Best Selling Books by Tony Kushner

The premier American playwright of this decade speaks out about art, sexuality, and social justice

"ANGELS IN AMERICA has proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams''s The Glass Menagerie." John Lahr, The New Yorker "The most influential American play of the last two decades." Patrick Healy, The New York Times "Daring and dazzling! The most ambitious American play of our time: an epic that ranges from earth to heaven; focuses on politics, sex and religion; transports us to Washington, the Kremlin, the South Bronx, Salt Lake City and Antarctica; deals with Jews, Mormons, WASPs, blacks; switches between realism and fantasy, from the tragedy of AIDS to the camp comedy of drag queens to the death or at least absconding of God." Jack Kroll, Newsweek "The greatest American play of the waning years of the twentieth century." Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

“Mr. Kushner’s glorious specialty is in giving theatrical life to internal points of view, in which our thoughts meld with a character’s wayward speculations or fantasies... He makes the personal and the universal, the trivial and the cosmic come simultaneously to life in a single character’s bewilderment.” –Ben Brantley, New York Times “An extraordinary play…a deeply felt, expansively ruminative drama.” –Paul Taylor, Independent (London) “What a feast of a play. No playwright in the English language has a greater passion for language than Kushner. And to this Kushner adds that rare quality in American theater, a yearning to go beyond domestic stories and into the great world of political struggle. Brilliant. It keeps us thinking.” –Richard Christiansen, Chicago Tribune “This eerily timely work about Afghanistan is comparably mesmerizing and mournful, vast and intimate, emotionally generous and stylistically fabulist, wildly verbal, politically progressive and scarily well informed.” –Linda Winer, Newsday In Homebody/Kabul, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America, has turned his penetrating gaze to the arena of global politics to create this suspenseful portrait of a dangerous collision between cultures. Written before 9/11, Homebody/Kabul premiered in New York in December 2001 and has had highly successful productions in London, Providence, Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles. This version incorporates all the playwright''s changes and is now the definitive version of the text. Tony Kushner’s plays include Angels in America; Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown; The Illusion, adapted from the play by Pierre Corneille; Slavs!; A Bright Room Called Day; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln. His books include The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

“Caroline is a breakthrough—a story so grounded in the ordinary details of life that it almost seems to have discovered a new genre.” –Richard Zoglin, Time “Acute, smart and witty: a telling snapshot focusing with sharp clarity on characters captured at a fraught turning point in history—a culture’s and a family’s.” –Charles Isherwood, Variety “Thrilling. You’ve never seen anything quite like Caroline, or Change and likely won’t again anytime soon. There’s never a moment that the part-pop, part-opera, part-musical-theater score Jeanine Tesori has conjured up doesn’t ideally match Tony Kushner’s meticulously chosen words with clarion precision.” –Matthew Murray, talkinbroadway.com “A monumental achievement in American musical theater. Joyful, wholly successful, immensely moving, told with abundant wit and generosity of heart.” –John Helipern, New York Observer Louisiana, 1963: A nation reeling from the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy assassination. Caroline, a black maid, and Noah, the son of the Jewish family she works for, struggle to find an identity for their friendship after Noah''s stepmother, unable to give Caroline a raise, tells Caroline that she may keep the money Noah leaves in his pockets. Through their intimate story, this beautiful musical portrays the changing rhythms of a nation. Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori have created a story that addresses contemporary questions of culture, community, race and class through the lens and musical pulse of the 1960s.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America comes this powerful portrayal of individual dissolution and resolution in the face of political catastrophe. "Tony Kushner''s A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY ... is unabashedly political, thought-provoking, a little scary, and frequently a good deal of theatrical fun ... BRIGHT ROOM is ... an examination of Nazi Germany in an attempt to shed insight on our own time. It''s brash, audacious, and, depending on your politics, anything from infuriatingly naive to intoxicatingly visionary. In its 1932-33 span, it tells of a group of Berlin artists and friends, with varying degrees of communist leanings, and of the changes in their lives as democracy falls and Adolph Hitler takes over." -Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune "It''s fun to see a show this engaged. This passionate and ready to talk. Wild, uneven, pugnacious, ragged, committed, smart, dumb, satirical, and utterly serious ... Always dramatically and intellectually forceful. And most important, always passionately committed. More than a diatribe against Reagan or a falling-into-the-Nazi-abyss history play, A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY is an assertion of the need for commitment." -Anthony Adler, The Reader

This is the second part of Tony Kushner''s award-winning play (Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes) entitled Perestroika. In this play, the characters first introduced in the first part, Millennium Approaches, move from the opportunistic 1980s to a new sense of community in the 1990s as they struggle to overcome catastrophic loss.

"ANGELS IN AMERICA has proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams''s The Glass Menagerie." John Lahr, The New Yorker "The most influential American play of the last two decades." Patrick Healy, The New York Times "Daring and dazzling! The most ambitious American play of our time: an epic that ranges from earth to heaven; focuses on politics, sex and religion; transports us to Washington, the Kremlin, the South Bronx, Salt Lake City and Antarctica; deals with Jews, Mormons, WASPs, blacks; switches between realism and fantasy, from the tragedy of AIDS to the camp comedy of drag queens to the death or at least absconding of God." Jack Kroll, Newsweek "The greatest American play of the waning years of the twentieth century." Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

The first collection of writings from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America. Includes Slavs!

