Green world: a tragicomic memoir of love & shakespeare - michelle ephraim

At twenty-three, Michelle Ephraim was failing at everything.

The only child of reclusive Holocaust-survivor parents who were dismayed by her literary studies, she found herself dumped by her boyfriend and bombing out of graduate school.

Then, one night, she crashed a Shakespeare recitation party.

Loopy from vodka and never having read a single line of Shakespeare, she was transfixed.

Shakespeare, she decided, was the lifeline she needed.

Green World is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of Ephraims quest to become a Shakespeare scholar and to find community and home.

As she studies Shakespeare, Ephraims world uncannily begins to mirror the story of the Jewish daughter in The Merchant of Venice , and she finds herself in a Green World, an idyllic place where Shakespeares heroines escape their family trauma.

Green World reckons with global, historical, and personal tragedy and shows how literature--comic and tragic--can help us brave every kind of anguish.