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  The Best Advice by Amy Dressler (Shakespeare Project, Book 2) Publication Date: July 8, 2025 After reading a second book of hers , I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm a fan of Amy Dressler and I look forward to reading more of her books, particularly this Shakespeare retelling series! Her first book, How to Align the Stars,  retells my favorite Shakespeare comedy, Much Ado About Nothing , and The Best Advice  follows up with a retelling of my second favorite Shakespeare comedy, As You Like It.  In both books, Dressler deftly transplants the scenarios and characters of the respective plays to the contemporary Pacific Northwest. However, unlike the most creatively imagined setting for a performance of the original script, Dressler makes the bones her own, sculpting and weaving them into lived-in and relevant characters and settings in a novel for a modern audience, with playful references to the original text (e.g., Phoebe Shepherd-Shepherd) and (mostly) ironing ...

How to Align the Stars by Amy Dressler (Shakespeare Project, Book 1) Release Date: June 4, 2024 Bea is an astronomy professor at a small college in Washington State; Ben is the college's special collections librarian. They hate each other due to a misunderstanding when they were undergraduates at the same school. This contemporary retelling of Much Ado About Nothing originally seems like just that--one of Shakespeare's most romantically compelling and simultaneously troubling comedies translated into contemporary American academia.  However, gradually, the book, told from the perspectives of Bea and her cousin Heron, reveals itself to be quite a lot more. This is not merely the modern retelling that the names and relationships suggest, but a deeper, feminist and humanist exploration of modern campus life for students and faculty, and a much-needed commentary and alternative ending to the Claudio/Hero storyline that rightfully haunts all feminist Shakespeare scholars. Beatrice a...

Scott Newstok’s new book, How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, makes a seemingly radical proposition: what if we returned to the teaching methods of Shakespeare’s day? No, Newstok isn’t advocating corporal punishment, Greek and Latin translations, or the endless rote memorization that Shakespeare himself mocked. However, Shakespeare’ s genius, Newstok claims, can be nurtured, and he, professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College in Tennessee, knows how. The specious-sounding treatise examines less the brain waves in the Bard's head than the methods that shaped his education. Although organized into fourteen short chapters (a number upon which the introduction spends nearly two pages philosophizing), the book tends to hit you over the head with its erudition, but that's part of its charm. Newstok’s prodigious use of quotes, which extends from the Table of Contents to the Index, at first ca...