San Antonio College Library

A moving drama of the complexities of marriage and personal transformation. Two men meet in a visitors' room at a mental hospital where their wives are being treated for nervous breakdowns. As the women mutually discover a well-spring of strength and hope inside themselves, they set out to englihten their husbands and transform their marriages.

Randall P. McMurphy, a feisty misfit, leads his fellow mental patients to do battle for their rights against a repressive ward nurse.

This extraordinary play, which swept Europe before coming to America, is based on two historical truths: the infamous Marquis de Sade was confined in the lunatic asylum of Charenton, where he staged plays; and the revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed in a bathtub by Charlotte Corday at the height of the Terror during the French Revolution. But this play-within-a-play is not historical drama. Its thought is as modern as today's police states and...

From our most celebrated writer of the psychological thriller comes this nerve-wracking yet eerily beautiful work of erotic obsession and madness. In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting--a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant and magnetic sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering...

Novel by Wilkie Collins, published ... in book form in 1860. Noted for its suspenseful plot and unique characterization, the successful novel brought Collins great fame; he adapted it into a play in 1871. This dramatic tale, inspired by an actual criminal case, is told through multiple narrators. Frederick Fairlie, a wealthy hypochondriac, hires virtuous Walter Hartright to tutor his beautiful niece and heiress, Laura, and her homely, courageous half-sister,...

Bosco presents a biographical expose of conditions within a state mental hospital along. By providing an outsider's view of the situation, he offers a valuable counterpoint to books by former patients. Bosco's descriptions of violence, horror, filth, and gallows humor, plus portraits of caring but demoralized staff working against inept bureaucrats more concerned with their own comfort than that of their patients, make this an eye-opening experience....

"The highly anticipated debut from the acclaimed award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv compels us to examine how the stories we tell about mental illness shape our sense of who we are"-- In Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes...