Mr. Universe

“One of the most intelligent writers working today.” —Kaye Gibbons
 
With three critically acclaimed works of fiction–Winter Birds, Dream Boy, and My Drowning–Jim Grimsley established himself as a gifted, accomplished novelist. The Philadelphia Inquirer called him “one of the finest Southern novelists to appear in a long, long time.” Now, with these four plays, collected for the first time, Grimsley shows that he is, as Romulus Linney puts it in his introduction, “a writer of many seasons.”

Here is award-winning drama that peers into the nature of human conflict. From the gritty streets of New Orleans, where a muscle man is rescued by two drag queens, to a prison cell, where Jesus is interrogated by his ambitious disciple, Grimsley’s plays ask what happens when divergent worlds converge. Each play challenges us to view otherwise opposing worlds and characters not in terms of how they contrast but in terms of what they have in common. Collected together, they form a powerful body of work by a talented and important writer–one who was awarded the Bryan Prize for Drama by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and was named Newsday’s George Oppenheimer’s Best New American Playwright.

A STAGE AND SCREEN BOOK CLUB Selection