"I’m not sure exactly how to recommend this, except to say that I cried the whole time through. Sarah and Max are(/were) such incredibly thoughtful and incisive writers, which comes through as much in their letters as in their poetry or plays. They write about the world and each other with full hearts and a deep sense of empathy. I know that this will be a book I’ll return to, both for the sheer beauty of their writing, and to continue to mull over their conversations about life, death, religion, and art."
Publisher Milkweed Editions
Publication Date 2018-09-18
Section New Hardcover - Biography / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781571313690
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.
