The 14 short plays collected here introduce readers to one of the most intelligent and anarchically funny playwrights of the last decade and his utterly delightful one-act plays that percolate with comic brio (The New York Times The world according to David Ives is a very add place, and his plays constitute a virtual stress test of the English language -- and of the audience's capacity for disorientation and delight. Ives's characters plunge into black holes called Philadelphias, where the simplest desires are hilariously thwarted. Chimps named Milton, Swift, and Kafka are locked in a room and made to re-create Hamlet. And a con man peddles courses in a dubious language in which hello translates as velcro and fraud comes out as freud. At once enchanting and perplexing, incisively intelligent and side-splittingly funny, this original paperback edition of Ives's plays includes Sure Thing, Words, Words, Words, The Universal Language, Variations on the Death of Trotsky, The Philadelphia, Long Ago and Far Away, Foreplay, or The Art of the Fugue, Seven Menus, Mere Mortals, English Made Simple, A Singular Kinda Guy, Speed-the-Play, Ancient History, and Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread.