A Failed Performance

People disappear without explanation. The government takes hostages. War and death occur without reason or meaning. The cycle of poverty and deprivation proliferates. A Failed Performance is a collection of bizarre and darkly humorous plays and scenes from the Russian avant-garde writer Daniil Kharms. This collection-the first volume in English dedicated entirely to Kharms's dramatic works-includes his major stage playsElizaveta BamandLapaas well as lesser-known sketches and hybrid poem-plays, most of which were never published or performed during his lifetime.

About the Author :
C Dylan Bassett'sbooks areGad'sBook(2023),A Failed Performance: Short Plays & Scenes by Daniil Kharms(2018), andInvention of Monsters: Plays for the Theatre(2015). He is an Assistant Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati. Emma Winsor Woodis a poet and essayist from New York City, Emma is the author of the poetry collectionThe Real World(BlazeVOX Books, 2022) and translator ofA Failed Performance: Short Plays & Scenes by Daniil Kharms(Plays Inverse, 2018). She has a BA in Russian History & Literature from Harvard, an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is currently a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of California Santa Cruz. She is the editor-in-chief ofStone Soup Magazine-the magazine 100% created by kids for kids (we like to think of ourselves as theParis Reviewfor the under-thirteen set!). Finally, she is the co-author ofTheComplete College Essay Handbook, and works one-on-one with a select group of students on their college application essays each year.

Review :
“Kharms's writing for me is like molecules that combine and re-combust an expected time creating another world. That is on one hand real and on the other unreal. It is its duality that gives his brilliant text power.”— Robert Wilson, award-winning director “Reading Kharms relieves us of the burden of making sense of the senseless. I lose my head reading these plays, but for this exact world, I'm better off without it. Maybe there'll never be a time not to read Kharms, but now is not one of those times.”— Zachary Schomburg, poet & translator “It's hard to read these rescued short plays and scenes by Kharms and not think of his vulnerability as a writer living under Stalin and the irrational state. The date of each piece tells us the time running out on his destiny. He is brave; every mention of food is heartbreaking; you hope he was consoled by the sheer act of writing, by continuing to create for as long as he could. Russian culture and literary history thank the friend who saved his papers.”— Darryl Pinckney, playwright & Kharms adapter