The Iron Bridge

Shortlisted, Danuta Gleed Literary Award

In a bold, brilliant collection of stories, Dora Award-winning playwright Anton Piatigorsky delivers a superbly inspired inquiry into the early lives of the 20th century’s most notorious tyrants. In The Iron Bridge, he is unafraid to push at the boundaries of the unexpected as he breathes fictionalized life into the adolescents who would grow up to become the most brutal dictators the world has ever known.

We discover a teenaged Mao Tse-Tung refusing an arranged marriage; Idi Amin cooking for the British Army; Stalin living in a seminary; and a melodramatic young Adolf Hitler dreaming of vast architectural achievements. Piatigorsky dazzlingly explores moments that are nothing more than vague incidents in the biographies of these men, expanding mere footnotes into entire realities as he ingeniously fills the gaps of the historical record.

The Iron Bridge, completely imagined yet captivatingly real, captures those crucial instants in time that may well have helped to deliver some of the most infamous leaders in history.

Contributors

Anton Piatigorsky

Anton Piatigorsky has twice won the Dora Mavor Moore Award. Eternal Hydra, commissioned by the Stratford Festival, was called "one of the best Canadian plays of the past decade" by NOW magazine and opened in Vancouver at the Touchstone Theatre in October 2012. The chamber opera, Airline Icarus, for which he wrote the libretto, won the Italian Primo Fedora Award in 2011. He was most recently the playwright in residence for Soulpepper. His play, Breath in Between, premiered at Toronto's Summerworks Festival in August 2012.
Chapter Title Contents Contributors Pages Year Price

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Idi Amin – Uganda 31 $3.10

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Pol Pot – Cambodia 32 $3.20

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Mao Tse-Tung (Mao Zedong) – People’s Republic of China 48 $4.80

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Josef Stalin – Soviet Union 45 $4.50

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Rafael Trujillo – Dominican Republic 44 $4.40

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Adolf Hitler – Germany 46 $4.60