Thirty years ago today, Max Joseph Ritvo was born in Los Angeles.
Letters from Max
A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2018
In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer.
Over the next four years—in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed—the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s correspondence, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is,” Ritvo writes. “And that’s all I want—is to know you forever.”
Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.
ISBN:
9781571313751 Publish Date:
09/10/2019
Pages:
336
Size:
8.5 × 5.5 × 1 in
Weight:
15.1 oz
Like this book? Sign up for occasional updates
Praise and Prizes
“Tender . . . A strange and beautiful volume made up of Sarah Ruhl’s correspondence with Max Ritvo.”
New Yorker
“A revelation, as honest and eloquent an expression of what it is like to be sick . . . a resonant and profound contribution from two fully formed artists to the literature of illness.”
Slate
“I will read more books in my life but I will not love another book more than this one. I suspect this book has the power to reassure the weary and to instill faith in anyone who needs it. If they let you bring books when you die, I will 100 percent put this one in the tiny stack that goes with me.”
Mary-Louise Parker
author of Dear Mr. You
“Immediate comparisons will be made to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Artist . . . This book is a nuanced look at the evolution of an incredible talent facing mortality and the mentor, never condescending, who recognizes his gift. Their infectious letters shine with a love of words and beauty.”
The Observer
“Letters from Max is a sublime journey shared by two brilliant minds. . . . It is stunning to see that these letters offer so much peace. They read like guided meditations, lived hymns, the good voices we seek within our own heads.”
BOMB
“Deeply moving, often heartbreaking . . . A captivating celebration of life and love.”
Kirkus
*starred review*
“With the depth and intelligence displayed, one feels in the presence of literary titans.”
Publishers Weekly
“I expected the letters between these two artists to be profoundly brilliant and profoundly heartbreaking. And they are. But what I didn’t expect . . . is the abiding and generous humor throughout, the element that, as Max Ritvo says, ‘makes our sadness rhyme with joy.’ Resisting any lesson to be found in Ritvo’s impending death, the letters between these two friends instead enact a deep and instructive compassion and pay ardent attention to what it means to continue to live a life, even one that will end tragically and too soon. In giving the world these breathtaking letters, Sarah Ruhl, with humility and humanity, goes far in preserving the legacy of the poet Max Ritvo.”
Carrie Fountain
author of I’m Not Missing
“Letters from Max is a story of two brilliant beings unfolding each other’s hearts and minds until even death is a gift and listening never ends. I read it once without stopping and read it again and again. Every page is a revelation about the unflinching mysteries of life.”
Beth Henley
winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
“Ruhl and Ritvo take the reader deep into some of the most challenging questions we face as human beings. . . . They both express, in numerous ways, that neither of them knows anything for sure but love. The sanguinity of this shared understanding is beautifully tempered by undisguised honesty, necessary humor, and an urgent spiritual playfulness.”
World Literature Today
“This is a gorgeous book exploring life and death, art and friendship; its power lingers.”
The New York Jewish Week
You Might Enjoy
Based on this book, we recommend you try…
The poems of this debut collection are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss—and yet they are also erotically, electrically...
A final collection fully inscribed with the daring of the author’s acrobatic mind and the force of his unrelenting spirit. These poems brush up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness.
2023 Best Book of the Year at The Vulture
A devastating memoir that sheds urgent, bracingly honest light on both the taboos surrounding disability and the limits of medical science.
An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
“Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.” So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar.