Rave Reviews for
My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and
Shakespeare
CHRISTOPHER
BUCKLEY, author of Boomsday and Thank
You For Smoking
“A lusty, pun-drunk first novel by the
professional wiseacre and award-winning cartoon producer
Jess Winfield . . . to say that Jess Winfield knows his
Shakespeare is laughable understatement. Upside down – boy
he knows him, inside out, and round and round . . .
Winfield must have known how much harder it would be to
pull off a strange eventful history like this one sans
tights, sans stage, sans everything – but where there’s a
will there’s a way. . . In MY NAME IS WILL, Winfield may be
accused of treating his favorite literary lion
unceremoniously. But, after all, no gentleman is a hero to
his varlet.”
NEW YORK TIMES
“Hilarious, fascinating . . . a cunningly witty,
frolicsome, time-warping bildungsroman . . . Winfield
slings bucketfuls of double-entendres and wily puns... But
serious business underlies the literary larkiness...
Winfield's high-spirited tribute is a celebration of the
power of language and story through which we learn who we
are and who we might be as we strut and fret our hour upon
the stage, bit players reaching for the heavens in a drama
beyond our grasp.”
LOS ANGELES TIMES
“Pulls off a potentially clumsy conceit with
nuance and panache, as the lives of our two Williams
intersect across time and space with mind-bending results."
WASHINGTON POST
"Bawdy puns, a clever construction, and a deliciously
irreverent sense of humor make this debut novel
irresistible."
BOOKLIST
Jess Winfield's My Name is Will cleverly twists two
parallel plot lines — one set in California in the 1980s,
the other in Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1580s — into a
single bizarre adventure that'll have you questioning the
Bard's religious history and rooting for a guy trying to
deliver an enormous hunk of fungus to a mysterious buyer.
AUSTIN STATESEMAN
"MY NAME IS WILL fuses a
witty campus novel, based on the narrator's hectic
experience of the mythological University of California of
the nineteen seventies and eighties, with a subversive
historical one about the equally legendary Elizabethan era
of the young Shakespeare, to create a provocative twin
narrative, in which youths fight their way through a world
of rampant sex and drugs to the beginnings of maturity. The
narrative’s ingenious achievement is to suggest how, by
saturation in the past, a youthful rebel in Elizabethan
Stratford and one in modern Berserkeley can share comic
misadventures, both paradoxically illuminating the
historical Shakespeare family's inveterate Catholicism.”
HUGH
RICHMOND, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
_________________________
Rave
Reviews for
The
Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) (revised)
Arts Theater, West End, London
Click any
quote for full review.
"Niftily updated... Wig-flinging,
wisecracking, twinkle-toed mayhem... Tirelessly funny
and accessible."
TIME OUT
“Wildly imaginative, thoroughly
affectionate to its source material, and above all,
infectiously fun."
METRO U.K.
“This is still a hoot. A neat blend of
nerdiness and slacker charm. Treat yourself! (Four
Stars)”
EVENING STANDARD
"As much a celebration as a send-up... A
preposterous riot of inventive physical
comedy.”
DAILY TELEGRAPH
“Get thee to a performance!”
WHAT'S ON STAGE
Rave Reviews for
What Would Shakespeare Do? Personal Advice From the Bard
"There is real spiritual insight here.... This is both an
amusing and thoughtful book... The fact that Winfield never
loses his humble sense of humor about it all is one of the
book's most winning qualities."
DETROIT FREE PRESS
“A funny, insightful, and thoughtful wee book.”
DOOYOO.CO.UK