Books by Suzan-Lori Parks
Getting Mother's Body: A Novel
Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks’s wildly original debut novel, Getting Mother’s Body, follows pregnant, unmarried Billy Beede and her down-and-out family in 1960s Texas as they search for the storied jewels buried—or were they?—with Billy’s fast-running, six-years-dead mother, Willa Mae. Getting Mother’s Body is a true spiritual successor to the work of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker—but when it comes to bringing hard-luck characters to ingenious, uproarious life, Suzan-Lori Parks shares the stage with no one.
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Lorna Simpson (Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series)
by Suzan-Lori Parks, Thelma Golden, Kellie Jones
Photo-based artist and film-maker Lorna Simpson (b.1960) is considered to be one of the key representatives of African-American visual culture. Emerging in the 1980s, Simpson was, in 1993, the first African-American woman ever to show in the Venice Biennale and to have a solo exhibition in the 'Projects' series of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is also one of very few African-American artists ever to have exhibited at Documenta, as she did in both 1987 and 2002. Simpson's well-known fragmented photographs, combining images with fragments of text, create mysterious and quietly intriguing works that reflect the silence of a portion of society - African-American women - that is rarely if ever represented in art. She raises profound questions about how we represent, see and communicate with each other and ourselves.
Thelma Golden, Curator of Simpson's autumn 2002 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, talks with the artist about the shift from her signature photographic work to more cinematographic and sculptural art. In her Survey, critic and scholar Kellie Jones places the work in the context of the history of African-American culture as well as the recent history of self-portraiture in art through photography and performance. Chrissie Iles, Curator of Simpson's film presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002), analyses in her Focus the artist's filmworks. The artist's fragmentary use of speech is paralleled in her Artist's Choice, an extract from Top Dog/UnderDog by contemporary African-American playwright Suzan Lori Parks, and in her project notes included in her Artist's Writings.
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Venus
by Suzan-Lori Parks, Auguste Rodin
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Modelled by the sea, which is the reservoir of all the forces, you enchant us and you sway us by that grace and by that calm which strength alone possesses, and you bestow on us your serenity. It prevails like the charm of melodies powerful and deep.What triumphant amplitude! What vigorous shadows! From the boundaries of the two worlds throngs come to contemplate you, venerated marble; and the twilight deepens in the room that you may be more clearly seen, shining alone, while the silent hours pass, heavy with admiration.Still you hear our clamors, immortal Venus! Having loved your contemporaries, you belong to us, now, to all of us, to the universe. The twenty-five centuries of your life seem only to have consecrated your invincible youth. And the generations, those waves of the ocean of the ages, to you, victorious over time, come and come again, attracted and recalled irresistibly. Admiration is not spent as a marble wears away.To the poets, to the seekers, to the quiet artists, in the heart of the city's tumult, you give long moments of refuge. Product Description Written in 1912, "Venus" is sculptor Auguste Rodinâs passionate ode to one of artâs great masterpieces, the Venus de Milo, now in the Louvre Museum in Paris. This new, expanded edition of Rodin's unique text, also includes "The Dance of Shiva", Rodin's loose, written impressions of a bronze statue of the Hindu god Shiva.This is Dorothy Dudley's original, authorized English translation of "Venus" from 1912. "The Dance of Shiva" was newly translated by Tina A. Kover in 2009. Review "thoroughly pleasing" (Dial, 1912)"an important little tract" (The Nation, 1913) About the Author Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was a French sculptor. Born in Paris, Rodin attended art school at a young age, but unable to advance to a higher education in art, he spent much of his early life working as a craftsman, doing decorative, architectural work. It wasn't until receiving a modest museum commission in 1880 that he was able to dedicate himself to his own art full-time.By 1900, his dominating artistic career was well-established. A prodigious worker, he remains best known for singular sculptures like The Thinker and The Kiss and his monuments to French writers Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo.While Rodin's works can be found in museum collections and on public display in cities around the world, the Musée Rodin--opened in Paris in his former residence in 1919--continues to hold the largest single collection of the artist's work.
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Venus
by Suzan-Lori Parks, Auguste Rodin
Suzan-Lori Parks continues her examination of black people in history and stage through the life of the so-called "Hottentot Venus," an African woman displayed semi-nude throughout Europe due to her extraordinary physiognomy; in particular, her enormous buttocks. She was befriended, bought and bedded by a doctor who advanced his scientific career through his anatomical measurements of her after her premature death.
