1. Target
  2. Movies, Music & Books
  3. Books
  4. All Book Genres
  5. Fiction
  6. Drama

Travesties - (Tom Stoppard) by Tom Stoppard (Paperback)

Travesties - (Tom Stoppard) by  Tom Stoppard (Paperback)
Store: Target
Last Price: 12.89 USD

Similar Products

Products of same category from the store

All

Product info

<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"Travesties" was born out of Stoppard's noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth century's most crucial revolutionaries -- James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin -- were all living in Zurich. Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consula official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into a masterful and riotously funny play, a speculative portrait of what could have been the meeting of these profoundly influential men in a germinal Europe as seen through the lucid, lurid, faulty, and wholy riveting memory of an aging Henry Carr.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><i>Travesties</i> was born out of Stoppard's noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth century's most crucial revolutionaries -- James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin -- were all living in Zurich. Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consula official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into a masterful and riotously funny play, a speculative portrait of what could have been the meeting of these profoundly influential men in a germinal Europe as seen through the lucid, lurid, faulty, and wholy riveting memory of an aging Henry Carr.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><b>Praise for <i>Travesties</i>: </b><p> "Mind-bending splendor . . . a prismatic text . . . The hilarity comes fast and frequent throughout."<b>--<i>New York Times</i> (2016)</b><p> "[A] brilliantly zany, effervescently erudite comedy about writers, artists, and revolutionaries holed up in neutral Zurich during the First World War . . . Stoppard crafts what is at once a hilarious riff on <i>The Importance of Being Earnest</i> and a playful, poignant memory play."<b>--<i>New York</i></b><p> "A gushing waterfall of wordplay, a fine-tuned literary torrent that only begins by covering love, sex, war, memory, and Marxism. Also James Joyce, Dada, the fine art of men's tailoring, and <i>The Importance of Being Earnest</i>."<b>--<i>Entertainment Weekly</i></b><p> "Set during World War I in Zurich, the famously neutral city that in 1917 counted among its residents author James Joyce, revolutionist Vladimir Lenin and poet Tristan Tzara, a founder of the freethinking artistic movement known as Dada. Only a playwright as brilliantly inventive as Stoppard could put all that together to come up with an uproarious work that seriously questions the nature of art."<b>--<i>Newsday</i></b><p> "[R]azzlingdazzling effervescence of language that erupts and bubbles throughout the evening . . . It is as iridescent as a rainbow glimpsed in a dirty puddle and almost as surprisingly elusive . . . It is also a play that is clever, adroit and, partly because it succeeds so well in being both, ultimately moving . . . It is so pleasant to go to the theater for once when the entertainment offered is not just illuminating, but is actually dazzling."<b>--<i>New York Times</i> (1975)</b><p> "<i>Travesties</i> provides a cultural guidebook to the post-Great War zeitgeist as seen through the eyes of a playwright who, like Wilde, interweaves the classicist and the clown."<b>--<i>Chicago Tribune</i></b><p> "The external brilliances in <i>Travesties</i>, its manic virtuosity of language, its diabolical manipulation of time and notion, cannot elude any visitor to Tom Stoppard's achingly funny verbal prank . . . It's brilliant, stunning, a miracle!"<b>--<i>New York</i></b><p> "<i>Travesties</i> is a brilliant, theatrical masterstroke. Crunchingly witty with a thousand laughs and nine hundred thoughts."<b>--<i>Newsweek</i></b><p> "A knockout! <i>Travesties</i> is a brilliant, dazzling play."<b>--<i>New York Daily News</i></b><p> "<i>Travesties</i> glows as Tom Stoppard's best."<b>--<i>New York Post</i></b><p> "[<i>Travesties</i> is] a Dadaist collage, a word-drunk dance and a political argument . . . [it] is also a frothy comedy of manners . . . a real achievement . . . dazzling."<b>--<i>Washington Post</i></b><p> "<i>Travesties</i> is an intellectual tease, a perfect mind-bender of a play."<b>--<i>Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</i></b><p> "Has there ever been a more genially erudite entertainment than this manic gloss on <i>The Importance of Being Earnest</i>, this nutty disquisition on politics and war and, most especially, art? I think not . . . The real fun of this play is in the details, the vaudeville routines that not only punctuate the script but often, in uncanny and inexplicable ways, advance it."<b>--<i>Philadelphia Inquirer</i></b><p> "A dazzling pyrotechnical feat that combines Wildean pastiche, political history, artistic debate, spoof reminiscence, and song-and-dance in marvelously judicious proportions. The text itself is a Joycean web of literary allusions; yet it also radiates sheer intellectual joie de vivre, as if Stoppard were delightedly communicating the fruits of his own researches."<b>--<i>Guardian</i> (UK)</b><p> "Tom Stoppard's <i>Travesties</i> is witty, playful and wise. Forty years on, it is starting to look timeless as well."<b>--<i>Sunday Times</i> (UK)</b><p> "It is a champagne cocktail, compounded of a balletic nimbleness of invention, a bewildering intricacy of design which reaches the sublime heights where mathematics merge with poetry, and the audacious juggling of a master conjuror."<b>--<i>Sunday Telegraph</i> (UK)</b><p> "Exuberant, extraordinary jeu d'esprit . . . an intellectual workout on a dramatic trampoline."<b>--<i>Daily Mail</i> (UK)</b><p> "A multi-layered confection of art, song, literature and pastiche . . . [a] dazzling intellectual pantomime."<b>--<i>Spectator</i> (UK)</b><p> "Humongously funny . . . [Stoppard has a] peerless gift for word games."<b>--<i>Arts Desk</i></b><p> "Brace yourself. Tom Stoppard's 1974 play achieves the near impossible. Set in Zurich, 1917, when Switzerland, or the 'still wheel of war, ' was brimful of artists, writers and revolutionaries, it mashes together the ideas that shaped much of the last century and, at the same time, has fun. Yes, fun."<b>--<i>Jewish Chronicle</i> (UK)</b><p> "Drop-dead brilliant."<b>--<i>Express</i> (UK)</b><p> "Prime early, funny Stoppard . . . the perfect Stoppardian mix of the intellectually heavy and the soufflé-light."<b>--<i>Financial Times</i> (UK)</b><p><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>Tom Stoppard is the author of such seminal works as <i>Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, Every Good Boy Deserves a Favor, Arcadia, Jumpers, The Real Thing, </i>and <i>The Invention of Love</i>.

Price History

Cheapest price in the interval: 12.89 on November 8, 2021

Most expensive price in the interval: 16 on October 23, 2021