Promotional item for bookseller and library campaign
Reading Group Guide available on Edelweiss and downloadable on publisher’s site
Newsletter promotion via the publisher to nonfiction and poetry lists of more than 30,000 contacts
Promotion to authors’ massive mailing lists and via enhanced content on publisher’s website
Major event in collaboration with the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis, to be presented in tandem with Ruhl play The Oldest Boy
A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2018
In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer.
Over the next four years—in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed—the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is,” Ritvo writes. “And that’s all I want—is to know you forever.”
Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.
