Uta Hagen

Perfect and new condition. No damages or dirt

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New Jersey

Theoretically, the actor ought to be more sound in mind and body than other people, since he learns to understand the psychological problems of human beings when putting his own passions, his loves, fears, and rages to work in the service of the characters he plays. He will learn to face himself, to hide nothing from himself -- and to do so takes an insatiable curiosity about the human condition. from the Prologue Uta Hagen, one of the world's most renowned stage actresses, has also taught acting for more than forty years at the HB Studio in New York. Her first book, Respect for Acting, published in 1973, is still in print and has sold more than 150,000 copies. In her new book, A Challenge for the Actor, she greatly expands her thinking about acting in a work that brings the full flowering of her artistry, both as an actor and as a teacher. She raises the issue of the actor's goals and examines the specifics of the actor's techniques. She goes on to consider the actor's relationship to the physical and psychological senses. There is a brilliantly conceived section on the animation of the body and mind, of listening and talking, and the concept of expectation. But perhaps the most useful sections in this book are the exercises that Uta Hagen has created and elaborated to help the actor learn his craft. The exercises deal with developing the actor's physical destination in a role; making changes in the self serviceable in the creation of a character; recreating physical sensations; bringing the outdoors on stage; finding occupation while waiting; talking to oneself and the audience; and employing historical imagination. The scope and range of Uta Hagen here is extraordinary. Her years of acting and teaching have made her as finely seasoned an artist as the theatre has produced.

Challenge for the Actor

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David Sedaris

Like new perfect condition and no damages 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A recent transplant to Paris, humorist David Sedaris, bestselling author of "Naked", presents a collection of his strongest work yet, including the title story about his hilarious attempt to learn French. A number one national bestseller now in paperback.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

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Konstantin Stanislavski

Some annotations in this used copy (see pics) but ultimately readable 

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

A Student's Diary

Stanislavski's 'system' has dominated actor-training in the West since his writings were first translated into English in the 1920s and 30s. His systematic attempt to outline a psycho-physical technique for acting single-handedly revolutionized standards of acting in the theatre.

Until now, readers and students have had to contend with inaccurate, misleading and difficult-to-read English-language versions. Some of the mistranslations have resulted in profound distortions in the way his system has been interpreted and taught. At last, Jean Benedetti has succeeded in translating Stanislavski's huge manual into a lively, fascinating and accurate text in English. He has remained faithful to the author's original intentions, putting the two books previously known as An Actor Preparesand Building A Characterback together into one volume, and in a colloquial and readable style for today's actors.

The result is a major contribution to the theatre, and a service to one of the great innovators of the twentieth century.

An Actor's Work

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Michael Shurtleff

Missing dust jacket but perfect readable condition 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Art, Music, Drama/Theater

Provides acting students with specific advice on handling various auditioning situations and offers behind-the-scenes stories about the beginning days of such stars as Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman, and Lily Tomlin.

Audition

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Zadie Smith

A Novel

Struggling with a stale marriage and the misguided passions of his three adult children, long-suffering art professor Howard Belsey finds his family life thrown into turmoil by his son's engagement to the socially prominent daughter of a right-wing icon. By the author of White Teeth. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 250,000 first printing.

On Beauty

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Chuck Palahniuk

Medical school dropout Victor Mancini comes up with a complicated but ingenious scam to pay for his mother's elder care, cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his zany mother, whose Alzheimer's disease hides the bizarre truth about his parentage.

Choke

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Twenty-three stories chronicle the experiences of people who have answered an ad for an artist's retreat, believing that they will find a peaceful refuge, only to find themselves isolated and trapped in a cavernous old theater.

