Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship

by Max Ritvo

Max Ritvo

0 ratings • 0 reviews • 0 shelved
Book cover for Letters from Max

Bookhype may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. Full disclosure.

A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2018

In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer.

Over the next four years--in which Ritvo's illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed--the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo's exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. "We'll always know one another forever, however long ever is," Ritvo writes. "And that's all I want--is to know you forever."

Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.

  • ISBN10 157131976X
  • ISBN13 9781571319760
  • Publish Date 18 September 2018
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Milkweed Editions
  • Format eBook
  • Pages 322
  • Language English