At twen­ty-three, Michelle Ephraim was fail­ing at every­thing. The only child of reclu­sive Holo­caust- sur­vivor par­ents who were dis­mayed by her lit­er­ary stud­ies, she found her­self dumped by her boyfriend and bomb­ing out of grad­u­ate school. Then, one night, she crashed a Shake­speare recita­tion par­ty. Loopy from vod­ka and nev­er hav­ing read a sin­gle line of Shake­speare, she was trans­fixed. Shake­speare, she decid­ed, was the life­line she need­ed.

Green World: A Tragi­com­ic Mem­oir of Love & Shake­speare is the hilar­i­ous and heart­break­ing sto­ry of Ephraim’s quest to become a Shake­speare schol­ar and to find com­mu­ni­ty and home. As she stud­ies Shake­speare, Ephraim’s world uncan­ni­ly begins to mir­ror the sto­ry of the Jew­ish daugh­ter in The Mer­chant of Venice, and she finds her­self in a Green World, an idyl­lic place where Shakespeare’s hero­ines escape their fam­i­ly trau­ma. Green World reck­ons with glob­al, his­tor­i­cal, and per­son­al tragedy and shows how lit­er­a­ture — com­ic and trag­ic — can help us brave every kind of anguish. 

Green World received the 2023 Juniper Prize for Cre­ative Non­fic­tion from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts Press, a nation­al book award.