A book about how Shakespeare became fascinated with the world, and how the world became fascinated with Shakespeare Ranging ambitiously across four continents and four hundred years, Worlds Elsewhere is an eye-opening account of how Shakespeare went global. Seizing inspiration from the playwright’s own fascination with travel, foreignness, and distant worlds—worlds Shakespeare never himself explored—Andrew Dickson takes us on an extraordinary journey: from Hamlet performed by English actors tramping through the Baltic states in the early sixteen hundreds to the skyscrapers of twenty-first-century Beijing and Shanghai, where “Shashibiya” survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution to become a revered Chinese author. En route, Dickson traces Nazi Germany’s strange love affair with, and attempted nationalization of, the Bard, and delves deep into the history of Bollywood, where Shakespearean stories helped give birth to Indian cinema. In Johannesburg, we discover how Shakespeare was enlisted in the fight to end apartheid. In nineteenth-century California, we encounter shoestring performances of Richard III and Othello in the dusty mining camps and saloon bars of the Gold Rush. No other writer’s work has been performed, translated, adapted, and altered in such a remarkable variety of cultures and languages. Both a cultural history and a literary travelogue, Worlds Elsewhere is an attempt to understand how Shakespeare has become the international phenomenon he is—and why.

Landish Druken, son of a Newfoundland sealing captain, turns his back on the family tradition and wishes to become a writer. He sets off for Princeton where he is befriended by Van, son of the wealthiest man in America and later betrayed by him. Returning to St John's, he adopts the orphan son of his father's first mate, but when poverty strikes there is only one person left to turn to - Van.

"There are 83 copies of the First Folio in a vault beneath Capitol Hill, the world's largest collection. Well over 150 Indian movies are based on Shakespeare's plays-more than in any other nation. If current trends continue, there will soon be more high-school students reading The Merchant of Venice in Mandarin Chinese than in early-modern English. Why did this happen-and how? Ranging ambitiously across four continents and 400 years, Worlds Elsewhere is an eye-opening account of how Shakespeare went global. Seizing inspiration from the playwright's own fascination with travel, foreignness and distant worlds, Dickson takes us on an extraordinary journey-from Hamlet performed by English actors tramping through Poland in the early 1600s to twenty-first century Shanghai, where Shashibiya survived Mao's Cultural Revolution to become an honored Chinese author. En route we visit Nazi Germany, where Shakespeare became an unlikely favorite, and delve into the history of Bollywood, where Shakespearian stories helped give birth to Indian cinema. In Johannesburg, we discover how Shakespeare was enlisted into the fight to end apartheid. In California, we encounter him as the most popular playwright of the American frontier. Both a cultural history and a literary travelogue, the first of its kind, Worlds Elsewhere explores how Shakespeare became the world's writer, and how his works have changed beyond all recognition during the journey"--

The extraordinary love story of an American blueblood and a German aristocrat—and a riveting tale of survival in wartime Germany Sigrid MacRae’s family story, A World Elsewhere, reads like an enthralling novel—one that would have remained unwritten had her mother, Aimée, not given her daughter the letters and journals she car­ried out of Germany during World War II. While visiting Paris in 1927, Aimée, a wealthy American debutante, falls in love with Heinrich, a charming yet penniless Baltic German aristocrat. They marry, but life in 1930s Germany is bleak. Two years into the war, Heinrich volunteers for the Russian front. Left to fend for herself, and living in a country at war with her homeland, Aimée gathers her six young chil­dren and flees the advancing Russian army on an epic journey back to the country she thought she left behind.

Challenging the commonly held perception that immigrants' lives are shaped exclusively by their sending and receiving countries, Here, There, and Elsewhere breaks new ground by showing how immigrants are vectors of globalization who both produce and experience the interconnectedness of societies—not only the societies of origin and destination, but also, the societies in places beyond. Tahseen Shams posits a new concept for thinking about these places that are neither the immigrants' homeland nor hostland—the "elsewhere." Drawing on rich ethnographic data, interviews, and analysis of the social media activities of South Asian Muslim Americans, Shams uncovers how different dimensions of the immigrants' ethnic and religious identities connect them to different elsewheres in places as far-ranging as the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. Yet not all places in the world are elsewheres. How a faraway foreign land becomes salient to the immigrant's sense of self depends on an interplay of global hierarchies, homeland politics, and hostland dynamics. Referencing today's 24-hour news cycle and the ways that social media connects diverse places and peoples at the touch of a screen, Shams traces how the homeland, hostland, and elsewhere combine to affect the ways in which immigrants and their descendants understand themselves and are understood by others.

We first met Avery in two of the stories featured in Dana Johnson's award–winning collection Break Any Woman Down. As a young girl, she and her family escape the violent streets of Los Angeles to a more gentrified existence in suburban West Covina. This average life, filled with school, trips to 7–Eleven to gawk at Tiger Beat magazine, and family outings to Dodger Stadium, is soon interrupted by a past she cannot escape, personified in the guise of her violent cousin Keith. When Keith moves in with her family, he triggers a series of events that will follow Avery throughout her life: to her studies at USC, to her burgeoning career as a painter and artist, and into her relationship with a wealthy Italian who sequesters her in his glass–walled house in the Hollywood Hills. The past will intrude upon Avery's first gallery show, proving her mother's adage: Every goodbye aint gone. The dual–narrative of Elsewhere, California illustrates the complicated history of African Americans across the rolling basin of Los Angeles.

A World Elsewhere is Steven Berkoff’s bold attempt to describe his multifarious theatrical works. Berkoff outlines the methods that he uses, first of all as an actor, secondly as a playwright and thirdly as theatre director, as well as those subtle connections in between, when one discipline melds effortlessly into another. He examines the early impulses that generated his works and what drove him to give them form, as well as the challenges he faced when adapting the work of other authors. Berkoff discusses some of his most difficult, successful and unique creations, journeying through his long and varied career to examine how they were shaped by him, and how he was shaped by them. The sheer scale of this book offers a rare experience of an accomplished artist, combined with the honesty and insight of an autobiography, making this text a singular tool for teaching, inspiration and personal exploration. Suitable for anyone with an interest in Steven Berkoff and his illustrious career, A World Elsewhere is the part analysis and part confession of an artist whose work has been performed all over the world.