Thirteen-year-old Sura, serving a six-month sentence in Hamstock Juvenile Detention Center, watches his doomed bunkmate Coly Jo self-destruct in the prison system--and becomes determined to avoid the same fate. Reissue.

The Buffalo Tree

Children's Books

Rapp, Adam

Action & Adventure

Avon Tempest

Clipping hoodies changed Sura's life. He's shipped off to Hamstock, a juvenile detention center that's worse than most. At the Stock they don't. try to keep juvies till they reform. They just keep guys till they feel like letting them go.
Sura and his patchmate, a kid named Coly Jo, look out for each other and try to evade the Stock's sadistic games. But things turn bad fast for Coly Jo, and Sura helplessly watches his friend's descent into hell, determined to escape with his own body and spirit intact -- if he can.Thirteen-year old Sura--intelligent, reckless, sensitive, and adrift--is serving a six-month sentence at Hamstock Juvenille Detention Center. Coping wiht the brutal pressures of life inside "the Stock," Sura helplessly watches his doomed bunkmate, Coly Jo, fall prey to the worst excesses of the prison system, and determines to escape with his own body and spirit intac -- if he can.

Buffalo Tree, The

HarperTeen

In a world where children under twelve are used as slave labor in subterranean lime mines, eleven-year-old Whensday Bluehouse struggles to survive the continuous poison rains and evade the ruthless Syndicate Soldiers. Reprint.

The Copper Elephant

Teen & Young Adult

Literature & Fiction

HarperTempest

Missing the Piano

Just last week, Michael Tegoff was a normal fifteen-year-old guy.
He was looking forward to the new school year and planning to try out for the basketball team. Then his father and stepmother dumped him at St. Matthew's Military Academy.
St. Matthew's calls itself a place "where boys become men," but mike doesn't want to be the kind of man St Mathew's wants to make him. The cadets are bullies, the rules make no sense, and Mike's only recourse is to just hang on tight and try not to forget there's a real world out past the school walls...

HarperTrophy

Mike, at fifteen years old, is sent to St. Matthew's Military Academy and feels that he will be expected to take part in the harsh treatments of others due to school traditions, but Mike does not want to be a part of it and devises a drastic plan to get out. Reprint.

Puffin

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist comes a hilarious and heartbreaking novel about a musician climbing back from rock bottom. As winter deepens in snowbound Pollard, Illinois, thirty-something Francis Falbo is holed up in his attic apartment, recovering from a series of traumas: his mother's death, his beloved wife's desertion, and his once-ascendant rock band's irreconcilable break-up. Francis hasn't shaved in months, hasn't so much as changed out of his bathrobe-"the uniform of a Life in Default"-for nine days. Other than the agoraphobia that continues to hold him hostage, all he has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants, including a pair of former circus performers whose daughter has gone missing. The tight-knit community has already survived a blizzard, but there is more danger in store for the citizens of Pollard before summer arrives. Francis is himself caught up in these troubles as he becomes increasingly entangled in the affairs of others, with results that are by turns disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing. Fusing consummate wit with the seriousness attending an adulthood gone awry, Rapp has written an uproarious and affecting novel about what we do and where we go when our lives have crumbled around us. Sharp-edged but tenderhearted, Know Your Beholder introduces us to one of the most lovably flawed characters in recent fiction, a man at last able to collect the jagged pieces of his dreams and begin anew, in both life and love. Seldom have our foibles and our efforts to persevere in spite of them been laid bare with such heart and hope.

