From Publishers Weekly
In a bleak morality tale about a fugitive from justice, Galgut (The Good Doctor) again demonstrates his flair for charting the vicissitudes of human despair in modern-day South Africa. After the unnamed, near-starving protagonist is picked up by a minister traveling to his next church post, he repays the holy man's generosity by murdering him. The desperado quietly slips into the minister's role and tries to assimilate into mainstream society, but his misdeeds continue to dog his every move. If Galgut's concise prose is nearly leached of emotion, it certainly sets the scene: "There was a film of dust on everything in the car as though it had been standing there for years. He stared ahead through the windscreen. There were the corpses of beetles shattered on the glass and their legs and feelers were composed in attitudes of violent expiry." With increasingly stomach-tightening intensity, Galgut chronicles his troubled protagonist's struggles to evade capture under the ever-watchful eye of the authorities in his new town. The suspenseful narrative never strays from the dreary force of its understated character development ("He reached out with his filthy, his bloody hands and began to eat without looking at them"). As the story builds to a climax, Galgut heightens the book's emotional power with tense one-page chapters until justice—cosmic justice, in this case—comes to call. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
The quarry is a place and a person, a pit and a fugitive, in this spare, intense story of rural South Africa. And the fugitive is murderer, victim, accused, minister, policeman, and judge. They all change roles, each one becomes the other, or seems to. In each stark vignette, it takes a few sentences to know whom he refers to, and it is easy to make a mistake. But that is the point. There is lots of action, including murders, a church fire, a court drama, a circus act, even an eclipse in the universe. But what holds the reader are the faint silhouettes on the road. As in Galgut's The Good Doctor (2003), which was a finalist for the Booker Prize, his clear, elemental prose is never generic. First published in South Africa 10 years ago, this story is rooted in the veldt. But the fugitive who sits on the rocks "as if waiting for something" could be anywhere on the edge. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Jean-Claude van Itallie is one of the most distinguished playwrights of the American avant-garde. A keen deconstruction of American popular culture, the America Hurrah triptych served notice that here was a major new dramatic voice. Rounded out with such works as Bag Lady, written in the voice of a deceptively insightful homeless woman; The Serpent, a fanciful interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve; The Traveller, which depicts a charismatic and brilliant artist recovering from a stroke; and van Itallie's dazzling play based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, America Hurrah & Other Plays is a definitive collection of the work of a major American playwright.

FROM THE PUBLISHER