One of the most essential artists produced by the twentieth century. Pinter s work gets under our skin more than that of any living playwright. "New York Times"
Upon its premiere at the National Theatre, "Betrayal" was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. It won the Olivier Award for best new play, and has since been performed all around the world and made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley, and Patricia Hodge. "Betrayal" begins with a meeting between adulterous lovers, Emma and Jerry, two years after their affair has ended. During the nine scenes...

In volume two of his collected works, the plays and revue sketches mark a period of transition, as Pinter's characters and settings become more recognizably realistic, in contrast to the absurdist atmosphere of his earlier work.

A fascinating work . . . possessing extraordinary power. Masterful. San Francisco Chronicle
Brilliant, cranky, and eccentric, and the narrative passages are some of the most thrilling ever written. Library Journal
Some of the author s most enduring themesnotably, sexual jealousy and betrayalare present. . . . The narration shows traces of writers as various as Joyce and Beckett, e.e. cummings and J.P. Donleavy. The Washington Post
The Abbott and Costello meet Samuel Beckett dialogue . . . makes you laugh out loud. The Village Voice"

Two plays by the Nobel Prize-winning author explore class, privilege, dissent, poverty, and democracy.

Representing Pinter's own selection of his non-dramatic writings, this volume includes pieces of poetry and prose up to 1990 and ranges back to the earliest piece, "The Kullus," which was written when he was 19 years old.

For more than twenty years, Mel Gussow, a drama critic for the New York Times, has been meeting Harold Pinter to talk about work and life, plays and people. At the core of this book is a series of lengthy interviews - some of the most extensive that Pinter has ever given - all published here in full for the first time. Pinter and Gussow first meet in 1971, when Old Times is a new play and Pinter's status as a major writer is still being confirmed. Then come public and private conversations in the eighties, when the voice of Pinter's political commitment is first heard. And finally, over a...

First presented by the Royal Court Theatre in London in September of 1996, Ashes to Ashes is a triumph of power and concision. In the living room of a pleasant house in a university town outside of London, Devlin, threatened by his wife Rebecca's recollections of an abusive ex-lover, questions her relentlessly in his need for a single truth. In her seamless blending of what she knows of violence with the wider violence of the world, Rebecca reveals an eerie communion with the dead victims of unnamed political barbarities.

In the early 1970s Harold Pinter joined forces with director Joseph Losey and Proust scholar Barbara Bray to develop a screenplay of Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. Pinter took more than a year to conceive and write the screenplay and called the experience the best working year of my life. Although never produced, Harold Pinter's The Proust Screenplay is considered one of the greatest adaptations for the cinema ever written.With fidelity to Proust's text, the screenplay is an extraordinary re-creation by one of the leading playwrights of our time. It is, in its way, a unique...

Harold Pinter is one of our most profound poets and playwrights, with work ranging from his plays "The Caretaker," "The Homecoming," and "Betrayal" to such poems as "The Bombs" and "Death." A writer known for his searing exploration of power, Pinter gives us an electrifying look into the often uncomfortable relationships between people whether family members or political opponents. "The Essential Pinter," which includes key plays, poetry, essays, and screenplays, is an indispensable companion for anyone wishing to delve into the astonishingly dazzling and frequently ominous world of Harold...

Like Pinter's earlier plays. Pinter deals with bare essentials. There are only three characters -- a man named Deeley, his wife, Kate, and Anna, a friend of Kate's whom they have not seen in 20 years. Beneath the surface of their taut, witty conversation lurks suggestions of darkness, until the present is overwhelmed with intimations of some frightening past.