Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, a Play, Two Poems, and a Prayer

A collection of essays, poems, a prayer and a play from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America.

This volume contains Tony Kushner's play Slavs!, about the decline and disintegration of the USSR and its rebirth as a collection of independent states.

Slavs! was premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky in March 1994. It later moved to the New York Theatre Workshop in December 1994.

Also included is a series of essays - American Things; Fick Oder Kaputt!; A Socialism of the Skin (Liberation, Honey!); With a Little Help from My Friends; Some Questions About Tolerance; Copious, Gigantic, Sane; and On Pretentiousness.

Two poems: An Epithalamion and The Second Month of Mourning.

And finally, A Prayer, the text of a sermon by Kushner given for the Episcopalian National Day of Prayer for Aids, which was delivered at the Cathedral Chruch of St John the Divine in New York City on 9 October 1994.

'Extraordinary compendium... Kushner is drunk on ideas, on language, on the possibility of changing the world' - Larry Kramer