Haunted

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Don Miguel Ruiz

Janet Mills

A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

In The Four Agreements, bestselling author don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love. • A New York Times bestseller for over a decade • Translated into 46 languages worldwide “This book by don Miguel Ruiz, simple yet so powerful, has made a tremendous difference in how I think and act in every encounter.” — Oprah Winfrey “Don Miguel Ruiz’s book is a roadmap to enlightenment and freedom.” — Deepak Chopra, Author, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success “An inspiring book with many great lessons.” — Wayne Dyer, Author, Real Magic “In the tradition of Castaneda, Ruiz distills essential Toltec wisdom, expressing with clarity and impeccability what it means for men and women to live as peaceful warriors in the modern world.” — Dan Millman, Author, Way of the Peaceful Warrior

The Four Agreements

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Carmen Maria Machado

Perfect condition new and now marks or dents 

Stories

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction “[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”—Roxane Gay “In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s memories and hunger and desire. I couldn’t put it down.”—Karen Russell In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

Her Body and Other Parties

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Perfect brand new condition. Read once. No damages or issues 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A Memoir

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

In the Dream House

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Lorrie Moore

Read once in perfect new condition. No damages or dents 

An anthology of ten short stories focuses on women who are on the brink of loneliness--their mothers are dying, their husbands and lovers are leaving them--and who face their disappointments with anxiety laced with ironic humor. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Self-Help

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Carrie Fisher

Perfect condition apart from dent/tear to front cover (see third photo for close up) 

This bestselling Hollywood novel by the witty author of Wishful Drinking and Shockaholic that was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. When we first meet the extraordinary young actress Suzanne Vale, she’s feeling like “something on the bottom of someone’s shoe, and not even someone interesting.” Suzanne is in the harrowing and hilarious throes of drug rehabilitation, trying to understand what happened to her life and how she managed to land in a “drug hospital.” Just as Fisher’s first film role—the precocious teenager in Shampoo—echoed her own Beverly Hills upbringing, her first book is set within the world she knows better than anyone else: Hollywood. This stunning literary debut chronicles Suzanne’s vivid, excruciatingly funny experiences inside the clinic and as she comes to terms with life in the outside world. Postcards from the Edge is more than a book about stardom and drugs. It is a revealing look at the dangers—and delights—of all our addictions, from money and success to sex and insecurity.

Postcards from the Edge

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This last book from beloved Hollywood icon Carrie Fisher is the crown jewel of ideal Star Wars gifts. The Princess Diarist is an intimate, hilarious, and revealing recollection of what happened behind the scenes on one of the most famous film sets of all time. When Carrie Fisher discovered the journals she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she was astonished to see what they had preserved—plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naiveté, and a vulnerability that she barely recognized. Before her passing, her fame as an author, actress, and pop-culture icon was indisputable, but in 1977, Carrie Fisher was just a teenager with an all-consuming crush on her costar, Harrison Ford. With these excerpts from her handwritten notebooks, The Princess Diarist is Fisher’s intimate and revealing recollection of what happened on one of the most famous film sets of all time—and what developed behind the scenes. Fisher also ponders the joys and insanity of celebrity, and the absurdity of a life spawned by Hollywood royalty, only to be surpassed by her own outer-space royalty. Laugh-out-loud hilarious and endlessly quotable, The Princess Diarist brims with the candor and introspection of a diary while offering shrewd insight into one of Hollywood's most beloved stars.

The Princess Diarist

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Carol Ann Duffy

Perfect brand new condition and no damages 

The T. S. Eliot Prize-winning collection from the Poet Laureate.Carol Ann Duffy's seventh collection is a book-length love poem, and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart is Duffy's refusal to simplify the contradictions and transformations of love - infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and grief. Instead, Rapture is a map of real love, in all its churning complexity, showing us that a song can be made of even the most painful episodes in our lives. These are poems that will find deep rhymes in the experience of most readers and will, ultimately, prove that poetry can and should speak for us all.

Rapture

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Edward Albee

Revised by the Author

A social event becomes a personal challenge for two faculty members and their wives at a small New England college as their inner fears and desires are exposed. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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Quentin Tarantino

Perfect brand new condition with no damages or issues 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Instant New York Times bestseller

The long-awaited first work of nonfiction from the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: a deliriously entertaining, wickedly intelligent cinema book as unique and creative as anything by Quentin Tarantino.

In addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. For years he has touted in interviews his eventual turn to writing books about films. Now, with Cinema Speculation, the time has come, and the results are everything his passionate fans--and all movie lovers--could have hoped for. Organized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which he first saw as a young moviegoer at the time, this book is as intellectually rigorous and insightful as it is rollicking and entertaining. At once film criticism, film theory, a feat of reporting, and wonderful personal history, it is all written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as QT's and with the rare perspective about cinema possible only from one of the greatest practitioners of the artform ever. 

Cinema Speculation

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Geena Davis

From two-time Academy Award winner and screen icon Geena Davis, the surprising tale of her "journey to badassery"--from her epically polite childhood to roles that loaned her the strength to become a powerhouse in Hollywood.

At three years old, Geena Davis announced she was going to be in movies. Now, with a slew of iconic roles and awards under her belt, she has surpassed her childhood dream--but the path to finding yourself never did run smoothly. In this simultaneously hilarious and candid memoir, Davis regales us with tales of a career playing everything from an amnesiac assassin to the parent of a rodent, her eccentric childhood, her relationships, and helping lead the way to gender parity in Hollywood--all while learning to be a little more badass, one role at a time. Dying of Politeness is a touching account of one woman's journey to fight for herself, and ultimately fighting for women all around the globe.

Dying of Politeness

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Stephen King

Perfect condition and no damages brand new 

Wolves of the Calla

Now a major motion picture starring Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba Wolves of the Calla is the highly anticipated fifth book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series—a unique bestselling epic fantasy quest inspired many years ago by The Lord of the Rings. Set in a world of extraordinary circumstances, filled with stunning visual imagery and unforgettable characters, the Dark Tower series is unlike anything you have ever read. Here is the fifth installment.

The Dark Tower V

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Song of Susannah

The Dark Tower VI

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Minnie Driver

Perfect pristine condition signed by the author no damages, blemishes or dirt stains!

A Memoir in Essays

A MARIE CLAIRE BEST MEMOIR OF THE YEAR • A USA TODAY MUST READ BOOK • A W MAGAZINE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • A SHEREADS BEST MEMOIR OF THE SUMMER A charming, poignant, and mesmerizing memoir in essays from beloved actor and natural-born storyteller Minnie Driver, chronicling the way life works out even when it doesn’t. In this intimate, beautifully crafted collection, Driver writes with disarming charm and candor about her bohemian upbringing between England and Barbados; her post-university travails and triumphs—from being the only student in her acting school not taken on by an agent to being discovered at a rave in a muddy field in the English countryside; shooting to fame in one of the most influential films of the 1990s and being nominated for an Academy Award; and finding the true light of her life, her son. She chronicles her unconventional career path, including the time she gave up on acting to sell jeans in Uruguay, her journey as a single parent, and the heartbreaking loss of her mother. Like Lena Dunham in Not That Kind of Girl, Gabrielle Union in We’re Going to Need More Wine and Patti Smith in Just Kids, Driver writes with razor-sharp humor and grace as she explores navigating the depths of failure, fighting for success, discovering the unmatched wonder and challenge of motherhood, and wading through immeasurable grief. Effortlessly charming, deeply funny, personal, and honest, Managing Expectations reminds us of the way life works out—even when it doesn’t.

Browse by categories

Uta Hagen

Challenge for the Actor

David Sedaris

Me Talk Pretty One Day

Konstantin Stanislavski

An Actor's Work

Michael Shurtleff

Audition

Zadie Smith

On Beauty

Chuck Palahniuk

Choke

Chuck Palahniuk

Haunted

Don Miguel Ruiz; Janet Mills

The Four Agreements

Carmen Maria Machado

Her Body and Other Parties

Carmen Maria Machado

In the Dream House

Lorrie Moore

Self-Help

Carrie Fisher

Postcards from the Edge

Carrie Fisher

The Princess Diarist

Carol Ann Duffy

Rapture

Edward Albee

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Quentin Tarantino

Cinema Speculation

Geena Davis

Dying of Politeness

Stephen King

The Dark Tower V

Stephen King

The Dark Tower VI

Minnie Driver

Managing Expectations SIGNED

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