books in order

Yasmina Reza Books In Order

Novels

  1. Hammerklavier (2000)
  2. Desolation (2002)
  3. Adam Haberberg (2007)
  4. Happy are the Happy (2014)
  5. Babylon (2018)
  6. Anne-Marie La Beaute (2021)

Collections

  1. Plays One (2005)

Plays

  1. Art (1996)
  2. Unexpected Man (1998)
  3. Conversations After a Burial (2000)
  4. Life X 3 (2001)
  5. The God of Carnage (2009)

Non fiction

  1. Dawn, Dusk Or Night (2008)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Yasmina Reza Books Overview

Hammerklavier

Yasmina Reza is best known as the author of the immensely successful Tony award winning play Art. Her latest work, Hammerklavier, is a bittersweet collection of autobiographical sketches that have love, loss, and the relentless passage of time as their themes. Convinced that one’s deepest thoughts can be said simply, Reza does so with unequaled humor and perceptiveness. She contemplates evanescence and death in her young daughter’s toothless smile, secretly mourning that it will inevitably change. In the title story, the sometimes adversarial but very loving relationship Reza shared with her father is examined in terms of their love of music.

Desolation

From the internationally acclaimed playwright and author of Art comes a first novel of extraordinary brilliance: the outpourings at once eccentric, dark, and exceedingly funny of an old man reflecting upon his life, marriages, friendships, love affairs, and the enragingly separate existence of his spoiled, and lost, only son. He has had a full life, and now, in his later years, retired, his second wife getting on his nerves, love affairs a distant memory, he has a few things that he d like to get off his chest. As he talks half to himself, half to the son he can t understand we re introduced to Nancy, his too happy wife; to their housekeeper, Mrs. Dacimiento, who still can t put the bag properly over the rim of the garbage can; to his chum Lionel; to his daughter and her wannabe truly Jewish husband; and to the heartbreaking Marisa Botton, his idiotic, irresistible mistress. Finally, we witness his chance re encounter with the charming Genevieve Abramowitz, who in telling him a story of her own leads him to his final overtures. Yasmina Reza has written a symphonic monologue a passionate kvetch, a truly original work.

Adam Haberberg

With the same lan and wit that inform her internationally acclaimed and award winning plays, Yasmina Reza’s second novel, Adam Haberberg, revels in the tragicomedy of one man s midlife crisis. While slumped on a park bench in Paris, a man is suddenly hailed by an old female classmate whom he has not seen since high school. The poor guy is, of course, a writer. Morose, panicked about his health, preoccupied with his marriage miseries and the fiasco of his recent book launch, he finds himself stranded in the desert of male middle age. And now there s the strange business of this woman, who may or may not still be in love with him. Somehow he finds himself riding in her Jeep, riding to her place, not for any of the sensational reasons you might imagine, but because he sort of got stuck in a conversation without any chance of escape. Now he has to find his way out and home.A bitingly funny, lethally wise portrait of a hapless nonhero s big adventure.

Plays One

Now in one volume, the works of ‘the most successful international playwright of her generation’ Vogue. Yasmina Reza’s plays reflect the razor sharp wit, social commentary, and impeccable comedic timing that have earned the praise of critics throughout the world, none more so than the Tony Award winning Art, an eccentric and clever play of ideas that took the American theater community by storm. In this sly critique of contemporary relationships, Reza skillfully picks apart the friendship of three men via a bowl of olives and a white on white painting. Now translated into more than 30 languages, Art continues to be performed worldwide, even as Reza’s other plays have garnered similar acclaim. Life x 3, Reza’s most recent offering, again highlights her satirical wit as two couples face off in three different versions of the dinner from hell. Praised as ‘compact, cool and clever’ by Christopher Isherwood of Variety, Reza uses the acidic exchanges of her characters to illuminate their inner desire for love and acceptance. Also included in this edition are two earlier plays, The Unexpected Man and Conversations After a Burial. Each elucidates the startling difference between public and private life, be it in the confines of a train compartment or a country estate in the aftermath of a loved one’s passing.

