100 books like The Cripple of Inishmaan

This is the play that made Suzan-Lori Parks the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

It features only two characters and takes place in only one room, but it is a dynamite exploration of the competitive relationship between two adult African-American brothers who have been abandoned by everyone else in their lives. One brother is a petty thief who wants to become a three-card-monte dealer. The other is an Abraham Lincoln impersonator who works as a target in a mock shooting gallery.

For me, the excitement of this play is all about discovering who these two men are, how they got that way, and how far each is willing to go to become a topdog in a world that has made them underdogs for years.

You don’t have to grow up Catholic to like this play, but It sure doesn’t hurt.

Set in a Catholic elementary school in the Bronx, Doubt introduces us to Sister Aloysius, an uncompromising principal who runs her school as if it were a Marine bootcamp. This regime gets shaken when suspicions of sexual child abuse begin to arise.

What I like most about this play is how four flesh-and-blood characters – a school principal, a history teacher, a priest/gym instructor, and a student’s mother – can bring an entire school and community onstage in an incredibly vital way.

It’s why I think the play is superior to the later film adaptation and also why the play received so many awards, including a Tony for Best Play and a Pulitzer for Drama. 

While most plays are driven by one protagonist, this Pulitzer finalist is a great example of how a group of characters can work together dramatically to fill that role.

Once again, it is the characters themselves who make this script so memorable: Lane, a successful doctor who met her husband in medical school over a dead body; Matilide, Lane’s Brazilian housekeeper who would rather be a stand-up comedian; and Virginia, Lane’s obsessive-compulsive sister who secretly cleans Lane’s house.

Breaking with realism, each of these characters addresses us directly at key times in the story and bring us into a “metaphysical Connecticut” where it may snow in a living room or where a perfect joke can cause someone to die laughing – literally.

I saw the world premiere of this play at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and never forgot it.

What stays with me most is the powerful main character Mama Nadi, a fierce, shrewd businesswoman who runs a brothel in the Democratic Republic of Congo during a civil war. And though she lives in a world where sex trafficking, rape, mutilation, and other brutality is commonplace, she knows how to keep her establishment flourishing and her girls, safe.

Playwright Nottage based her characters on women and girls whom she interviewed during a trip to Africa. The authenticity of the characters and storyline may help explain why the play went on to earn multiple awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. 

This is one of the few novels I’ve read twice for pleasure (rather than work). It’s a noirish novel that delves into the esoteric along the lines of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (which Kubrick allegedly considered adapting at one point but which I was unable to read twice!).

The book follows a film scholar who uncovers an incredible conspiracy around a fictional B-movie director called Max Castle, and the imperceptible images he placed in the gap between each of the twenty-four frames played every second in a movie: the so-called flicker of the title. Its author, Roszak, is better known for having coined the term "the counter-culture."

This book is an absolutely indispensable reference – Donald Bogle may well be dubbed the “godfather” of race studies in film as he meticulously chronicled and chartered black images in early film.

The book’s title alone already clues readers into the idea that Bogle will not pull any punches in describing popular black film caricatures that we now regard as problematic today.

Bukowski didn't thieve, solve crimes, or use high-tech. In fact, he worked hard and was poor and isolated most of his life. But he lived in the fringe of the noir world, and beat on his machines—manual typewriters, then an IBM Selectric, and finally, with some fame and money, a computer. He was South of his No North, real and genuine for so long that when Hollywood knocked, he was ready for them. This book is his first-hand account of the dumb ego and stupid money that goes into making a movie. Hilarious and dark at the same time. A poet's novel.

I was in New York waiting to interview Elia Kazan, a somewhat notorious figure in the history of the blacklist, when I first spotted a newly published book that sought to explore events from the perspective of those involved, both those who cooperated with the Committee and those who refused to do so. Drawing on oral histories and interviews, Navasky’s book focused on the motives and rationales of those (like Kazan) who ‘named names’ and those who pleaded the fifth amendment or took other routes to avoid becoming, in the author’s nuanced but ultimately uncompromising judgment, an informer. This book prompted later writing and debate; it is full of raw detail about the painful decisions that filmmakers of this era were forced to make. 

When I was growing up there was, amongst enthusiasts of American film, much excited if not always well-informed discussion of the Hollywood Blacklist. This was the book that first provided chapter and verse, documenting the phenomenon and placing it in the context of American history, the politics of Hollywood, the industry unions, and the role of the studios from the 1930s onward. There is important research on key organizations such as the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, and the Committee for the First Amendment. This is still the best, most empirically grounded, and most comprehensive treatment – the classic history.

You may have seen There Will Be Blood, which won Daniel Day Lewis an Academy Award.

Sinclair’s novel (which inspired the film) satirizes the petroleum-fueled tycoons and preachers of Southern California a century ago. For an extra treat, follow this novel with Darren Dochuk’s Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America, which weaves together the stories of American oil, American religion, and the great schism within today’s Republican Party.