Bøger af Adam Rapp

A riveting play about a creative writing professor at Yale and her brilliant, rebellious student, exploring the limits of what one person can ask of another.

"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"--

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

A pinball wizard for the twenty-first century, Wynne Ledbetter is surrounded by despair. His father is wasting away on workman's comp, his mother is a double-shift waitress obsessed with the lives of the saints, and his sister is a dropout junky. But Wynne has a plan. One of only three players in the country to solve the Tang Dynasty computer game, he will travel to the championships in New York City, where the winner pockets a cool million dollars. With this money, he'll put his sister in rehab, pay for his father's operation, and employ his mother in his very own computer repair shop. But he has to get there first. "STONE COLD DEAD SERIOUS...is the work of a playwright who is forging a real voice... Its rendering of the shared language of loved ones illustrates how families can remain intimate even when they are in shards. Its depiction of a working-class America that is unable to dream of anything beyond enduring is as sincerely sad a commentary on our culture as I've seen in recent memory. And its fear for young people is, unfortunately, deeply convincing." Bruce Weber, The New York Times

"It's totally familiar but dreamlike at the same time," observes one American of Amsterdam's notorious Red Light District in the stunning work from Adam Rapp. 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. "Riveting...a clever portrait of sexual obsession that never quite shows its hand... With one foot in the buddy comedy of Sideways and another in the macho diabolism of Neil LaBute...for sure, this will be Rapp's deserved breakthrough play..." Chris Jones, Variety "Spellbinding and haunting." Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times "An arresting study in melancholic triangulation and obsessions dashed... Shrewd about the way certain male friendships exist on the knife edge of disaster." Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

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

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

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

A tense, haunting new play from a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

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. Its 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.

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 2003 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.

"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. A devastating, elegant, and gripping dissection of the American dream, Nocturne signals a brave new voice in American theater.

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.

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.

"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."--

A collection of critically acclaimed plays by contemporary American writersOf interest to students of drama and American studies

Disgruntled misfit Yul Carroll takes a job as an attack dummy in a women's self-defence class and finds himself mysteriously drawn to Sadie, the repressed bookworm mercilessly honing her skills on him. Meanwhile, alls not well on the unassuming Midwestern streets of Bloggs.

Premiered at Playwrights Horizons, New York City, in 2008.

Showrooming is a growing phenomenon in which customers browse products in a retail store and make purchases of similar products through an online vendor. The authors of this book offer retail managers strategic insight in how to stem the loss of resources to showrooming and transform showrooming customers into in-store sales.

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

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist comes a hilarious and heartbreaking novel about a musician climbing back from rock bottom.