Associate Professor Benjamin Taylor Has New Work on the Stage and the Page

Chasing Bright Medusas, a new biography from Adjunct Associate Professor Benjamin Taylor, is coming next October–and that’s not all. Soon after, Taylor’s work will hit Broadway. The stage rights of his memoir, Here We Are, have been sold to Daryl Roth Productions.

Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth was published to critical acclaim by Penguin Random House in 2020. NPR’s Maureen Corrigan was one of the voices who praised the work, saying, “There's an appealing quality of randomness to this slim memoir that makes it feel like we're tagging along with the two friends on their constant walks, talks and dinners in the dive restaurants Roth preferred on the Upper West Side, where anything could come up, sometimes even big revelations.” The memoir was named a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. 

Daryl Roth Productions, which produced the recent Broadway hit revivals of Funny Girl and Into the Woods, has hired Richard Greenberg to write the adaptation. Greenberg is well known for his play Take Me Out, which is currently running a revival on Broadway as well. The production ran for a few months in the spring of 2022, before returning to Broadway for an encore fourteen-week stretch.

The stage production of Here We Are is expected to premiere in 2024. 

Taylor’s newest book will be released before that–Chasing Bright Medusas is coming from Viking in October of 2023. This biography of Willa Cather is an homage to the brilliant 20th-century author, as well as an appeal to readers to return to her work with renewed vigor and appreciation.  

Here We Are is available for purchase here, and Chasing Bright Medusas is available for preorder here. 

Benjamin Taylor received a 2021 Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His earlier memoir, The Hue and Cry at Our House, received the 2018 Los Angeles Times/Christopher Isherwood Prize and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice; his Proust: The Search was named a Best Book of 2016 by Thomas Mallon in The New York Times Book Review and Robert McCrum in The Observer (London); and his Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay was named a Best Book of 2012 by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker. He is also the author of two novels, Tales Out of School, winner of the 1996 Harold Ribalow Prize, and The Book of Getting Even, winner of a Barnes & Noble Discover Award. He edited Saul Bellow: Letters, named a Best Book of 2010 by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times and Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post, and Bellow’s There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, also a New York Times Editors’ Choice. His edition of the collected stories of Susan Sontag, Debriefing, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2017. French and Italian  translations of Here We Are were published in 2021. He is a past fellow and current trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and serves as president of the Edward F. Albee Foundation.