Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare

Michelle Ephraim

Aug 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Sharon Freedman

About this audiobook

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 Ephraim's quest to become a Shakespeare scholar and to find community and home. As she studies Shakespeare, Ephraim's 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 Shakespeare's 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.

About the author

Michelle Ephraim is professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, author of Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage, and coauthor of Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas.

Sharon Freedman is an actor, narrator, producer, and international arts educator. Her acting credits include Just Beyond, Chicago Med, Henry Danger, Cold Winter's Night (Emmy Award winner), It's Your Birfday, Ladies Room (official selection of Slamdance), and The Ski Trip.