James De Mille

Four men aboard a boat find the titular strange manuscript in a cylindar floating in the sea. It turns out to be the story of Adam More, a sailor stranded in a savage hidden country in Antarctica. In this "nation" are everything from cannibals to kings and the bizarre citizens love death and poverty as other nations love life and prosperity. Can Adam escape...?

James De Mille (1833-1880) was a Canadian novelist from Saint John, New Brunswick, who wrote sensational novels, historical novels, and satirical romances. "The Dodger Club" is one of several self-parodies involving the act of writing itself.

Set in early Quebec. British Lieutenant Macrorie is trying to find the mysterious 'Lady of the Ice' whose life he saved crossing the river as the ice was breaking up. Meanwhile, his friend Jack Randolph has managed to become "engaged to three ladies, and in love with a fourth."

In this gripping short play, David Mamet combines mercurial intelligence with genuinely Hitchcockian menace. The Cryptogram is a journey back into childhood and the moment of its vanishing - the moment when the sheltering world is suddenly revealed as a place full of danger. On a night in 1959 a boy is waiting to go on a camping trip with his father. His mother wants him to go to sleep. A family friend is trying to entertain them - or perhaps distract them. Because in the dark corners of this domestic scene, there are rustlings that none of the players want to hear. And out of things as innocuous as a shattered teapot and a ripped blanket, Mamet re-creates a child's terrifying discovery that the grownups are speaking in code, and that that code may never be breakable.