Infinite Absence: 2nd Edition, 2021

This is a gloriously funny, gloriously serious novel by Pulitzer Prize nominated playwright Ronald Ribman that actually answers the age old question: How is it possible that one man, who has magnificently succeeded as a most brave, honorable, and extraordinarily decent human being, ends up with his head severed and in a pot of honey; while another, given everything, turning everything to shit, ends up blessed by a miracle, given the one true love of his life and the ultimate answer to it all?

Ribman has given us a rich and enduring tale, steeped in magical realism, where walls are sometimes quivering membranes to be walked through, and stars can find their way beneath your skirt to ravish you "in all the secret places that are joy!"

Ronald Ribman's plays have been called remarkable, wildly unique and written with a maniacal ferocity, defiant of category, striking in their eclecticism and many-sided portrayal of the human comedy. In recognition of his "sustained contribution to American Theater" he has been honored by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His numerous awards include an Obie Award for Best Play: The Journey of the Fifth Horse; an Emmy Nomination for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama: The Final War of Olly Winter; the Playwrights USA Award for Buck; the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for Cold Storage. After the American Repertory Theater's world premier of Ribman's Sweet Table at the Richelieu, Jonathan Marks noted a central theme in the playwright's work, that "What reveals itself repeatedly, throughout his work, is a preoccupation with the persistence of the past in the present-a recognition that we all carry with us a heavy baggage of seeds, each of which began sprouting at a different time in the past, and never stopped shooting out tendrils: a bag of memories which can never be simply dumped." Infinite Absence is Ribman's first novel.