It’s been a very Richard Greenberg theater season. Not only is the playwright up for a Tony for his family drama, “The Assembled Parties,” but he adapted books for two other shows: the late “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and Off-Broadway’s new musical “Far From Heaven.” So, Richard, what’s easier — bringing out the new or the old? “Writing something new,” says Greenberg, who won a Tony for 2003’s “Take Me Out,” about a gay baseball player.“You have this incredibly exuberant phase at the beginning, whereas, when you’re adapting something — particularly when you’re trying to be faithful to it — you start by trying to merge with the original, so there’s a degree of caution.” Here are four of his favorite neglected books.
The Long-Winded Lady
by Maeve Brennan
These started out as New Yorker Talk of the Town essays written from the early to mid-’50s to the ’80s. “Long-Winded Lady” was a puckishly inaccurate pseudonym, because these are so compressed . . . Brennan wrote about the minutiae of life in a transitory city. This book is an inadvertent masterpiece.
The Widow’s Children
by Paula Fox
Paula Fox has never written a bad sentence. Jonathan Franzen said her “Desperate Characters” was better than anything Saul Bellow wrote. I think this book is even better. It’s about a family of Cuban exiles and their friends . . . Fox, as a young woman, gave away a baby for adoption who turned out to be Courtney Love’s mother. So she’s Courtney Love’s grandmother!
The Folded Leaf
by William Maxwell
Maxwell was one of the New Yorker’s great editors who happened to be a great writer. [This book] is famous for a moment that’s usually considered homoerotic but isn’t: a friendship between two young people who were unlikely friends. It just smacks of life, and you believe everything he tells you.
The Voice Imitator
by Thomas Bernhard
This is a collection of stories, some of them just paragraphs, animated by a desire to obliterate everything and start all over. Bernhard takes no prisoners. He writes from disgust — with Vienna, with people with power and people without power. He was a dangerous, thrilling, brilliant writer — and scary as hell.