Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (incl. Slavs!)

A collection of essays, poems, a prayer and a play from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America.

This volume contains Tony Kushner's play Slavs!, about the decline and disintegration of the USSR and its rebirth as a collection of independent states.

Slavs! was premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky in March 1994. It later moved to the New York Theatre Workshop in December 1994.

Also included is a series of essays – American Things; Fick Oder Kaputt!; A Socialism of the Skin (Liberation, Honey!); With a Little Help from My Friends; Some Questions About Tolerance; Copious, Gigantic, Sane; and On Pretentiousness.

Two poems: An Epithalamion and The Second Month of Mourning.

And finally, A Prayer, the text of a sermon by Kushner given for the Episcopalian National Day of Prayer for Aids, which was delivered at the Cathedral Chruch of St John the Divine in New York City on 9 October 1994.

'Extraordinary compendium... Kushner is drunk on ideas, on language, on the possibility of changing the world' - Larry Kramer

Tony Kushner is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Tony Kushner's other plays include A Bright Room Called Day; Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Brown; The Illusion, adapted from the play by Pierre Corneille; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures; and The Visit, adapted from the play by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. His translations include S. Y. Ansky's The Dybbuk; Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan and Mother Courage and Her Children; and the libretto for Hans Krása and Adolf Hoffmeister's Brundibár, a children's opera for which he wrote a curtain-raiser, But the Giraffe! He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols's film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg's Munich and Lincoln. His books include The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. Among many honours, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.