"Carl Hancock Rux is full of promise and virtuosity ... a gifted poet who offers up vibrant imagery like a street corner preacher in the midst of a nervous breakdown."--New York Times "Talk is the most intellectually ambitious play in years. It wins the case for a renewed theatre of ideas."--Time Out "Mr. Rux has a fertile imagination and exceptional talent." -- Wall Street Journal "A dazzling play. Mr. Rux's ideas have the urgency and passion of...

"The manor is hosting the New England Whaling in History and Literature Conference. The place is transformed into a scene from a rugged high sea adventure. Before the conference begins one of the guests makes waves. Raymond refuses to show his valuable scrimshaw. Raymond then is found murdered. His widow then claims the scrimshaw is missing." --

Betts Winston has inherited more than her cooking skills from her grandmother, she can also see and talk to ghosts of people that once roamed the streets of Broken Rope, Missouri, in the days of the Old West. With Gram's Country Cooking School on spring break, Betts and Gram are taking part in this year's cowboy poetry convention, offering lessons on frying catfish over an open campfire. But when a staged gunfight ends in real death and her brother...

"Now that her moonshine shop is up and running, Hattie Hayes can focus her efforts on expanding her fledgling business to events in the area, like the Chattanooga Choo Choo Model Train Convention, which is running full steam ahead at the convention center down the block. Hattie is all aboard, seizing this perfect opportunity to promote her Southern homebrew to the folks who have come to the city for the annual event. But when an attendee dies after...

"For fans of legendary pulp author H.P. Lovecraft, there is nothing bigger than the annual Providence-based convention the Summer Tentacular. Horror writer Colleen Danzig doesn't know what to expect when she arrives, but is unsettled to find that among the hobnobbing between scholars and literary critics are a group of real freaks: book collectors looking for volumes bound in human skin, and true believers claiming the power to summon the Elder God...