Fans pick 13 books like Mr. Burns and Other Plays

Cormac McCarthy does the impossible in this book—he writes an emotionally satisfying, literary-minded travelogue of horrors. It shatters the reader but then lifts them up with its beautifully wrought prose.

Be patient: the novel gets brutally dark before the light.

It’s a fascinating book. The story takes place in 2024, and some themes seem prophetic: water shortages, soaring food prices, the resulting social chaos, and Mars exploration. There is also a president who promises to “make America great again” (the book was written in 1993). 

I liked the story, though it left a rather heavy impression on me. I couldn't put it down despite how grim it was. I was especially fascinated by its invented religion, though I’m more inclined to view it as a philosophy. It was refreshing, stimulating, and thought-provoking.

Through her dystopian vision, Octavia Butler explores the issues of inequality, poverty, slavery, politics, capitalism, religion, and human psychology. Her book is a great analysis of what human beings are capable of in crisis.

I knew I was going to love this book as soon as I saw the breathtaking cover. (Yes, sometimes I do judge a book by its cover!) This story takes place on a spaceship in the future that feels a bit too close to home in some ways, but I was completely drawn in by the mixing of science fiction, Mexican folklore, and storytelling.

Petra is a storyteller, like her abuelita, who was left on Earth when a comet destroyed it. I couldn’t get enough of the fast-paced stakes, heartbreaking realities, twists and turns, and beautiful storytelling. This is my ten-year-old's favorite book!

I found this book realistic in a really frightening way. The entire societal structure of the world depends on the stories we humans tell ourselves about ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and I think the book plays with this very cleverly.

It has a very tender depiction of what happens to us and our stories when we’re all alone, and I still think about the way generational guilt is woven through the story.

It was one of those books where I kept walking up to my wife to say, “Can I read you something?” and, “Listen to this…” because the ideas are so big, but the language is so clipped and to the point. 

A little levity may be required as we watch the world crumble around us. Anne Washburn’s play reads as a multi-generational game of telephone. Beginning shortly after the apocalypse, with television now obsolete, people gather round a campfire and begin retelling what they remember from random episodes of The Simpsons. In the second act, the retelling has evolved into an oral tradition far from the original. By the third act, we’re eighty years removed from the apocalypse, and the story has become its own bizarre and surreal performance. I read Mr. Burns and saw the play in person years ago, but I still think about it and laugh. It might also somehow be a fairly accurate depiction of our post-apocalyptic world.

This very handy anthology includes the only modern edition of The Tragedie of Iphigenia (1557-9), by Jane Lumley, the first person to translate Euripides into English and the first English woman to write a full-length play.

It is a surprisingly modern-sounding script, featuring a father sacrificing his daughter, not unlike Stannis Barathean in Game of Thrones, and I loved producing and taking part in a production in 2013-14. Also included are Antonius translated by Mary [Sidney Herbert], Countess of Pembroke, and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam.

Unlike the anthology above, this edition publishes the plays in their original old spelling so you can get a feel of Renaissance English. Diane Purkiss offers a concise introduction and notes at the back of the book.

Greek tragedy is similar to fantasy except for matters of form (e.g. the chorus). Euripides was a startlingly modern playwright, especially when it comes to psychology.

Heracles can be portrayed as a monstrous monster-slayer (I’m looking at you, Sophocles), but in Euripides he’s noble, brave, and domestic. He performs his labors because he’s the kind of guy to use his powers for good.

Hera, being a jealous jerk, drives him mad; Madness herself is unenthusiastic about the whole affair, recognizing that Heracles has made the world a better place.

But insane Heracles knows that he’s murdering innocent people. Is that who he really is? Is it all Hera’s fault?

This translation of four of Euripides’ plays features his three best female avengers.

Electra is the loyal daughter who conspires with her brother Orestes, to avenge the killing of their father by slaughtering their mother, Clytemnestra. Hecabe is the fierce maternal figure who exacts revenge for her dead son Polydorus on the man who killed him for his riches. Medea is the murderous mother who avenges herself on her faithless husband, Jason, by killing her own children to destroy his family line.

The power of these plays is in the way their plots build as the women move from grief to anger, culminating in their fatal acts of revenge and leaving the audience to ponder on the nature of justice.

Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize laureate from Nigeria, was steeped in both Yoruba traditions and Greek tragedy as well as Shakespeare.

This combination of influences shaped his adaptation of The Bacchae, by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides.

He brings this play into the modern world of slavery, using White and Black actors. At the same time, he captures the original’s blend of ritual and performance.

This explosive mixture is the most compelling study I know in what theater can do: mobilize bodies in front of an audience. It also shows how theater can bridge vast historical and cultural differences.

This lucidly written scholarly book considers how revenge was understood in ancient Athens and what the implications of this understanding are for reading tragedies whose plot lines feature revenge.

My favourite chapter is the one on Sophocles’ fragmentary Tereus, in which Procne takes revenge against her husband, Tereus, for raping and mutilating her sister Philomela, by killing her son Itys and serving him to his father in a pie. It is a compelling and horrifying storyline that influenced Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

Burnett’s careful reading seeks to reconstruct the fragments of the play to explain how the playwright delivered this extreme violence as a tragic revenge plot.