Broadway Bookshelf- Experts from the NY Public Library Select Your Next Great Read!

Love Broadway? In need of a good book? Well you're in luck, because BroadwayWorld has teamed up with the New York Public Library to bring you Broadway Bookshelf- an expert opinion on what theatre fans can and should add to their personal libraries.

NATASHA, PIERRE AND THE GREAT COMET OF 1812 opens on Monday- a musical that's inspired by a 70-page slice of WAR AND PEACE. But you don't need to go as far as Tolstoy to find a great read. Read on as Gwen Glazer, (Librarian, Readers Services) and Doug Reside (Curator for the Billy Rose Theatre Division) share their selections for your very own Broadway bookshelf!

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If you like Waitress, check out...
Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado

Tirado's essays take a brutal, personal look at what it's like to be part of the working poor in America. Jenna, the main character of Waitress, could have written a book like this herself.

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If you like Matilda, check out...
It Ain't So Awful, Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas

Zomorod lives in a different world than Matilda, but the two heroines have a lot in common. This is another great -- and often funny -- middle-grade tale of a girl who doesn't fit into the traditional mold discovering her power and coming into her own.

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If you like Fiddler on the Roof, check out...
In the Shadow of the Shtetl by Jeffrey Veidlinger

What would the future look like for the villagers in Anatevka? This meticulously researched book, which compiles interviews from about 400 Jews born between 1910 and 1930, tells the stories of real-life Eastern European Jews who returned to their original communities.

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If you like Wicked, check out...
The Dorothy Must Die series by Danielle Paige

These books take a different angle on Frank Baum's classic and turn Oz on its head! They tell the story of Amy Gunn, the "other girl from Kansas," who's been recruited into the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked and sent to destroy the original heroine.

Or...
Grendel by John Gardner

Grendel retells the story of classic Old English poem Beowulf from the perspective of the monster. Both the novel and the musical, by telling classic story through the perspective of a character that was a 2-dimensional antagonist in the original, invite the audience to push the boundaries of their empathy to those they may have previously vilified.

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If you like A Bronx Tale, check out...
Underworld by Don DeLillo

Set against the same Bronx background, this epic novel strikes many of the same chords as the musical -- but in a different key.

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If you like Hamilton, check out...
Women of Colonial America: 13 Stories of Courage and Survival in the New World? by Brandon Marie Miller

Go beyond the Ron Chernow biography and dig into the contemporaries of the Schuyler sisters! This young-adult work of nonfiction, written in easy-to-read vignettes, highlights all the women who should be included in the sequel.

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If you like The Phantom of the Opera, check out...
Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

Loosely based on Goethe's verse drama, Faustus, Mann's novel tells the story of an opera composer who makes a deal with a (perhaps) imagined devil to have 24 years of genius productivity. It's a complicated work written during the final years of World War II by a German who fled the Nazi regime, and it has all the complex political symbolism one might expect given the context. If you're looking for another story about an isolated musical genius for whom romantic love has been all but denied, this dark novel might be just the thing to "wake and stir imagination."

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Visit your local library today to check out all of these Broadway Bookshelf selections!