Ben Brantley Book Recommendations & Book Mentions
This list consists of recommendations or mentions of books spotted in media, social media accounts, podcasts or other public websites.
Ben Brantley on X
reader and theatergoer

Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle
Simon Stephens
Reasons to love live theater, 267. Retired, retiring man meets wacky con woman; anything is possible, including love. Screwball comedy becomes existential drama in Simon Stephens' "Heisenberg," with the enchantingly odd couple of Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt. NYC, 2015. https://t.co/0hLp2cps9L
Paperback, 2017
$15.95$7.97 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Translation: A Guide to the Practice of Crafting Target Texts
Stella Cragie
Reasons to love live theater, 353. Death ennobles nobody in Horton Foote's ruthlessly funny "Dividing the Estate." Among those clucking and drawling as a mercenary Texas clan in hard times (on Broadway in 2008): Elizabeth Ashley, Gerald McRaney and the peerless Hallie Foote. https://t.co/9lU73rGQ49
Paperback, 2019
$48.99$24.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Jumpers
Tom Stoppard
Happy birthday to the incomparable Simon Russell Beale. He shattered stereotypes to be the most convincing Hamlet I ever saw. He was a terrifying Iago, a heartbreaking Vanya and a charismatically bewildered philosopher in Stoppard's "Jumpers." And what about "The Lehman Trilogy"? https://t.co/GkapBYE79z
Paperback, 1994
$18.00$9.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
James Joyce: A Life
Edna O'Brien
At 92, the extraordinary Irish writer Edna O'Brien summons her greatest influence, James Joyce -- and the women of his life -- in a play in Dublin. https://t.co/pG4oJdi6Z7
Paperback, 2011
$24.00$12.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Side Man: A Play
Warren Leight
Reasons to love live theater, 371. A musician dissolves into the wail of a trumpet; his wife disappears into a bottle; their son remembers the vanishing. Frank Wood, Edie Falco and Robert Sella are the broken family in Warren Leight's fine recollective riff, "Side Man," NY, 1998. https://t.co/aKvzfjXt5w
Paperback, 1999
$13.00$6.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry
Reasons to love live theater, 289. At Williamstown, Ma., 2019, the director Robert O'Hara widens the lens of, and refocuses, Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun." Starring a terrific S. Epatha Merkerson and Francois Batiste, it's a revival that makes a monument feel new. https://t.co/6pJsWenitP
Paperback, Mass Market, 2004
$8.95$4.47 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
"The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense." -- Jane Austen, "Pride and Prejudice"
Hardcover, 2024
$17.00$8.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir
Margo Jefferson
Margo Jefferson's wonderful "Constructing a Nervous System," which reinvents the memoir as a personal cultural kaleidoscope, has been named one of the year's ten best books by the Washington Post. I read it months ago, and it keeps resurfacing in my imagination.
Paperback, 2023
$16.00$8.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Ink
James Graham
Reasons to love live theater, 234. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch becomes the model for two genius performances in London, both as irresistibly scary as folktale ogres: Anthony Hopkins in David Hare and Howard Brenton's "Pravda" (1985) and Bertie Carvel in James Graham's "Ink" (2017) https://t.co/zuM4uFB8ol
Paperback, 2020
$14.95$7.47 + Free shipping50% off your first book
The Country Girls
Edna O'Brien
It is the birthday of Edna O'Brien, the sublime Irish novelist, dramatist and master of the short story. She shocked Ireland in 1960 with her first novel, "The Country Girls," and continues to cross frontiers to anatomize the hearts of women with a lyrical candor all her own. https://t.co/TEbmbNQr7S
Out of stock