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Recommendations based on The Bald Soprano and Other Playsby Eugène Ionesco
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Glengarry Glen Ross
by David Mamet
Cutthroat competition in a real estate sales office, where survival of the fittest is the only way out.
Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A collection of four works exploring the human psyche, morality, and existentialism through the lens of Russian society.
The story opens with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Petersburg . He is contemplating the ridiculousness of his own life, and his recent realization that nothing matters to him any more. It ... (Wikipedia)
The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
by Sophocles
Ancient tragedy of a family's fall from grace due to a fateful prophecy.
English versions of Sophocles’ three great tragedies based on the myth of Oedipus, translated for a modern audience by two gifted poets. Index. ... (Barnes & Noble)
Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett
Two men wait for a mysterious figure who never arrives, reflecting on their lives and existence.
Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, have met near a leafless tree. Estragon spent the previous night lying in a ditch and receiving a beating from some unnamed assailants. The two men discuss a variety ... (Wikipedia)
Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
Surrealist exploration of addiction, delusions, and reality.
Naked Lunch is a non-linear narrative without a clear plot. The following is a summary of some of the events in the book that could be considered the most relevant. The book begins with the ... (Wikipedia)
Proof
by David Auburn
A young woman struggles to prove her mathematical genius, while dealing with a troubled past.
The play concerns Catherine, the daughter of Robert, a recently deceased mathematical genius in his fifties and professor at the University of Chicago , and her struggle with mathematical genius and ... (Wikipedia)
Faust, First Part
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A timeless story of a man's struggle between the forces of good and evil.
Goethe’s masterpiece and perhaps the greatest work in German literature, Faust has made the legendary German alchemist one of the central myths of the Western world. Here indeed is a monumental ... (Goodreads)
The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides
by Aeschylus
Tragedy of a cursed family and their struggle to find the truth and justice.
Alternate cover edition can be found, here,, here,, here,, here, In the Oresteia—the only trilogy in Greek drama which survives from antiquity—Aeschylus took as his subject the bloody chain of murder ... (Goodreads)
The Birthday Party
by Harold Pinter
A seemingly ordinary birthday party turns into a nightmare of paranoia and fear.
While Meg prepares to serve her husband Petey breakfast, Stanley, described as a man "in his late thirties" (23), who is dishevelled and unshaven, enters from upstairs. Alternating between maternal ... (Wikipedia)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams
A family struggling to confront hidden resentments and repressions that lurk beneath the surface.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the story of a Southern family in crisis, especially the husband Brick and wife Margaret (usually called Maggie or "Maggie the Cat"), and their interaction with Brick's ... (Wikipedia)
Wit
by Margaret Edson
A professor's journey of self-discovery as she faces her own mortality.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award,Margaret Edson’s ... (Goodreads)
Salomé
by Oscar Wilde
A retelling of the Biblical story of a young woman's defiance and seductive power.
Outraged by the sexual perversity of this one-act tragedy, Great Britain's Lord Chamberlain banned Salomé from the national stage. Symbolist poets and writers — Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice ... (Goodreads)
The Wall
by Jean-Paul Sartre
A soldier's fight for survival in a World War II concentration camp.
'The Wall', the lead story in this collection, introduces three political prisoners on the night prior to their execution. Through the gaze of an impartial doctor–seemingly there for the men's ... (Goodreads)
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman
An exploration of the relationship between the individual and the divine, viewed through the lens of nature and its rhythms.
A collection of quintessentially American poems, the seminal work of one of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century. ... (Goodreads)
Endgame & Act Without Words
by Samuel Beckett
Two plays exploring the human condition through absurdist and existentialist lenses, showcasing the futility and meaninglessness of life.
Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature n 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our ... (Goodreads)
100 Selected Poems
by E.E. Cummings
An exploration of life, love, and the beauty of nature through the lens of poetry.
E.E. Cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred ... (Barnes & Noble)
Poor Folk
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A tale of romance between two unprivileged people, exploring the human condition of poverty.
Varvara Dobroselova and Makar Devushkin are second cousins twice-removed and live across from each other on the same street in terrible apartments. Devushkin's, for example, is merely a portioned-off ... (Wikipedia)
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
A fantastical exploration of the cities of the imagination and the possibilities of life.
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young ... (Goodreads)
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
by Nikolai Gogol
A collection of bizarre, humorous and satirical stories set in 19th century Russia.
When Pushkin first read some of the stories in this collection, he declared himself "amazed." "Here is real gaiety," he wrote, "honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places ... (Goodreads)
The Castle
by Franz Kafka
Townspeople's surreal struggle against a mysterious ruling power.
The protagonist, K., arrives in a village governed by a mysterious bureaucracy operating in a nearby castle. When seeking shelter at the town inn, he claims to be a land surveyor summoned by the ... (Wikipedia)
The Raven and Other Poems
by Edgar Allan Poe
A collection of dark, gothic poems, exploring the depths of the human psyche.
A chilling, thrilling collection of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry, introduced by best-selling author Philip Pullman The Raven . . . Annabel Lee . . . Ulalume . . . these are some of the spookiest, most ... (Goodreads)
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
An aging knight's adventures and misadventures, filled with chivalry, honor, and satire.
Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in ... (Goodreads)
Lysistrata
by Aristophanes
Women of Greece uniting to end the Peloponnesian War through a sex strike.
These lines, spoken by the Athenian Lysistrata and her friend Calonice at the beginning of the play, , set the scene for the action that follows. Women, as represented by Calonice, are sly hedonists ... (Wikipedia)
Tender Is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A young couple's tumultuous journey through love, wealth and tragedy.
Dick and Nicole Diver are a glamorous couple who rent a villa in the South of France and surround themselves with a circle of friends, mainly Americans. Also staying at the nearby resort are Rosemary ... (Wikipedia)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
by Edward Albee
A darkly comedic exploration of a troubled couple's tumultuous marriage.
George and Martha engage in dangerous emotional games. George is an associate professor of history and Martha is the daughter of the president of the college where George teaches. After they return ... (Wikipedia)
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
by William Blake
A poetic collection exploring the duality of human nature, innocence and experience.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, is an collection of poems by William Blake., Note:, For a complete Table of Contents of the included poems, see the 'Questions' section below. This book appeared ... (Goodreads)
Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
The inner struggles of a tortured soul as he searches for redemption.
The book is presented as a manuscript written by its protagonist , a middle-aged man named Harry Haller, who leaves it to a chance acquaintance, the nephew of his landlady. The acquaintance adds a ... (Wikipedia)
Cat's Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
A satirical exploration of human folly, exposing the dangers of unchecked science and technology.
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it ... Dr Felix Hoenikker, ... (Goodreads)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by Tom Stoppard
A humorous exploration of fate and free will, seen through the eyes of two minor characters in Shakespeare's "Hamlet".
Hamlet told from the worm's-eye view of two minor characters, bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, reality and illusion mix, and where fate leads heroes to a ... (Goodreads)
The Pillowman
by Martin McDonagh
A darkly comic tale of a writer accused of murder, testing the limits of storytelling.
Ariel and Tupolski interrogate Katurian in a police room, adopting a good cop/bad cop routine with Ariel happily playing the bad cop. At first Katurian does not know why he is being questioned, and ... (Wikipedia)
