds as we bring his writing home with us and allow a whole new being to enter. So it is with The Cement Garden, the story of dying family who live in a dying part of the city. The father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. In the process, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving the cement garden unfinished and the children to the care of their mother. Soon after, the mother too dies and the children, fearful of being separated by social services, decide to cover up their parents’ deaths: they bury their mother in the cement garden.
ll of the children are free thinking independent-minded teenagers. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, one of the sons, the narrator who is entering adolescence with all of its curiosity and appetites that he must contend with (along with the sure confusion of what the children have done). Julie, the eldest, is almost a grown woman. Sue is rather bookish and observes all that goes on around her. And Tom is the youngest and the baby of the lot.
The children seem to manage in this perverse setting rather well until Julie brings home a boyfriend who threatens their secret by asking too many questions (like what is buried beneath the cement pile, etc), surely threatening the status quo (however morbid) that the children have come to accept as "normal" and as "home". We understand through McEwan that home is not to be defined by anyone else but it is, instead, what you know and have known that makes you feel safe, even if it is rather dangerous and macabre. Views: 378
Titus Crow and his faithful companion and record-keeper fight the gathering forces of darkness-the infamous and deadly Elder Gods of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Cthulhu and his dark minions are bent on ruling the earth. A few puny humans cannot possibly stand against these otherworldly evil gods, yet time after time, Titus Crow drives the monsters back into the dark from whence they came. Spawn of the Winds is the fourth book in the Titus Crow series. Views: 365
The Fourth Reich is waiting to arise—and the only man who can stop it is about to sign its birth certificate. In 1945 the children of the Third Reich were secretly hidden all over the world, to be concealed until they came of age in the 1970s, at which point $780 million would be waiting in a Swiss bank. But all of these elaborate plans need an unsuspecting outsider to set them in motion: Noel Holcroft, the American son of a high-ranking Nazi officer. He has just been shown an incredible document known as the Holcroft Covenant. If he signs, he will inadvertently deal a serious blow to an already fragile world—and authorize his own death warrant.
Praise for Robert Ludlum and *The Holcroft Covenant
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“Pleases and seduces . . . [Robert] Ludlum stuffs more surprises into his novels than any other six-pack of thriller writers combined. . . . I sprained my wrist turning his pages and didn’t notice until an hour later.”—John Leonard, The New York Times
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“Don’t ever begin a Ludlum novel if you have to go to work the next day.”—Chicago Tribune***
BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Robert Ludlum’s *The Bourne Identity.* Views: 354
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced. Views: 339
