New Releases by Adam Rapp

A play about a banned book, a small town, and fiction''s power to both divide and unite, from the "prodigiously talented" Pulitzer Prize finalist (Charles Isherwood, Variety). In small-town America, a young adult novel about teen pregnancy is banned by the local school board, igniting a fierce and violent debate over abortion, religious beliefs, and modern feminism. The decade-old novel''s directionless New York City author arrives in town to defend the book and finds that it has inspired a group of local teens to rebel in strange and unexpected ways. A timely and unforgettable drama about the failure of urban and heartland America to understand each other, The Metal Children explores what happens when fiction becomes a matter of life and death. Acclaim for Adam Rapp "An original . . . a distinctive voice." —Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press "An oblique and haunting style reminiscent of Haruki Murakami''s best fiction." —Ed Park, The Village Voice "Rapp is a latter-day incarnation of Sam Shepard." —John Lahr, The New Yorker

The Corrections meets We Need to Talk About Kevin in this harrowing multigenerational saga about a family harboring a serial killer in their midst in this “masterful novel” that “peers into the dark heart of America” (Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Independence Day) As late summer 1951 descends on Elmira, New York, Myra Larkin, thirteen, the oldest child of a large Catholic family, meets a young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. The matter consumes her until later that night, when a triple homicide occurs just down the street, opening a specter of violence that will haunt the Larkins for half a century. As the siblings leave home and fan across the country, each pursues a shard of the American dream. Myra serves as a prison nurse while raising her son, Ronan. Her middle sisters, Lexy and Fiona, find themselves on opposite sides of class and power. Alec, once an altar boy, is banished from the house and drifts into oblivion. As he becomes an increasingly alienated loner, his mother begins to receive postcards full of ominous portent. What they reveal, and what they require, will shatter a family and lead to devastating reckoning. Through one family’s pursuit of the American dream, Wolf at the Table explores our consistent proximity to violence and its effects over time. Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp writes with gorgeous acuity, cutting to the heart of each character as he reveals the devastating reality beneath the veneer of good society.

Two young grifters try to strike a deal with the devil during the hottest summer on record. "An ambitious and prodigiously talented writer." Charles Isherwood, Variety "Rapp...shows an exuberant love for the written word... [He] tells stories that encase classical themes--class and envy, ambition and alienation--in blunt terms and in modern settings." Jesse McKinley, The New York Times "One of the more daring young stylists working today." David Cote, Time Out

“The closest thing that the American theater currently has to a David Foster Wallace, Rapp can give you the head rush of sophisticated literary allusion and unreliable narrative trickery à la Dostoevsky, and yet talk of Plano, Illinois, and let you know that he knows exactly how it feels…A gripping stunner of a play.” —Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune When Bella Baird, an isolated creative writing professor at Yale, begins to mentor a brilliant but enigmatic student, Christopher, the two form an unexpectedly intense bond. As their lives and the stories they tell about themselves become intertwined in unpredictable ways, Bella makes a surprising request of Christopher. Brimming with suspense, Rapp’s riveting play explores the limits of what one person can ask of another.

The second volume in this series brings together some of the best new writing from contemporary American playwrights. Each play is introduced by critically acclaimed writers themselves. THE EDGE OF OUR BODIES by Adam Rapp, Introduced by AM Homes, follows a teenage girl Bernadette who has to grow up quickly when she discovers she is pregnant. THE COWARD by Nick Jones, introduced by Marsha Norman, is an absurdist comedy set in 18th century England. Lucidus initiates a pistol duel, but when he finds he''ll have to fight the son of the man he challenged, he doesn''t want to go through with it. His plot to avoid the duel creates more trouble. THE BOOK OF GRACE by Suzan-Lori Parks, introduced by Oskar Eustis, portrays a dysfunctional American family, where anger and mistrust are symptoms of historical abuse. WHAT ONCE WE FELT by Ann Marie Healy, introduced by Paula Vogel, is set in a mysterious parallel universe, where Macy is the last ever author to be published in print, the system has an underclass named the Tradepack, and a woman can only have a baby if she possesses the right kind of ''scan card''.