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Venus
by Suzan-Lori Parks, Auguste Rodin
THE STORY: In 1810, The Venus Hottentot (as she is dubbed)--a young black woman with an enormous posterior--is lured away from her menial job in South Africa to tour the world and make lots of money. Once in England, however, she is sold to a freak s
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The Red Letter Plays
"In the Blood is an extraordinary new play…It is truly harrowing…we cannot turn away, and we do not want to. The play strikes us as Hawthorne claimed his first glimpse of the scarlet letter struck him, with "a sensation not altogether physical yet almost so, as of a burning heat, as if the letter were not of red cloth but of red-hot iron.’"—Margo Jefferson, The New York Times
The playwright who "has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way [John Heilpern, New York Observer and Vogue]," has written two haunting riffs on Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter: In the Blood and Fucking A.
Hester La Negrita of In the Blood is an unapologetic mother of five illegitimate children—"my treasures, my five joys"—who practices writing the alphabet to help herself "one day get a leg up. The letter A is as far as she gets. Hester Smith of Fucking A works the only job available—abortionist to the lower class, in order to save for a reunion picnic with her imprisoned son. Her branded A bleeds afresh every time a patient comes to see her.
These are two mature, beautifully crafted, inventive and poetic plays by one of the most unique voices writing for the stage today.
Suzan Lori-Parks is also the author of The America Play and Other Works and Venus, both published by TCG. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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365 Days / 365 Plays
“Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most important dramatists America has produced.”—Tony Kushner
“The plan was that no matter what I did, how busy I was, what other commitments I had, I would write a play a day, every single day for a year. It would be about being present and being committed to the artistic process every single day, regardless of the ‘weather.’ It became a daily meditation, a daily prayer celebrating the rich and strange process of a writing life.”—Suzan-Lori Parks
On November 13, 2002, the incomparable Suzan-Lori Parks got an idea to write a play every day for a year. She began that very day, finishing one year later. The result is an extraordinary testament to artistic commitment. This collection of 365 impeccably crafted pieces, each with its own distinctive characters and dramatic power, is a complete work by an artist responding to her world, each and every day. Parks is one of the American theater’s most wily and innovative writers, and her “stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and marvelous” (TIME).
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100 Plays for the First Hundred Days
In reaction to the extraordinary events of the first hundred days of the presidency of Donald J. Trump, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has created a unique and personal response to one of the most tumultuous times in our recent history―a play diary for each day of the presidency, to capture and explore the events as they unfolded. Known for her distinctive lyrical dialogue and powerful sociopolitical themes, Parks’s 100 Plays for the First Hundred Days is the powerful and provocative everyman’s guide to the Trumpian universe of uncertainty, confusion, and chaos.
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Plays for the Plague Year
A stunning collection of plays from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks that captures the societal rupture of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On March 13, 2020, as theaters shut their doors and the world went into lockdown, Suzan-Lori Parks picked up her pen and set out to write a play every day. What emerged is a breathtaking chronicle of our collective experience throughout the troubling days and nights that followed. Parks’s groundbreaking new work bears witness to what we’ve experienced and offers inspiration as we look ahead.
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$17.95
Topdog/Underdog - Acting Edition (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)
A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori Parks latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future. Suzan-Lori Parks is the author of numerous plays, including In the Blood and Venus . She is currently head of the A.S.K. Theater Projects Writing for Performance Program at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.
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White Noise
Leo, Misha, Ralph, and Dawn are old friends. The two couples have a lot in common—good educations, progressive politics, a taste for culture. But when a racially motivated incident with the cops leaves Leo shaken, he decides he must take extreme measures in order to survive. Suzan-Lori Parks’ newest work reveals how easily fissures can form in the social contracts we build with one another when confronted with difficult questions about race and identity.
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Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3)
Finalist, 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
"The finest work yet from this gifted writer."The New York Times
Offered his freedom if he joins his master in the ranks of the Confederacy, Hero, a slave, must choose whether to leave the woman and people he loves for what may be another empty promise. As his decision brings him face to face with a nation at war with itself, the ones Hero left behind debate whether to escape or wait for his return, only to discover that for Hero, freedom may have come at a great spiritual cost. A devastatingly beautiful dramatic work, Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) is the opening trilogy of a projected nine-play cycle that will ultimately take us into the present.
Suzan-Lori Parks became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog in 2002. Her other plays include The Book of Grace, In the Blood, Venus, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Fucking A, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and The America Play. In 2007 her 365 Days/365 Plays was produced at more than seven hundred theaters worldwide. Parks is a MacArthur Fellow and the Master Writer Chair at the Public Theater.
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The America Play and Other Works
"Parks has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way.... She's passionate and jokey and some kind of genius."--Vogue
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