A Journal of the Plague Year, and Other Plays and Adaptations

One of our best novelists here collects plays and adaptations he wrote before turning to fiction. His 1994 take on Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is a powerful dramatic response to the AIDS epidemic. The one-man play Chesterfield to His Son, adapting that forbidding nobleman’s famous Letters, is a hilariously antic—and painfully accurate—dissection of a father’s love and hopes for his son. Dr. Knox and Mr. Banner examines same-sex desire in 19th-century London and the stories people tell themselves about what makes them who they are.

More characters tell themselves more stories in five sparkling one-act plays set in locales ranging from the sidewalk of West 23rd Street to Seward, Alaska: The Old Agitator continues his lifelong mission, but with modified idealism; a new arrival in Alaska does what she must in order to stay; a grandmother exiled to a suburban lawn examines her life and is inspired to take action; a man explores the sexual temptation offered by a random encounter, and a casual philanderer finally meets a reckoning.

One of the country’s most interesting and accomplished novelists widens his vision with this collection.