"This is an odd assemblage of plays, for which gathering-together there is no overarching thematic justification. Because several of the plays deal with death, and one of the death-plays deals as well with money, and the last play deals with taxation, we''re calling the book Death & Taxes. But all plays, directly or indirectly, are about death and taxes, so this title explains little..." –Tony Kushner This stunning new collection by Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America, showcases his masterful explorations of form and style. A rich and vibrant collection from one of our greatest American playwrights, Death & Taxes includes the following treasure trove of works: In Reverse Transcription: Six Playwrights Bury a Seventh, six playwrights come together to bury their contemporary and friend, Ding. They discuss and brood on their lives, writings, and loves. Theatre critic Dr. David Nowlan calls Reverse Transcription “rich in allusion, elegant in language and satirically funny” (Irish Times). Hydriotaphia or The Death of Dr. Browne begins at one man’s deathbed and becomes an epic farce spanning Heaven and Earth. “Karl Marx said that history occurs first as tragedy and then as farce. In Hydriotaphia, Tony Kushner says that history is tragedy and farce at once. Ben Jonson meets Bertolt Brecht in this brilliantly funny and dark knockabout play of the rise of the entrepreneurial spirit. As in all of Kushner’s work, the play teems with ideas.” –Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet Laureate “The play flourishes Kushner’s trademark ability to mix up wildly diverse tonalities and ideas — bawdy humor, theological and class warfare debate, fourth-wall-breaking, dizzying monologues, fantasy and domestic intrigue all whirl like a juggler’s pins.” -Variety Inspired by Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 75,” Terminating or Sonnet LXXV “is a delirious, scatological encounter between a psychotherapist, her madly besotted patient and their lovers, which contains some dizzyingly fine writing” (Variety). “Tony Kushner at his most fanciful and eclectic ... fierce, strange and clever theatre.” –Evening Standard East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis is a one-man show featuring two dozen characters’ involvement in a tax evasion scheme. “Surreal, confrontational and funny.” –Prospect Magazine (UK) "There is such clarity conveyed not just in the language but in the rhythm and the nuance. Ideas and phrases honey drip from the script. Listening is an indulgence.” –The Stage Notes on Akiba has been performed at The Jewish Museum and other venues during Passover. Fictionalized versions of playwright Tony Kushner and director Michael Mayer reimagine aspects of Jewish history, tradition and myth. G. David Schine in Hell was originally published in New York Times Magazine. Featuring an appearance by Kushner’s fictionalized Roy Cohn of Angels in America, this short play revisits Cohn and several other American Conservatives of the McCarthy era as they adjust to an afterlife in Hell.

Tony Kushner returns with a scorching new version of his first play, revisited in the age of Trump--the prescient 1985 work suggesting the possibility of the Reagan counter-revolution eventually giving rise to American fascism.

“All forward thrust and hot-damn urgency…A brilliant, brawling epic. Screenwriter Tony Kushner blows the dust off history by investing it with flesh, blood, and churning purpose. . . . A great American movie.” –Peter Travers, Rolling Stone “Lincoln is a rough and noble democratic masterpiece. And the genius of Lincoln, finally, lies in its vision of politics as a noble, sometimes clumsy dialectic of the exalted and the mundane…And Mr. Kushner, whose love of passionate, exhaustive disputation is unmatched in the modern theater, fills nearly every scene with wonderful, maddening talk. Go see this movie.” –A.O. Scott, New York Times “A lyrical, ingeniously structured screenplay. Lincoln is one of the most authentic biographical dramas I’ve ever seen…grand and immersive. It plugs us into the final months of Lincoln’s presidency with a purity that makes us feel transported as if by time machine.” –Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly A decade-long collaboration between three-time Academy Award® winner Steven Spielberg and Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner, Lincoln is a revealing drama that focuses on the 16th President’s tumultuous final months in office. Having just won re-election in a country divided, Lincoln pursues a course of action designed to end the war, unite the country and abolish slavery. With the moral courage and fierce determination to succeed, his choices during this critical moment will change the fate of America, and generations, to come. Containing eight pages of color photos from the film and inspired by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s critically acclaimed Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln is now a major motion picture by DreamWorks starring two-time Academy Award® winner Daniel Day-Lewis. Tony Kushner''s plays include Angels in America, Parts One and Two; A Bright Room Called Day; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual''s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols''s film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg''s Munich. Kushner is the recipient of a Pultizer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, and two Oscar nominations, among other honors. In 2008 he was the first recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes includes Part One, Millennium Approaches and Part Two, Perestroika “Glorious. A monumental, subversive, altogether remarkable masterwork…Details of specific catastrophes may have changed since this Reagan-era AIDS epic won the Pulitzer and the Tony, but the real cosmic and human obsessions—power, religion, sex, responsibility, the future of the world—are as perilous, yet as falling-down funny, as ever.” –Linda Winer, Newsday "A vast, miraculous play... provocative, witty and deeply upsetting... a searching and radical rethinking of American political drama." - Frank Rich, New York Times "A victory for theater, for the transforming power of the imagination to turn devastation into beauty." - John Lahr, New Yorker “An enormously impressive work of the imagination and intellect, a towering example of what theater stretched to its full potential can achieve.” -Philadelphia Inquirer "Angels in America is the finest drama of our time, speaking to us of an entire era of life and death as no other play within memory. It ranks as nothing less than one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century." - John Heilpern, New York Observer “Some playwrights want to change the world. Some want to revolutionize theater. Tony Kushner is that rarity of rarities: a writer who has the promise to do both.” -New York Times This new edition of Tony Kushner''s masterpiece is published with the author''s recent changes and a new introduction in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of its original production. One of the most honored American plays in history, Angels in America was awarded two Tony Awards for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was made into an Emmy Award-winning HBO film directed by Mike Nichols. This two-part epic, subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," has received hundreds of performances worldwide in more than twenty-six languages. Tony Kushner’s plays include Angels in America; Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown; The Illusion, adapted from the play by Pierre Cornelle; Slavs!; A Bright Room Called Day; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln. His books include The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