What is it like to be a giant? Meet Corinthia Bledsoe, a seven-foot tall high-school junior who can predict the future. Over seven feet tall and with a newfound ability to sense future events, Corinthia Bledsoe is far more than just another Midwestern high-school junior; she’s a force of nature. When she predicts with terrifying accuracy the outcome of a tornado that will hit her high school, leaving a cow standing midcourt in the Lugo Memorial field house, Corinthia finds herself at the epicenter of another kind of storm entirely. And as things get stranger and stranger — both in her small town and her own home — lives start to intersect in ways even Corinthia can’t foresee.

We investigate the linear and interactive influences of leader-empowering behaviors, team experience, and the degree of virtuality on team planning processes and performance among virtual sales teams. Collecting data across three separate time periods with 218 pharmaceutical sales teams, our results indicate that empowering leadership improves team planning processes and is moderated by the team''s experience. Interestingly, it seems that, as teams gain more experience, they are less likely to engage in effective planning; however, these effects are attenuated as the team becomes more virtual in nature. Our findings have relevance for sales managers and salespeople in terms of leveraging team processes to influence performance as well as in terms of presenting the issues associated with virtual means of interaction.

In this research, we apply a team self-regulatory perspective to build and test theory focusing on the relationships between team efficacy and 2 key team performance criteria: a performance behavior (i.e., team effort) and a performance outcome (i.e., objective team sales). We theorize that rather than having a linear association, the performance benefits of team efficacy reach a point of inflection, reflective of too much of a good thing. Further, in an effort to establish a boundary condition of the inverted-U shaped relationship we predict, we also test the moderating role played by team goal monitoring in the nonmonotonic relationship between team efficacy and team performance. The results from a lagged field test, in which we collect multisource data from 153 technology sales teams, reveal a significant curvilinear association that is moderated by team goal monitoring behavior. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

In WOLF IN THE RIVER, Adam Rapp explores love and neglect, the challenges of poverty, the dangerous cost of shiftlessness, the simple notion of leaving a place behind, and the value of a girl. "Savage lyricism." Ben Brantley, The New York Times "A jolt of dark energy...I can''t remember the last time I felt as invested in a fictional stage character as I did in Tana... Half the time I wasn''t sure what was real and what was fantasy or dream. Yet the story held me from start to finish." BlogCritics.org "Extraordinary... Nothing like you have ever seen before and nothing you are likely ever to see again." Theatre Reviews Limited "This is great theater. It''s hard to separate the play itself from the creative staging and perfect acting but it all adds up to as stunning a theatrical experience as anyone ever needs to have." Let''s Talk Off-Broadway

From award-winning playwright Adam Rapp and veteran cartoonist and animator Mike Cavallaro comes Decelerate Blue, a dark, breath-taking new vision of an all-too-plausible future for America. The future waits for no one. In this new world, speed and efficiency are everything, and the populace zooms along in a perpetually stimulated haze. Angela thinks she''s the only person in her family—maybe the only person on the planet—who sees anything wrong with this picture. But the truth is she''s not alone. Angela finds herself recruited into a resistance movement where the key to rebellion is taking things slow. In their secret underground hideout, they create a life unplugged from the rapid-fire culture outside. Can they free the rest of the world before the powers that be shut down their utopian experiment?

Do employee judgments of their organization''s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs relate to CSR-specific performance and in-role job performance? Can middle managers influence the formation of such judgments and what factors might moderate such cascading influences? To answer these yet unaddressed questions, we conduct three studies. Study 1 takes an organizational justice perspective and tests our baseline model. Results show that employees'' CSR judgments trigger their affective commitment and performance on extra-role CSR-specific behaviors; however, extra-role CSR-specific performance is unrelated to in-role job performance. Study 2 replicates Study 1''s findings while, in addition, applies a social information processing approach and offers novel insights by demonstrating the cascading effects of managers'' CSR judgments on employee CSR judgments. This approach argues that investments made in CSR programs in order to improve employee judgments and behaviors may be unsuccessful if employees'' CSR judgments are based on social information that remains unchanged. In addition to replicating the findings from study 1 and 2, study 3 draws from middle management involvement and leadership theories to show that leadership styles and managers'' involvement in implementing deliberate strategy can strengthen or weaken these cascading effects. It thus highlights the important role of middle-managers as "linking pins" in the CSR strategy implementation process. Further, Study 3 shows that employee in-role CSR-specific performance relates positively with employee in-role job performance, thus substantiating the importance of managing CSR judgments.

