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.

“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.

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?

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.

Little Chicago opens in the office of Children’s Services, where eleven-year-old Blacky Brown is being interviewed by a social worker who is trying to determine what has happened to him. At first, Blacky’s emotions are blocked, but then he reveals that he has been sexually abused by his mother’s boyfriend, and is released into his mother’s custody. Thus begins an alternately harrowing and hopeful story of a brave boy’s attempts to come to grips with a grim reality Mary Jane, a classmate who is similarly ostracized, tries to help Blackie, but he soon takes refuge instead in the gun that he buys easily from his sister’s boyfriend. Little Chicago is an unblinking look at the world of a child who has been neglected and abused. It portrays head-on the indifference and hostility of classmates, teachers, and even Blacky’s mother, once these people learn his “secret.” Like Sura in The Buffalo Tree and Whensday in The Copper Elephant, Blacky is one of Adam Rapp’s mesmerizing voices, more so because it is a voice so rarely heard.

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.

Alternately heartbreaking and starkly humorous, this teenager''s brutal story of escape and desire for redemption is masterfully told by award-winning writer and film director Adam Rapp. I''m what they call a Gray Grouper. The Red Groupers are the junkies and the Blue Groupers are the suicide kids. Steve Nugent is in a facility called Burnstone Grove. It''s a place for kids who are addicts, like Shannon Lynch, who can stick $1.87 in change up his nose, or for kids who have tried to commit suicide, like Silent Starla, whom Steve is getting a crush on. But Steve doesn''t really fit in either group. He used to go to a gifted school. So why is he being held at Burnstone Grove? Keeping a journal, in which he recalls his confused and violent past, Steve is left to figure out who he is by examining who he was.

A runaway boy nicknamed Punkzilla who sustains himself on the streets of Portland through petty crimes decides to try to kick his meth habit, turn his life around, and go on a journey to Tennessee to visit his dying older brother.

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.

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.

Escaping their lives in Manhattan, former college buddies Matt and Davis take off to the Netherlands and find themselves thrown into a bizarre love triangle with a beautiful young prostitute named Christina. But the romance they find in Europe is eventually overshadowed by the truth they discover at home.

In this freakishly funny and vividly imagined absurdist nightmare for our time, the inert occupants of an East Village apartment - members of a band once called "Lester''s Surprise," now remembered simply as "Less" - are going numb. Pill-popping Chase and Staples, who look like they''ve been living on their sofa since the previous spring, sit mesmerized in front of the television until its untimely demise. Desperately in need of technological stimulus, they decide to call up their weird neighbor, luring him upstairs and under Chase''s narrative spell so that Staples can steal his Magnavox via the fire escape. The strange arrivals and events that follow move from the hilarious to the disturbingly existential, as Rapp''s electronic-age creatures long to feel something, to be part of something, or to be of use. "A television blares in the background. A bloody child is carried into the room. And at least three kinds of bodily fluids are spilled. This can mean only one thing: Adam Rapp is back in town. Mr Rapp has always written with the energy and tastefulness of a punk rock band, so it should come as no surprise that his latest, FINER NOBLE GASES, follows the drugged-out members of an East Village rock group who waste away their days in front of the television, their eyes half-open, looking almost comatose. In 2000 Mr Rapp burst on the scene with NOCTURNE, a highly praised monologue about a piano prodigy living in the shadow of the death of his sister. Since then he has written a handful of grimly poetic plays including FASTER, TRUEBLINKA and STONE COLD DEAD SERIOUS - none of which you would probably want to take your grandmother to. The hallmarks of a play by Mr Rapp are slangy, potent dialogue; a dark, often baroque worldview; and a deep wallowing in the gratuitous ... Mr Rapp is aiming for something much more grand and metaphysical than just another mundane tale of arrested development." -Jason Zinoman, The New York Times "Rapp has concocted a smelly brew here, but like all poisons it can be intoxicatingly fun to watch other people imbibe the stuff ..." -Robert Hofler, Variety

Publisher Description

A devastating, elegant, and gripping dissection of the American dream, Adam Rapp''s Nocturne signals a brave new voice in American theater. "Fifteen years ago I killed my sister." So begins Adam Rapp''s highly acclaimed play Nocturne, in which a 32-year-old former piano prodigy recounts the tragic events that tore his family apart. With a keen eye for human relationships and a deft ear for language, Rapp explores the aftershock of this unimaginable event. The father is so incapable of forgiveness he puts a gun in his son''s mouth; the mother so shattered, she deserts the family and eventually takes leave of her sanity altogether; the son--only 17 years old at the time--sets out for New York City. There, he seeks an uneasy refuge in books and reinvents himself as a writer. Across the decade and a half that follows he tries to cope with the ramifications of his own anguish and estrangement while making a desperate search for redemption.

Getting caught changed 12-year-old Sura''s life. Now he''s just struggling to survive in Hamstock, a juvenile detention center where he helplessly watches his friend''s descent into hell. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.