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The 17th century dramatist Jean Racine was considered, along with Moliere and Corneille, as one of the three great playwrights of his era. The quality of Racine's poetry has been described as possibly his most important contribution to French literature and his use of the alexandrine poetic line is one of the best examples of such use noted for its harmony, simplicity and elegance. While critics over the centuries have debated the worth of Jean Racine, at present, he is widely considered a literary genius of revolutionary proportions. In this volume of Racine's plays we find «Esther», the penultimate of twelve plays by the author. «Esther» was written at the request of Madame de Maintenon, second wife of King Louis XIV of France, who wished Racine write some more liturgical works to be performed by the pupils of the Maison royale de Saint-Louis, a famous academy for girls. Racine's drama concerns the Biblical character of Esther, Jewish queen of the Persian king Ahasuerus, who is commonly thought to be Xerxes I.

The poignant, searching, haunting story of one family’s entanglement with twentieth-century historyAN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER‘Intensely involving … a fervent meditation on love and loss, with a remarkable cast of characters’ Financial Times‘Rich, intriguing … Maybe Esther calls to mind the itinerant style of W. G. Sebald’ Guardian‘Unflinchingly potent … Revolutionaries, war heroes, teachers and phantoms populate these magnetic pages’ Irish IndependentKatja Petrowskaja’s family story is impossible to untangle from the history of twentieth-century Europe. There is her great-uncle, who shot a German diplomat in Moscow in 1932 and was sentenced to death. (Could this act have had more significance than anyone at the time understood?) There is her Ukrainian grandfather, who disappeared during World War II and reappeared without explanation forty-one years later. (How was it that he then went back to normal family life, as though nothing had happened?) And there is her great-grandmother (was she really called Esther?) who was too old and frail to leave Kiev when the Jews there were ordered to leave, and was brutally killed by the Nazis on the street.Taking the reader from Moscow to Kiev to Warsaw to Berlin, and deep into archives and pieced-together conversations, photos and memories, Maybe Esther is a journey into language, memory, philosophy, history and trauma, and a singular, beautiful, unforgettable work of literature.

Teaching Sunday school at her brother's church in the Bay area was supposed to help former champion athlete Esther «Essie» Walker understand boys–the better to raise her newborn son as a stellar example of manhood. Fat chance! Enter the eight-year-old male psyche: awful jokes, disrespectful behavior and general mayhem.Essie, the queen of control, finds herself in a brand-new world of chaos.The pressure builds on all fronts–Sunday school class, husband's job, church pageant, aging parents, finances, friends secretly battling illnesses–until Queen Esther has one royal meltdown. God, it seems, has makeover plans for Essie's competitive nature. Her characteristic control is in very short supply as she gains a better understanding of the nature of imperfection, the value of motherhood and the virtues of a messy but connected life.