New Releases by Adam Rapp

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 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.

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.

A girl who thinks the rapid-fire, hyperkinetic culture of the country is counter-productive is recruited into a resistance movement where the mode of survival is taking things slow.

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.

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.

As much as selling has changed, in many ways the fundamental aspects of selling have remained the same. Sellers still need to engage in a systematic process to find prospects, collect research, get prospects'' attention, ask questions, deliver solutions, and close sales. What has changed is the rate at which these events occur and the amount of knowledge and insight necessary from the very first prospect interaction. With the availability of information today, customers have considerably more power than they did just a few years ago. This power demands a better understanding of customer needs prior to the sales call. Customer power also imposes more demands on their time and more complicated decision-making processes. It is no longer possible to sell to one person. Rather, an entire buying center in a matrix-form environment requires a range of versatile value propositions. In light of increased time pressures, questioning can no longer be initiated with broad inquiries like: "Tell me about your business"; or "What keeps you up at night." Salespeople are the experts in the sales process and, to be successful, must behave like experts. Sales organizations have increasingly introduced more complicated products and solutions that come with higher internal expectations. These demands require smarter sales and customer goals and team-selling approaches. Salespeople must understand how to navigate not only the customer organization, but also their own sales organization. Sales professionals must become knowledge managers, knowledge brokers, and information dealers. In Transforming Selling you will learn how to become a Resource Manager, Knowledge Manager, and Account Manager. These three sets of skills are the critical triumvirate for becoming a successful seller.

"Rapp remains a true man of the theater and a potent writer."—Time Out "To watch The Hallway Trilogy by Adam Rapp is to enter an alternate universe . . . a carnival of the desperate, the grotesque, the outrageous."—The New York Times "I knew in a single sentence that Adam was a writer the world was going to listen to for as long as he felt like writing. . . . Adam writes like nobody else, his fierce poetic power as inescapable as the doom that waits for his characters. The work is bleak and true, his touch that of a master in the making."—Marsha Norman Multi-talented artist and provocateur Adam Rapp shocks and disturbs, weaving themes of love, suffering, and redemption throughout this alarming yet heartening critical examination of societal change. Spanning one hundred years in one Lower East Side tenement hallway, this series of connected plays—Rose, Paraffin, and Nursing—is a dark and compelling exploration of what binds people together and drives them apart. Packed with searing dialogue and harrowing narratives, The Hallway Trilogy "bristles with humor" and "contains some of Rapp''s most sensitive and mature writing" (The New York Times). Adam Rapp is a novelist, filmmaker, and an OBIE Award–winning playwright and director. His plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalist Red Light Winter, Nocturne, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Finer Noble Gases, Essential Self-Defense, and more. He is the author of many young adult novels such as Punkzilla, The Buffalo Tree, and Under the Dog, and the writer and director of the film Winter Passing, starring Zooey Deschanel, Will Ferrell, and Ed Harris.

Bernadette is 16. She is pregnant. Her boyfriend doesn''t know. Much more importantly than all that, however, she will soon be auditioning for her high school''s production of Genet''s The Maids . As she stands on the cusp of adulthood, she must learn to untangle the real world outside from the thorns of her imagination.

"Adam Rapp’s brilliant and haunting story will break your heart. But then his words will mend it. . . . Absolutely unforgettable." – Michael Cart On the run in a stolen car with a kidnapped baby in tow, Custis, Curl, and Boobie are three young people with deeply troubled pasts and bleak futures. As they struggle to find a new life for themselves, it becomes painfully clear that none of them will ever be able to leave the past behind. Yet for one, redemption is waiting in the unlikeliest of places. With the raw language of the street and lyrical, stream-of-consciousness prose, Adam Rapp hurtles the reader into a world of lost children, a world that is not for the faint of heart. Gripping, disturbing, and starkly illuminating, his hypnotic narration captures the voices of two damaged souls - a third speaks only through drawings - to tell a story of alienation, deprivation, and ultimately, the saving power of compassion.

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

An award-winning writer and playwright hits the open road for a searing novel-in-letters about a street kid on a highstakes trek across America. For a runaway boy who goes by the name "Punkzilla," kicking a meth habit and a life of petty crime in Portland, Oregon, is a prelude to a mission: reconnecting with his older brother, a gay man dying of cancer in Memphis. Against a backdrop of seedy motels, dicey bus stations, and hitched rides, the desperate fourteen-year-old meets a colorful, sometimes dangerous cast of characters. And in letters to his sibling, he catalogs them all -- from an abusive stranger and a ghostly girl to a kind transsexual and an old woman with an oozing eye. The language is raw and revealing, crackling with visceral details and dark humor, yet with each interstate exit Punkzilla’s journey grows more urgent: will he make it to Tennessee in time? This daring novel offers a narrative worthy of Kerouac and a keen insight into the power of chance encounters.

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

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

In a world where children under twelve are used as slave labor in subterranean lime mines, eleven-year-old Whensday Bluehouse struggles to survive the continuous poison rains and evade the ruthless Syndicate Soldiers.

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

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.

A collection of plays from Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp, "one of the more daring young stylists working today" (Time Out New York) Adam Rapp''s plays have captivated audiences across the country with their unflinching explorations of the good, the bad, and the ugly in America''s heartland and cities. Gathered here are three of his works: Faster, in which two young grifters try to strike a deal with the devil during the hottest summer on record; Finer Noble Gases, a lament for a band of arrested thirty-year-olds slouching toward adulthood amid East Village decay; and the Off-Broadway hit Stone Cold Dead Serious. An honest, strange, and humorous look at a blue-collar family struggling to survive in the face of disability and addiction, and the seemingly surreal lengths their teenage son will go to save them from themselves. "Rapp is very gifted, and, even rarer, he has something to say . . . Stone Cold Dead Serious [is] brave, compassionate, and . . . breathtakingly moving." -(New York Times)

Forced to live at the institution of Burnstone Grove, Steve Nugent feels out of place amongst the strange residents there and wonders why he has been banished to such a place, but as time passes, Steve begins to write in his journal regularly and learns important things about himself he had never been able to see before.

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.