Kirjahaku

As winter deepens in Pollard, Illinois, 30-something Francis Falbo is holed up in an 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. He hasn't changed out of his bathrobe-"the uniform of a Life in Default"-for nine days. All he has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants, becoming increasingly entangled in their lives, with results that are by turns disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing.KNOW YOUR BEHOLDER is an uproarious and affecting novel about what we do when our lives have crumbled around us and we must collect the jagged pieces and begin anew. Seldom have our foibles and our efforts to persevere in spite of them been laid bare with such heart and hope.

The Corrections meets We Need to Talk About Kevin in this harrowing multigenerational saga about a family harboring a serial killer in their midst, from the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award finalist playwright Adam Rapp.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.

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.

Drama / Characters: 2m, 2f / Interior An ailing mother and her teenaged son flee Illinois and a crumbling marriage for the relative calm and safety of a midtown Manhattan hotel. Mom holds tickets to a popular musical about love among bohemians. Her son isn't interested, so Mom takes the kindly cabdriver instead, while the boy entertains a visitor from down the hall, an enigmatic, potentially dangerous young woman. Kindness is a play about the possibility for sympathy in a harsh world and the meaning of mercy in the face of devastating circumstances. Premiered at Playwrights Horizons, New York City in 2008. "Compelling. A well-crafted mini-thriller, which keeps you in suspense until the final blackout." - Joe Dziemianowics, New York Daily News "Rapp has raised some provocative questions about the prickly mother/son relationship he has drawn in such detail."- Marilyn Stasio, Variety "Pungent, vivid...Rapp finds a gentle approach to his characters' physical and emotional pain without turning sentimental. His playful side is on display too." [Four stars] - Diane Snyder, Time Out New York "Adam Rapp can write dense, tense, funny dialogue." - Charles Isherwood, The New York Times "A taut and involving dark comedy. Hilarious and unsettling." - Dan Bacalzo, TheatreMania.com

The United States has been attacked. Men are being castrated women enumerated. Ellen has been in hiding for fifty-two days subsisting on very little hoping against hope for her husband to return. As the world around her falls further into senseless chaos she takes an unlikely action one that just might signal a new beginning.

Dr. Bertram and Sandra Cabot invite longtime friends Dirk and Celeste Von Stofenberg to their beautiful Connecticut Gold Coast home in honor of James the Von Stofenbergs' only son who has recently been released from an esteemed private psychiatric hospital. The feast promises to be delicious but when Sandra enlists Dirk to help her change the course of her life the sky turns a strange color Canadian geese start crashing into the bay window and the fate of the evening tilts toward an inevitable conclusion that promises to change the lives of all who come to the table.

When Bella Baird an isolated creative writing professor at Yale begins to mentor a brilliant but enigmatic student named 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 that neither knows if he can fulfill. Brimming with suspense Rapp's riveting play explores the limits of what one person can ask of another.

"It's totally familiar but dreamlike at the same time," observes one American of Amsterdam's notorious Red Light District in this stunning work from Adam Rapp, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 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. Written with an unflinching poetic beauty, Red Light Winter is a play of sexual intrigue that explores the myriad and misguided ways we seek to fill the empty spaces inside us.

It's Christmas Eve: a Desert Storm veteran with a herniated disk and a 19-year-old runaway heroin addict share the holiday in a filthy, rundown squat on New York's Canal Street. This unusual love story is grimly compelling, mixing gritty honesty with remarkable generosity and compassion, striking a delicate balance between the sweet and difficult moments in human interaction. "... a terrifically impressive British debut for new U S playwright Adam Rapp. Froggy and Baylis are two wrecked drifters in a New York squat ... BLACKBIRD could, in the hands of a lesser dramatist, be a crude mix of in-your-face grunge and sentimentality ... actually, the squalor here is both appalling and cryingly funny and Rapp has a brilliant ear for talk." -The Independent "There is a strange tenderness in Rapp's writing that marks him out as one to watch. Rapp has genuine Gorky-esque talent and loves his characters as all-consumingly as they do each other." -The Guardian

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 fa ade 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 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

Art "Crazy Train" Sligo (Slee-go), all-star wrestling legend, is about to retire. His two sons, his sister-in-law, his greatest fan, and a few unexpected guests gather on the eve of his final match for his last supper, but things just can't seem to stop going wrong in the Sligo home. "... Adam Rapp's brutal and funny play ... The play's aesthetic - realism with a dash of exaggerated dark humor, detailed observations of the pop-culture world delivered with energy and immediacy - are familiar from Mr Rapp's recent work in many forms. In the last few years alone they have included the play RED LIGHT WINTER, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as a fine small film he wrote and directed, Winter Passing, and a witty coming-of-age novel, Year of Endless Sorrows. AMERICAN SLIGO ... bolsters his reputation as a writer ... as a writer he veers in a few unexpected directions, with new characters popping up, and others revealing surprising layers ..." -Caryn James, The New York Times "... AMERICAN SLIGO, his latest attack on the moral values and social conventions that define the American way of life ... Rapp hits his stride in the razor-cut pieces of dialogue ..." -Marilyn Stasio, Variety