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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
May 2011
On Sale: April 26, 2011
Featuring: Oberon; Titania
304 pages ISBN: 0374166412 EAN: 9780374166410 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Acclaimed as a “gifted, courageous writer” (The New York
Times), Chris Adrian brings all his extraordinary talents to
bear in The Great Night—a brilliant and mesmerizing
retelling of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”On
Midsummer Eve 2008, three people, each on the run from a
failed relationship, become trapped in San Francisco’s Buena
Vista Park (the home in exile for Titania, Oberon, and their
court) on their way to a party. On this night, something
awful is happening in the faerie kingdom: in a fit of
sadness over the end of her marriage, which broke up in the
wake of the death of her adopted son, Titania has set loose
an ancient menace, and the chaos that ensues threatens the
lives of immortals and mortals alike. The three heartbroken
lovers will become lost in the park and within the memories
of the people they lost or drove away, and each will
remember through the course of the night that this is not
the first time their lives have been touched by magic. In
thrall to her old enemy, Titania puts all the resources of
her kingdom at the disposal of a homeless man who thinks he
can bring down the purportedly sinister mayor of San
Francisco by staging a musical production of Soylent Green.
Before the night ends the mortals are transformed, the show
is staged, and Titania discovers, at great cost, a way to
undo the menace she’s set free, if not to undo her
grief.Selected by the New Yorker as one the best young
writers in America, Adrian has created a singularly playful,
moving, and humorous novel—a story that charts the borders
between reality and dreams, love and magic, and mortality
and immortality.
No awards found for this book.
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