"Tony Kushner’s adaptation of A Dybbuk, perhaps the greatest classic of Yiddish drama, is passionate and illuminating.” –Clive Barnes, New York Post “Some playwrights want to change the world. Some want to revolutionize theater. Tony Kushner is that rarity of rarities: a writer who has the promise to do both.” -New York Times “As filtered through Kushner, the play has a deep wistfulness about a flawed but rich culture on the precipice of apocalyptic change, about technology poised to tear through ancient truths and the seductions of assimilation ready to devastate whatever culture is left after the slaughters of the twentieth century.” –Linda Winer, Newsday The first part of the book features Tony Kushner’s remarkable, imaginative adaptation of The Dybbuk by S. Ansky (from Joachim Neugroschel’s translation), with an afterword by Harold Bloom. Considered by many to be the greatest Yiddish drama, The Dybbuk recounts the tale of a wealthy man’s daughter who is possessed by the spirit of her dead beloved. Also included in this volume is a selection of stories translated into English for the first time by Joachim Neugroschel, illuminating different aspects of the Jewish mystical world, including possessions, transmigration, fairy tales, parables and miracles.

In this first collection of writings by Tony Kushner, including his latest play Slavs!, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright grapples with the timeless issues of bigotry, war, faith, love, as well as tackling the contemporary topics as AIDS, gay rights and the moral horrors of the Gulf War.

The most anticipated new American play of the decade, this brilliant work is an emotional, poetic, political epic in two parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. Spanning the years of the Reagan administration, it weaves the lives of fictional and historical characters into a feverish web of social, political, and sexual revelations.

Cast size: medium.

This is a study of the history of global refugee movements over the 20th century, ranging from east European Jews fleeing Tsarist oppression at the turn of the century to asylum seekers from the former Zaire and Yugoslavia. Recognizing that the problem of refugees is a universal one, the authors emphasize the human element which should be at the forefront of both the study of refugees and responses to them.

Despite the massive literature on the Holocaust, our understanding of it has traditionally been influenced by rather unsophisticated early perspectives and silence. This book summarizes and criticizes the existing scholarship on the subject and suggests new ways by which we can approach its study. It addresses the use of victim testimony and asks important questions: What function does recording the past serve for the victim? What do historians want from it? Are these two perspectives incompatible? It also examines the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and compares them to those responsible for other acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the early years of the twentieth century. In addition, it looks at the bystanders--examining the complexity and ambiguity at the heart of contemporary reaction.

In this moving novel set in a Greek village in 1942, the corpses of disappeared men wash ashore. The village women claim the bodies as husbands and fathers, even though their faces are unrecognizable. A tug of war ensues between the local police, who insist the women cannot identify their loved ones, and the women, who demand the right to bury their dead. Their standoff becomes a struggle for dignity and honor against the forces of fascism. First published in 1983 and anticipating some of the themes of his award-winning play Death and the Maiden, Widows is Ariel Dorfmans eloquent tribute to those who have perished under totalitarian regimes. This is a classic parable of individual courage in the face of oppression from a literary grandmaster (Time). Lyrical and even elegiac ... Dorfman gives flesh to a human rights issue of our time. Chicago Tribune Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Maurice Sendak ranks as one of the best-known & most respected children''s book artists in the world. However, his oeuvre includes much more than picture books. Tracing Sendak''s life & work from 1980 to the present, this richly illus. vol. is filled with projects in various mediums, both inside & outside the children''s book arena. Reproduced here are lavish set & costume designs for a number of theatrical & dance productions, from The Nutcracker” to The Magic Flute” to The Love for Three Oranges.” Also represented is artwork for numerous posters, CD covers, book jackets, & adult books, as well as children''s picture books. A singular portrait of a man with burning passion, acute sympathy, & a hunger for beauty.”