Mark Dunn – författare

Nevin Nollop left the islanders of Nollop with the treasured legacy of his pangram the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. But as the letters begin to crumble on the monumental inscription, the island's council forbids the use of the lost letters and silence threatens Ella and her family.

In Mark Dunn’s new novel, his alter ego, Griffin Stoddard, a long-time admirer of Cranford author, Mrs Gaskell, chances upon her work called We Five. He comes to learn that the novel – unpublished in her lifetime – was subsequently adapted by three other writers. Stoddard draws together the four versions and writes his own to complement them. The result is a novel which spans five different historical periods – a small mill town near Manchester in 1859, San Francisco in the days before the 1906 earthquake, the fictional Zenith, Winnemac of 1923, autumn in 1940’s war torn London and a small town in Northern Mississippi in 1997 – and follows five childhood friends – Ruth, Jane, Molly, Maggie and Carrie – their encounters with five young men of differing intentions, the girls’ respective families together with their ever-changing occupations and exploits, concluding with an explosive unification of all five stories.This cleverly constructed novel’s style is faithful to each era, the vagaries of language and the bonds of friendship. Readers who have already discovered Ella Minnow Pea – a novel without letters, Ibid: A Life – a novel in footnotes and Welcome to Higby will recognise and enjoy the challenges in Mark Dunn’s new adventure Pentaptych.

Dramatic Comedy / 9m, 8f (cross casting and double casting possible) Inspired by Pygmalion, Shaw's classic drawing room tale of language and class division, and its musical incarnation, My Fair Lady, the play tells the story of one Eliza Doolittle-the daughter of a hardscrabble Mississippi pig farmer-who sells homemade pork rinds at the Tri-Counties Fair and Livestock Show, and dreams of someday working as a waitress at "one of those nice downtown barbecue restaurants where all the tourists go." With the support of her best friend, a sassy Transgender firecracker named Miss Tiffany Box, patroness Ida Hill and her daughter Clara; and with Ida's instantly enamored son Freddy nipping romantically at Eliza's heels, Delta-drawlin' Eliza engages the services of a "Kudzu-league" college prof named Henry Higgins to take the country out of her speech and give her some semblance of class. Devotees of Shaw's original will delight in the transplantation of Eliza and Professor Higgins and his colleague Pickering to the American South.But this gentle, warm-hearted comedy gives us something else as well, a question for which everyone in the play must find the answer: how do we reconcile the way we present ourselves on the outside with who we truly are on the inside?

Twenty-five years have passed since we last visited the six Walker sisters from Memphis Tennessee and they're all back on the phone again for another crisis-filled weekend. The most immediate concern: Mama has taken off all her clothes in the community room of her nursing room and the sisters must put their heads together and decide what to do with her. And that's just for starters: oldest sister Peggy has been bilked out of all her money by a ne'er-do-well boyfriend. Aneece and Paige's marri

Chaos arises when letters begin to fall from a town monument and government officials ban them one by one. The community depends on the strength of a determined teenage girl to fight for their freedom of speech. Adapted from Mark Dunn's 2001 award-winning debut novel Ella Minnow Pea this unique musical is part romance part clever word game and part adult fable that reminds us how precious our liberties are and how important it is to have the courage to stand up for what we believe.

As she's being forced to move out of her home a septuagenarian enlists the help of her homebuyers to put together the last unfinished puzzle in her collection.

The United States is a nation of counties--3,071 of them. This reference book offers a profile and history of every one of them.The authors provide the following information for each county: name, county seat, population, land area, location and prominent geographical features, name derivation, date of establishment, and products and industries. Selected entries include a sampling of famous residents, interesting facts or oddities, population and area rankings and name comparatives. Alaska is not included, as it does not have any counties. Connecticut and Rhode Island's counties were officially abolished a few years ago, but information about the former counties is included. Louisiana's parishes are also included.

The 1950s television game show was a cultural touchstone, reflecting the zeitgeist of a flourishing modern nation. The author explores the iconography of the mid-20th century U.S. in the context of TV watching, game playing and prize winning. The scandals that marred the genre's reputation are revisited, highlighting American's propensity for both gullibility and winking cynicism.

From 1983 to 1987, author Mark Dunn worked as a court clerk for a justice of the peace in Travis County, Texas, where, he says, “I learned more about human nature . . . than I could have learned in any other job I might have taken up as a bushy-tailed kid from Tennessee.” Based on interviews with 200 justices of the peace from all parts of Texas, Texas People’s Court promises to take readers on a tour of what it means to be a Texas justice of the peace: an experience that is by turns hilarious, sobering, heart-wrenching, and, from one end to the other, fascinating.Here in the Texas justice court, wrongs can be righted and lives changed in profound ways. A priceless family necklace might finally be restored to the rightful owner; an occupational driver’s license fortuitously granted. A death inquest may become an opportunity for family reflection and valediction, with the attending judge as sympathetic witness.In each of its chapters, Texas People’s Court takes up a different aspect, duty, or area of thought related to the profession of justice of the peace taken from conversations with JPs throughout the state of Texas—from those who serve in its most populous municipalities to rural county JPs—putting a human face on the responsibilities, attitudes, and perspectives that motivate their judgments. The result is a thoroughly entertaining, sympathetic view of what Dunn calls “the day-to-day observation of human conflict in microcosm.”

Five narratively consecutive stories about the same five women, set in five variant times and places; England in 1859; San Francisco on the eve of the 1906 earthquake; in Sinclair Lewis's fictional Zenith, Winnemac in 1923; London during the Blitz and in a small town in northern Mississippi in 1997. The book's climax is a dramatic collision of all five incarnations of the story.