• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2023 January #1
  *Starred Review* Novels about contemporary stagings of classic plays, such as Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed (2016), Meg Wolitzer's The Uncoupling (2011), and Adam Langer's Cyclorama (2022), contrast epic social changes with timeless aspects of the human condition. Fiction virtuoso Bausch's psychologically lush and situationally entangled tale is catalyzed by the building of a glitzy Globe Theater in Memphis and its ambitious, inevitably stormy opening production of King Lear. This endeavor forges highly problematic relationships, bringing back together the former husband of one of the two philanthropists funding the venture—his ex-wife and her wife—and a former TV anchor struggling with alcoholism and disgrace over an allegedly inappropriate involvement with his underage niece-by-marriage, who is also appearing onstage. Add a visiting artistic director with attitude, bad ideas, and his own woes; the imperiled marriage of the set designer and the general manager; and a leading actor who has just taken her dementia-afflicted father out of an assisted living facility against her family's wishes. Profound turmoil ensues, driven by conscience, longing, gossip, guilt, anguish, rage, and sexual assaults, all taking place in a vibrantly depicted city assailed by nature's fury. With Shakespearean moments of confusion, regret, and dissemblance, sharp-witted banter and all-out showdowns, Bausch's enthralling, tempestuous, empathic drama illuminates with lightning strikes paradoxes of family, loyalty, and love. Copyright 2023 Booklist Reviews.

RICHARD BAUSCH is the author of twelve novels and nine volumes of short stories. He is a recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers' Award, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for his novel Peace. He is past chancellor of The Fellowship of Southern Writers, and his work is widely anthologized, including in Pushcart Prize Stories, The O. Henry Awards, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South. He is on the Writing Faculty of Chapman University in Orange, California.