Authors: Chris Adrian

The Great Night (38 page)

BOOK: The Great Night

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“Adrian can pack more depth of understanding about what makes a human human into a single page than many novelists wedge into entire books. More than perhaps any author today, he understands people.”

â
Esquire

“The Shakespearean fairy worldâlusty and cruelly orgiasticâseeps into the mortal world, where pain always accompanies love and often overtakes it. Adrian, who is a medical doctor, approaches the fantastical with a sensitive realism that gives even the selfish Titania poignance.”

â
The New Yorker

“This wonderful novel is much more than a simple adaptation â¦ . In Adrian's hands this is a play about grief â¦ . The saddest and most lovely scenes of this sad and lovely book are those in which the fairy queen waits in a San Francisco hospital. Her child is sick, and her magic cannot save him â¦ . This is what Adrian has taken most powerfully from the play: the sad knowledge that heartbreak and love are necessary transformations, ones we need but cannot control.”

â
Financial Times
(London)

“In a shimmering, shape-shifting take on
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Adrian imagines the fairy kingdom and the mortals who stumble into it by way of Buena Vista Park â¦ . Less a retelling of Shakespeare's comedy â¦ Adrian's book is more like the play's dark twin â¦ . Black humor goes hand in hand with crushing sorrow, and sexual debauchery sometimes offers the only relief. Only through the commingling of two worlds, fairy and human, can Adrian's very mortal beings confront their worst fears, the mistakes they've made, and, most frightening of all, their own personal demons â¦ . A tender and all-too-human book.”

â
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Imagine Guillermo del Toro channeling the horrific majesty of
Pan's Labyrinth
into a Shakespeare comedy and you'll get an idea of Chris Adrian's take on
A Midsummer Night's Dream
â¦ . Enthralling â¦ lusty, darkly comic.”

âJosh Davis,
Time Out
(New York)

“Adrian's recurring idea that the line between reality and surreality is most blurred in either tragedy or ecstasy whisks this story out of the physically fantastic and into the emotionally real. A sweet fever dream of a book.
The Great Night
is playful, erotic, hilarious, and, of course, heartbreaking.”

âSusan Stamberg, NPR's
Morning Edition

“Magical flora â¦ wondrous â¦
The Great Night
is rich with hints of Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, and L. M. Montgomery, but full of Adrian's detailed and evocative imagination â¦ . A novel ripe with crepuscular dreaming and starry dread.”

â
The Portland Mercury

“By turns brilliant, cruel, tenderhearted, visionary, poetic, and profane.”

â
Elle

“[Adrian] uses Shakespeare's comedy not for a virtuosic display of stylistic mimicry but as a vessel to help him access and contain the amazingly bountiful, sparkling âjewels from the deep' (as the Bard calls them) of his rich imagination.”

âNPR

“Droll, dark, and challenging â¦ Ribald, raucous, and seriously funny â¦ Chris Adrian is masterful.”

â
San Francisco Chronicle

“Intense emotion always puts you on the threshold of the magical, in that it opens up a portal to a new plane of experience. The mash-up world Adrian has created, where the fantastical sits uneasily, queasily, alongside the mundane, captures this notion beautifullyâparticularly the way the loss of a loved one can push you to a place where you become estranged yourself.”

â
Slate

ALSO BY CHRIS ADRIAN

Gob's Grief

The Children's Hospital

A Better Angel

CHRIS ADRIAN is the author of
Gob's Grief, The Children's Hospital,
and
A Better Angel
. He lives in San Francisco and New York City.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to Eric Chinski, Eric Simonoff, Nathan Englander, Cressida Leyshon, and Deborah Treisman for the use of their wisdom and intelligence to improve this novel, and to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for the means to complete it.

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First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

eISBN 9781429961004

First eBook Edition : May 2012

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition as follows:

Adrian, Chris, 1970â

The great night / Chris Adrian.â1st ed.

p. cm.

A retelling of Shakespeare's A midsummer night's dream

ISBN 978-0-374-16641-0