Central Kansas Library System

"Winner of the 2012 Robert Lowry Patten Award, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Rice University" Simon Goldhill is professor of Greek literature and culture and fellow and director of Studies in Classics at King's College, University of Cambridge. His many books include Love, Sex, and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives. How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity is a brilliant...

The Ghost in the bone-white mask who haunts theAnkh-Morpork Opera House was always considered a benign presence -- some would even say lucky -- until he started killing people. The sudden rash of bizarre backstage deaths now threatens to mar the operatic debut of country girl Perdita X. (nee Agnes) Nitt, she of the ample body and ampler voice. Perdita's expected to hide in the chorus and sing arias out loud while a more petitely presentable soprano...

New York City, 1894. To Gramercy Park, bordered by elegant town houses, cloistered behind its high iron fence, comes Mario Alfieri, the world's greatest tenor. Poised for his premier at the Metropolitan Opera, the summit of society, the handsome Alfieri needs a refuge from the clamor of New York's elite... and from the eager women who rule it. He finds it, he thinks, at Gramercy Park, in the elegant mansion of the recently deceased Henry Ogden Slade....

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening -- until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked,...

Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera, first published in 1910, remained a perennial favorite throughout the twentieth century and into the early 2000s. It was adapted to several popular motion pictures and into one of the most successful stage musicals of all time. Its main character, Erik, is a romantic figure whose appeal reaches across different cultures and times. He is a sensitive soul, an accomplished composer and musician whose great...

Political opera has been alive and well in Washington D.C. since the city became the nation's capital, and the Washington National Opera company, housed at the Kennedy Center, is no stranger to politics itself. Murder at the Opera re-introduces a popular couple who have appeared in some of the earlier Capital Crimes novels: law professor Mac Smith and his wife, Georgetown gallery owner Annabel Reed-Smith, who has a professional relationship with some...

A mouse who works as a page turner at the Metropolitan Opera House has only one enemy, a cat; but, during a performance of "The Magic Flute," something magical happens to change their lives.

Driven by talent and ambition, Thea Kronborg leaves behind everyone and everything to fulfill her dreams of becoming an opera singer. Yet even as she achieves ever greater heights of success, Thea's ambition drives her still further to her eventual debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, where she finally makes peace with what, and who, she has sacrificed for her career.