The growing phenomenon of showrooming plagues sales managers and small retailers in ever increasing numbers as technology has evolved to create smarter and more empowered consumers. Showrooming refers to the phenomenon of consumers – or potential consumers - browsing products in a retail store, and then ultimately purchasing online at a lower price through another store. In the age of the Internet, the sight of a customer who will visit a store and use their smartphone to scan the barcode, hoping to find the same item at a cheaper price from a different vendor has become commonplace. Through exhaustive research, the authors of this book investigate this exploding trend and offer strategies, tools, and training approaches that can help to transform showrooming customers into in-store sales. Offering retail managers and owners deep insight into how they can stem the loss of resources to showrooming, this book, through a close, systematic examination of showrooming, provides insight and understanding of the value added through customer service and expert salesperson knowledge. Retailers will learn how to implement essential, incremental changes to infuse value in the customer experience and entice significantly improved in-store sales while building core customer relationships and enhancing loyalty.

The sampler includes chapters from three Michael L. Printz Honor Books: Sally Gardner’s Maggot Moon, Adam Rapp’s Punkzilla, and Sonya Hartnett’s Surrender. Maggot Moon In Sally Gardner’s stunning novel, set in a ruthless regime, an unlikely teenager risks all to expose the truth about a heralded moon landing. Punkzilla An award-winning writer and playwright hits the open road for a searing novel-in-letters about a street kid on a high-stakes trek across America. Surrender A mesmerizing psychological thriller from extraordinary novelist Sonya Hartnett

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist comes a hilarious and heartbreaking novel about a musician climbing back from rock bottom. As winter deepens in snowbound Pollard, Illinois, thirty-something Francis Falbo is holed up in his attic apartment, recovering from a series of traumas: his mother''s death, his beloved wife''s desertion, and his once-ascendant rock band''s irreconcilable break-up. Francis hasn''t shaved in months, hasn''t so much as changed out of his bathrobe-"the uniform of a Life in Default"-for nine days. Other than the agoraphobia that continues to hold him hostage, all he has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants, including a pair of former circus performers whose daughter has gone missing. The tight-knit community has already survived a blizzard, but there is more danger in store for the citizens of Pollard before summer arrives. Francis is himself caught up in these troubles as he becomes increasingly entangled in the affairs of others, with results that are by turns disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing. Fusing consummate wit with the seriousness attending an adulthood gone awry, Rapp has written an uproarious and affecting novel about what we do and where we go when our lives have crumbled around us. Sharp-edged but tenderhearted, Know Your Beholder introduces us to one of the most lovably flawed characters in recent fiction, a man at last able to collect the jagged pieces of his dreams and begin anew, in both life and love. Seldom have our foibles and our efforts to persevere in spite of them been laid bare with such heart and hope.

Successfully managing employees'' corporate social performance (CSP) perceptions requires insights into their antecedents. However, not much is currently known on the subject. We contribute to the micro-level corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature in two ways: (a) we investigate the antecedents of employees'' CSP perceptions; (b) we integrate both customers'' perceptions of CSP-as these are construed by employees-and employees'' own CSP perceptions into a comprehensive framework. Specifically, we examine (a) the antecedent role of employee-customer CSR causal meta-attributions (i.e., what employees think customers think about the company''s motives underlying CSR programs); and (b) the antecedent and moderating role of employee-customer CSP meta-perceptions (i.e., what employees think customers think about the company''s overall social performance) on employees'' CSP perceptions and, in turn, on employees'' affective organizational commitment. Our study highlights that employees'' CSR assessments are more complex than previously thought with employees guessing the perceptions (and attributions) others make about their firm.

On the night of a terrible storm, a single mother and her younger son await the arrival of the older son, who has broken out of prison. Two others arrive before him: a stranger with a wounded leg and a girl with a suitcase. Nothing will ever be the same. "Adam Rapp''s play ... is just the ticket - brutal Southern Midwest grotesque, otherworldly and darkly human. It takes place on a stormy night, in a one-room house furnished with scavenged car parts and a PVC-pipe kitchen zoo table; as the play begins, Bean Scully is sucking the leech welts on her naked teen-age son''s body. Her other son, Jeff, has busted out of prison and is making his way home, and as the night goes on, various wanderers - a man with a bullet in his leg, a pregnant teen, two half-mute desperadoes - show up and wreak incredible havoc. Rapp''s dialogue is beautiful mayhem, full of mudslops and dogsnakes and hog gravy, and we care just enough about these strange souls to be devastated by their pain. Though neither Rapp nor the company nor the audience may ever understand what this work is doing or why, it jolts and haunts all involved in its happy amoralism." -The New Yorker "Adam Rapp''s GHOSTS IN THE COTTONWOODS ... is without question some of the most raw and intestine twisting theater happening in New York City." -Slant Magazine

