Adam Rapp

A runaway boy nicknamed Punkzilla who sustains himself on the streets of Portland through petty crimes decides to try to kick his meth habit, turn his life around, and go on a journey to Tennessee to visit his dying older brother.

Punkzilla

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

The Sound Inside

Timothy Basil Ering

A homeless boy, running from the police with a fifteen-year-old, drug-addicted prostitute, her boyfriend who just killed his own parents, and a baby, gets the chance to make a better life for himself. An ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Reprint.

33 Snowfish

Abducted by teen genius Bounce and her drifter friends Wiggins and Orange, four-year-old Frog seems content to eat cereal and play a video game about wolves all day--a game that parallels the reality around her--until Wiggins is overcome by guilt and tension and brings Frog to safety.

The Children and the Wolves

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 Play

Red Light Winter

Mike Cavallaro

The future waits for no one. In this new world, speed and efficiency are everything, and the populace zooms along in a perpetually stimulated haze. Angela thinks she's the only person in her family—maybe the only person on the planet—who sees anything wrong with this picture. But the truth is she's not alone. Angela finds herself recruited into a resistance movement where the key to rebellion is taking things slow. In their secret underground hideout, they create a life unplugged from the rapid-fire culture outside. Can they free the rest of the world before the powers that be shut down their utopian experiment? From revolutionary and award-winning playwright Adam Rapp and veteran cartoonist and animator Mike Cavallaro comes Decelerate Blue, a dark, breath-taking new vision of an all-too-plausible future for America.

Decelerate Blue

Wolf at the Table

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.

A Novel

Know Your Beholder

"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 latest 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'. Honest, strange, and humorous, this play looks at a blue-collar family's struggle to survive in the face of disability and addiction, and the seemingly surreal lengths to which their teenage son will go to save them from themselves. It prompted Bruce Weber to rave in 'The New York Times': '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. Is 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"--Publisher's description, p. [4] of cover.

And Other Plays

Stone Cold Dead Serious

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.

The Year of Endless Sorrows

Over seven feet tall and with a newfound ability to sense future events, high-school junior Corinthia Bledsoe is a force of nature. When she predicts with terrifying accuracy the outcome of a tornado that will hit her high school, Corinthia finds herself at the epicenter of another kind of storm entirely.

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.

The Metal Children

George O'Connor

Hiding in his claustrophobic basement room after most of the city succumbed to the plague, Welton becomes part of a collective that's killing children, and, infected with the plague himself, Welton takes refuge in apathy--until someone knocks on his door. Original.

Ball Peen Hammer

While serving a six-month sentence at a juvenile detention center, thirteen-year-old Sura struggles to survive the experience with his spirit intact.

The Buffalo Tree

Alternately heartbreaking and starkly humorous, this teenager's brutal story of escape and desire for redemption is masterfully told by award-winning writer and film director Adam Rapp. I'm what they call a Gray Grouper. The Red Groupers are the junkies and the Blue Groupers are the suicide kids. Steve Nugent is in a facility called Burnstone Grove. It's a place for kids who are addicts, like Shannon Lynch, who can stick $1.87 in change up his nose, or for kids who have tried to commit suicide, like Silent Starla, whom Steve is getting a crush on. But Steve doesn't really fit in either group. He used to go to a gifted school. So why is he being held at Burnstone Grove? Keeping a journal, in which he recalls his confused and violent past, Steve is left to figure out who he is by examining who he was.

Under the Wolf, Under the Dog

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.

Adam Rapp

Books

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