Disruption Curios

Relying on historical and literary evidence hidden in plain sight, “Shakespeare's Greatest Love” tells the true, uncensored love story of William Shakespeare and Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate." -Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, written for and about Southampton. Leaving behind a wife and three young children in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare moved to London for its thrilling theater scene, where everyone mixed freely across ages, classes, and ranks. It was through their mutual passion for the theater that the handsome twenty-seven-year-old playwright first met and fell deeply in love with the effeminate seventeen-year-old earl who beguiled men and women alike and avowed that 'desire and pleasure [should] sometimes triumph over reason.' Author David Medina demonstrates that Shakespeare wrote more of his plays and poems for and about Southampton than anyone else, works that are sexually charged, romantic, and homoerotic. He also chronicles the evidence that Southampton provided Shakespeare the support he needed to secure his acting company share, coat of arms, family residence, royal commission, life portrait, and funerary bust. Shakespeare and Southampton's personal and professional relationship evolved privately and publicly over a quarter century against the backdrop of a national anti-sodomy law, multiple plague outbreaks, unexpected pregnancies, rushed and possibly forced marriages, a failed rebellion, and political imprisonments. “Shakespeare's Greatest Love” challenges us all to recognize Southampton as the individual who had the most significant impact on Shakespeare's life, literature, and legacy.

A memoir of a child's forced relocation to Siberia under Stalin's Gulag system reveals the potential for true human kindness in the face of extraordinary hardship. In April of 1940, six-year-old Ida woke to the sound of pounding on her door. Soviet soldiers forcibly packed her and her mother onto a train with thousands of their neighbors and deported them to remote Siberia, leaving them stranded to survive the brutal winter in subhuman conditions. Looking back, Ida shares their struggles: foraging for food, trying to reunite with her imprisoned father, spending weeks in a desolate hospital with typhoid fever, and adapting to shifts in the political climate to make the long journey home to Poland. Ida published this acclaimed memoir in her native Polish in 2011. Here, Ida's granddaughter, Isabella Skrypczak, translates her babcia's words and provides additional context-including describing the remarkable life Ida has gone on to live as a pioneering doctor. In the vein of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, A Polish Girl in Siberia chronicles Ida's experiences on a lesser-known front of the Second World War. Together, Ida and Isabella reflect on how every small act of kindness contributed to Ida's liberation from exile and ability to build a life and a family. Her story celebrates the capacity of the human spirit to not only survive trauma but thrive beyond it.