Research examining technology and the sales force has a long, developed history that spans several decades. From initial research reviewing sales force laptop usage to more recent studies investigating the effects of advanced customer relationship management applications, much insight has been garnered regarding technology and sales. However, much of this investigation has occurred in business-to-business environments, leaving what we believe to be a considerable gap in knowledge on technology in business-to-consumer settings. In this paper, we briefly review some areas of research that we believe have seen abundant investigation and offer other fruitful avenues for research. We conclude that in business-to-consumer sales interactions, technology takes on a varying role and often enables a salesperson to complete a sale successfully, but seldom replaces the human interaction necessary to further develop the relationship.

Given the importance of new products, firms may be prone to “over-manage” sales personnel by using behavior-based control systems that dictate the performance of particular activities related to the introduction. Such controls may be especially tempting given that favorable salesperson product perceptions actually yield less effort on the new product, and behavior-based controls can offset this tendency. However, using longitudinal data from a sample of 226 pharmaceutical salespeople, along with external ratings from customers and archival measures of effort and sales performance, we demonstrate that such a strategy is short-sighted. Behavior-based controls constrain a salesperson''s ability to appropriately allocate effort across his or her customer base, negatively impacting customer product perceptions and, ultimately, new product sales. In contrast, outcome-based control systems enable salespeople to work smarter, and their corresponding effort on behalf of the new product has a more positive effect on customer product perceptions and new product sales.

A harrowing trilogy from the OBIE Award-winning author of Red Light Winter.

Printz Honor-winning author Adam Rapp spins a raw, gripping, and ultimately redemptive story about three disaffected teens and a kidnapped child. Three teenagers — a sharp, well-to-do girl named Bounce and two struggling boys named Wiggins and Orange — are holding a four-yearold girl hostage in Orange’s basement. The little girl answers to “the Frog” and seems content to play a video game about wolves all day long, a game that parallels the reality around her. As the stakes grow higher and the guilt and tension mount, Wiggins cracks and finally brings Frog to a trusted adult. Not for the faint of heart, Adam Rapp’s powerful, mesmerizing narrative ventures deep into psychological territory that few dare to visit.

This research focuses on the impact of leadership empowerment behavior (LEB) on customer service satisfaction and sales performance, as mediated by salespeople''s self-efficacy and adapt ability. Moreover, the authors propose an interactive relationship whereby LEB will be differentially effective as a function of employees'' empowerment readiness. The authors'' hypotheses are tested using survey data from a sample of 231 salespeople in the pharmaceutical field, along with external ratings of satisfaction from 864 customers and archival sales performance information. Results indicated that contrary to popular belief, employees with low levels of product/industry knowledge and low experience benefit the most from leadership behaviors that are empowering, whereas high-knowledge and experienced employees reap no clear benefit. The authors conclude with directions for future research and application.

This research focuses on the impact that salesperson knowledge and empowering leader behaviors have on salesperson working smarter and working harder behaviors. In turn, we examine the impact of working harder and smarter on customer service, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, on sales performance. Moreover, we propose an interactive relationship, whereby the influences of leader empowering behaviors and salespersons'' knowledge will be moderated by salespersons'' experience. We tested our hypotheses using survey data from a sample of 175 sales people in the pharmaceutical field, along with external ratings of salespersons'' knowledge from sales managers, customer ratings of sales satisfaction and service, and archival measures of salespersons'' effort and performance. Results indicate that contrary to popular belief, employees with low levels of product/industry experience benefit the most from leader empowering behaviors. Also, we find that employees with lower levels of experience and higher levels of knowledge are more inclined to work harder. We conclude with directions for future research.