Know Your Beholder: A Novel

Humor & Satire

Little. Brown and Company

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist comes a hilarious and heartbreaking novel about a musician climbing back from rock bottom. As winter deepens in snowbound Pollard, Illinois, thirty-something Francis Falbo is holed up in his attic apartment, recovering from a series of traumas: his mother's death, his beloved wife's desertion, and his once-ascendant rock band's irreconcilable break-up. Francis hasn't shaved in months, hasn't so much as changed out of his bathrobe-"the uniform of a Life in Default"-for nine days. Other than the agoraphobia that continues to hold him hostage, all he has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants, including a pair of former circus performers whose daughter has gone missing. The tight-knit community has already survived a blizzard, but there is more danger in store for the citizens of Pollard before summer arrives. Francis is himself caught up in these troubles as he becomes increasingly entangled in the affairs of others, with results that are by turns disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing. Fusing consummate wit with the seriousness attending an adulthood gone awry, Rapp has written an uproarious and affecting novel about what we do and where we go when our lives have crumbled around us. Sharp-edged but tenderhearted, Know Your Beholder introduces us to one of the most lovably flawed characters in recent fiction, a man at last able to collect the jagged pieces of his dreams and begin anew, in both life and love. Seldom have our foibles and our efforts to persevere in spite of them been laid bare with such heart and hope.

Back Bay Books

The Corrections meets We Need to Talk About Kevin in this harrowing multigenerational saga about a family harboring a serial killer in their midst, from the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award finalist playwright Adam Rapp. &nbsp; As late summer 1951 descends on Elmira, New York, Myra Larkin, thirteen, the oldest child of a large Catholic family, meets a young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. The matter consumes her until later that night, when a triple homicide occurs just down the street, opening a specter of violence that will haunt the Larkins for half a century. As the siblings leave home and fan across the country, each pursues a shard of the American dream. Myra serves as a prison nurse while raising her son, Ronan. Her middle sisters, Lexy and Fiona, find themselves on opposite sides of class and power. Alec, once an altar boy, is banished from the house and drifts into oblivion. As he becomes an increasingly alienated loner, his mother begins to receive postcards full of ominous portent. What they reveal, and what they require, will shatter a family and lead to devastating reckoning. Through one family's pursuit of the American dream,&nbsp;Wolf at the Table&nbsp;explores our consistent proximity to violence and its effects over time. Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp writes with gorgeous acuity, cutting to the heart of each character as he reveals the devastating reality beneath the veneer of good society. &nbsp;

Wolf at the Table

United States

New York City, the early 1990s: the recession is in full swing and young people are squatting in abandoned buildings in the East Village while the homeless riot in Tompkins Square Park. The Internet is not part of daily life; the term "dot-com" has yet to be coined; and people's financial bubbles are burst for an entirely different set of reasons. What can all this mean for a young Midwestern man flush with promise, toiling at a thankless, poverty-wage job in corporate America, and hard at work on his first novel about acute knee pain and the end of the world?
With The Year of Endless Sorrows, acclaimed playwright and finalist for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Adam Rapp brings readers a hilarious picaresque reminiscent of Nick Hornby, Douglas Copeland, and Rick Moody at their best―a chronicle of the joys of love, the horrors of sex, the burden of roommates, and the rude discovery that despite your best efforts, life may not unfold as you had once planned.

The Year of Endless Sorrows: A Novel

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

"Fifteen years ago I killed my sister." 
So begins Adam Rapp's highly acclaimed play Nocturne, in which a 32-year-old former piano prodigy recounts the tragic events that tore his family apart. 
With a keen eye for human relationships and a deft ear for language, Rapp explores the aftershock of this unimaginable event. The father is so incapable of forgiveness he puts a gun in his son's mouth; the mother so shattered, she deserts the family and eventually takes leave of her sanity altogether; the son--only 17 years old at the time--sets out for New York City. There, he seeks an uneasy refuge in books and reinvents himself as a writer. Across the decade and a half that follows he tries to cope with the ramifications of his own anguish and estrangement while making a desperate search for redemption. A devastating, elegant, and gripping dissection of the American dream, Nocturne signals a brave new voice in American theater.

Nocturne: A Play

Dramas & Plays

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rapp, Adam. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Rapp, Adam

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rapp, Adam. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Buffalo Tree

Buffalo Tree, The

The Copper Elephant

Missing the Piano

Missing the Piano

Know Your Beholder: A Novel

Know Your Beholder: A Novel

Wolf at the Table

The Year of Endless Sorrows: A Novel

Nocturne: A Play