Much more than a word list, the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus is a browsable source of inspiration as well as an authoritative guide to selecting and using vocabulary. This essential guide for writers provides real-life example sentences and a careful selection of the most relevant synonyms, as well as new usage notes, hints for choosing between similar words, a Word Finder section organized by subject, and a comprehensive language guide. The text is also peppered with thought-provoking reflections on favorite (and not-so-favorite) words by noted contemporary writers, including Joshua Ferris, Francine Prose, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Simon Winchester, many newly commissioned for this edition.
The third edition revises and updates this innovative reference, adding hundreds of new words, senses, and phrases to its more than 300,000 synonyms and 10,000 antonyms. New features in this edition include over 200 literary and humorous quotations highlighting notable usages of words, and a revised graphical word toolkit feature showing common word combinations based on evidence in the Oxford Corpus. There is also a new introduction by noted language commentator Ben Zimmer.

David Auburn's Proof won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was adapted to film by director John Madden, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, and Jake Gyllenhaal.

One of the most acclaimed plays of its time, Proof is a work that explores the unknowability of love as much as it does the mysteries of science.

It focuses on Catherine, a young woman who has spent years caring for her father, Robert, a brilliant mathematician in his youth who was later unable to function without her help. His death has brought into her midst both her sister, Claire, who wants to take Catherine back to New York with her, and Hal, a former student of Catherine's father who hopes to find some hint of Robert's genius among his incoherent scribblings. The passion that Hal feels for math both moves and angers Catherine, who, in her exhaustion, is torn between missing her father and resenting the great sacrifices she made for him. For Catherine has inherited at least a part of her father's brilliance--and perhaps some of his instability as well. As she and Hal become attracted to each other, they push at the edges of each other's knowledge, considering not only the unpredictability of genius but also the human instinct toward love and trust.

A deeply moving, tenderly insightful play about friendship, memory, and the small moments that can change the course of our lives forever. Over one fateful summer, an unlikely friendship develops between Diana, a fiercely iconoclastic artist and single mom, and Alice, a free-spirited yet naive young housewife. As the Bicentennial is celebrated across the country, these two young women in Ohio navigate motherhood, ambition, and intimacy, and help each other discover their own independence.

An engrossing new drama from the author of Proof, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award
The lakeside rental cabin Veronica has managed to afford is a far cry from the idyllic getaway she and her children were planning. Exhausted from her life as a New York City nurse and by her troubled marriage, Veronica finds herself on vacation without any adult company except for Hogan, the disheveled property owner, who becomes more unreliable by the day. Hogan has problems of his own, problems that Veronica finds herself inevitably--and irrevocably--pulled into.
David Auburn's Lost Lake is a tense, carefully wrought drama about the surprising, complicated friendship formed by two very different people with no one else to turn to.

A new play from the Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning author of Proof, coming to Broadway this April

In midcentury America, newspaper columnists are kings--and Joseph Alsop wears the biggest crown. Joe sits at the nexus of Washington life: beloved, feared, and courted in equal measure by the very people whose careers and futures he determines. But as the sixties dawn and America undergoes dizzying change, the intense political dramas Joe has been throwing his weight around in--supporting the war in Vietnam and Soviet containment, criticizing student activism--come to bear a profound personal cost.

Based on the real-life story of Joe Alsop, whose columns at the time of his 1974 retirement were running three times a week in more than three hundred newspapers, David Auburn's The Columnist is a deft blend of history and storytelling. A hilarious, searing portrait of the glorious rewards and devastating losses that accompany ego, ambition, and the pursuit of power, The Columnist pens a vital letter from a radically changing decade to our own turbulent era.