A disgruntled East Village theater company with more on their minds than playing Bingo descends upon a small New England town. They plan a heist of the local church''s cash box, but the night takes a darkly comic turn as things do not go as planned. "The ideas and sometimes the actors ricochet around the stage with such energy and scattershot purpose in Adam Rapp''s BINGO WITH THE INDIANS that they might be in a pinball machine. A dark comedy that starts with a sitcom premise and finally invokes questions about the meaning of life, the play spins out of control, but that forgivable chaos comes from a writer who hasn''t reined in his overabundance of ideas. The entire play is set in a shabby New England motel where three members of a New York theater group have arrived with a scheme: They''ll steal the cash box from the local church bingo (it happens to be Indian night) and use the money to rent a performance space back home ... BINGO WITH THE INDIANS explores themes that run through other Rapp plays (most prominently, RED LIGHT WINTER; most recently, AMERICAN SLIGO): how far people will go to get what they want; how they face desires they barely knew they had; how grief seeps to the surface, and pent-up rage explodes." -Caryn James, The New York Times

A religious Southern clan cite God''s will as justification for torturing each other. "... There is a certain excitement that one experiences quite quickly when exposed to his plays - it doesn''t take long to recognize a truly gifted writer who has an emotionally (and otherwise) quite powerful story to tell ... TRUEBLINKA''s title, the kiln and the Teutonic family name are not the only markers of this holocaust drama, writ small. But they are enough to set the dark, creepy, metaphor-heavy story in motion ... This is theater worth staying up for." -Les Gutman, CurtainUp "Though the title suggests a meditation on history''s worst atrocities, Adam Rapp''s TRUEBLINKA is essentially a dysfunctional-American-family play, inflated to apocalyptic proportions. In a dimly lit house somewhere in creepiest flyover country ... It''s laudable that Rapp doesn''t shy away from difficult subject matter at a time when most new plays risk so little ..." -Village Voice

The next work for the stage from the Pulitzer finalist Adam Rapp, Essential Self-Defense. In Essential Self-Defense, disgruntled misfit Yul Carroll takes a job as an attack dummy in a women''s self-defense class and finds himself mysteriously drawn to Sadie, the repressed bookworm mercilessly honing her skills on him. Meanwhile, all''s not well on the unassuming Midwestern streets of Bloggs: with local children vanishing at an alarming rate, our hero, his lady friend, and a motley assortment of poets, butchers, and punk librarians prepare to battle the darkness on the edge of town.

From "one of the more daring young stylists working today" ( Time Out New York) comes a novel of New York in the early ''90s and one man''s brutally funny coming of age. New York City, the early 1990s: the recession is in full swing and young people are squatting in abandoned buildings in the East Village while the homeless riot in Tompkins Square Park. The Internet is not part of daily life; the term "dot-com" has yet to be coined; and people''s financial bubbles are burst for an entirely different set of reasons. What can all this mean for a young Midwestern man flush with promise, toiling at a thankless, poverty-wage job in corporate America, and hard at work on his first novel about acute knee pain and the end of the world? With The Year of Endless Sorrows, acclaimed playwright and finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Adam Rapp brings readers a hilarious picaresque reminiscent of Nick Hornby, Douglas Copeland, and Rick Moody at their best—a chronicle of the joys of love, the horrors of sex, the burden of roommates, and the rude discovery that despite your best efforts, life may not unfold as you had once planned.

Two men are snowbound in a cheap motel room in Boone, North Carolina. On a pick-up errand for their drug dealing boss, ten-year partners Burris and Dantly await the arrival of the enigmatic "Burning Man." Talk of beef jerky, Pocahontas, and the various uses of stick deodorant fill the night, but the men''s conversation is interrupted by a series of increasingly mysterious phone calls. Under a comic façade of buddies bonding in a blizzard, Rapp examines a friendship threatened by betrayal. "Rough-spoken, raunchy, and sometimes guffawingly funny, award-winning playwright and novelist Adam Rapp''s ANIMALS AND PLANTS is very different from his NOCTURNE ... The sheer liveliness of Rapp''s dialogue and his multifaceted characters keep his play afloat ... a lurid comic phantasmagoria of life on the underside of Middle America." -Markland Taylor, Variety

A homeless boy, running from the police with a fifteen-year-old, drug-addicted prostitute, her boyfriend who just killed his own parents, and a baby, gets the chance to make a better life for himself. An ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Reprint.