Art

Tony Award winner for Best Play and Olivier Award winner for Best Comedy. How much would you pay for a painting with nothing on it? Would it be art? Marc’s best friend Serge has just bought a very expensive and very white painting. To Marc, the painting is a joke, and as battle lines are drawn, old friends use it to settle scores. With friendships hanging in the balance, the question becomes: how much is a painting worth? A nonstop cross fire of crackling language and serious issues of life and art…
sounds like a marriage of Moliere and Woody Allen, writes Newsweek. A L.A. Theatre Works full cast performance featuring: Bob Balaban, Brian Cox and Jeff Perry.

Unexpected Man

A train compartment. A man and a woman. In a series of dazzling internal monologues, the man, a novelist, muses on his latest work, and considers life and the futility of writing. The woman thinks of her life in the full knowledge that the man she is facing is the novelist she admires and whose latest work she has tucked in her handbag.

Conversations After a Burial

From the Author of The Tony Award Winning Art, a Moving Play About Family and MemorySimon Weinberg is dead. And, on a November morning, he is buried in accordance with his wishes on the Loiret family estate. Gathered together at his funeral are six people brothers and sisters, lovers, husbands and wives. Mourning allows them special privilege and, for a few hours, they are isolated in another world under a lingering sun, in the shadow of the deceased. Conversations After a Burial explores that ineffable moment of mourning, wherein the newly deceased is still almost palpable, the moment in which one can still maintain the memory of a breath, the intense moment between the absence and the return to every day existence, between loss and life

Life X 3

From the celebrated writer of Art, a scathingly hilarious commentary on vanity, professional insecurity, and the vicissitudes of marriage. Life X 3 presents three versions of two couples and an offstage six year old trying to make a success of one evening despite the fact that they neither like nor respect one another. When Hubert and In’s arrive a day early to dinner at the home of Henri and Sophie, Sophie barely has time to change out of her robe and In s is in a foul mood about a run in her stocking from there, the evening can only go downhill. Over an improvised meal of chocolate fingers, potato chips, and wine, the couples trade insults on every social and professional level and loyalties are changed with the same rapidity that glas*ses of Sancerre are drained. However, as she has so astutely done in the past, Yasmina Reza uses these acidic exchanges to illuminate the innate desire for love and acceptance in us all.

The God of Carnage

What happens when two sets of parents meet up to deal with the unruly behavior of their children? A calm and rational debate between grown ups about the need to teach kids how to behave properly? Or a hysterical night of name calling, tantrums, and tears before bedtime? Christopher Hampton’s translation of Yasmina Reza s sharp edged new play The God of Carnage premiered at Wyndham s Theatre, London, in March 2008 and at Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, New York City, in March 2009. The International Herald Tribune calls it an expert piece of stagecraft, and savagely funny.

Dawn, Dusk Or Night

An enormous success in France and a media sensation around the world, Yasmina Reza’s Dawn, Dusk Or Night will startle English language readers with its utterly unorthodox and candid and witty portrait of a man in his quest for ultimate power. In 2006, Yasmina Reza, the most celebrated playwright in France, asked Nicolas Sarkozy a simple question: Would he allow her to spend the next year with him and his team as he campaigned for the French presidency? His response was an unqualified yes. To the alarm of his advisers, and the consternation of many of her friends, who feared she was making a pact with the devil, she picked up her notebook and her pencil, and off she went. It is not enough to say that she was an observer of Sarkozy s rise to power. Rather, hers is the account of a brilliant woman of letters dancing in orbit with the most powerful man in France. Their casual exchanges, her remarkable insights, their phenomenal experience exist as a play of words and glances, framed as scenes from a headlong drama. Through the greenrooms, bus rides, and flights, along the campaign trail; in strategy sessions and at meetings with heads of state;, in all hours of the day and night, they develop a relationship that knows no parallel, bridging the arts and politics, abiding within a purely intellectual sphere without judgment, conflict, or competition. The groundbreaking Dawn, Dusk Or Night defies genre to offer a spellbinding look at the interplay between two formidable champions bound by intellect and nation.

Related Authors