Book excerpt: (Applause Books). Lose yourself in a universe of forces familiar and frightening in the 21 plays presented in this exclusive volume. The playwrights included here succeed in pushing back the boundaries of conventional dramatic expression. Among them, Lanford Wilson dissects a survivor's anguish after his lover's death in A Poster of the Cosmos and Deborah Pryor spins an eerie tale of spellbinding romance in The Love Talker . Richard Greenberg plots a battle of wills between a young writer and his elusive muse, while Sheila Walsh examines the exchange of a woman's soul for her husband's fame in Molly and James . From the starkly realistic to the fantastic, these plays challenge their audiences to confront the universal from a new perspective.