By: Michelle Ephraim
ISBN: 978-1625347824
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024
2025 GILDA FINALIST
At twenty-three, Michelle Ephraim was failing at everything. The only child of reclusive Holocaust-survivor parents who were dismayed by her literary studies, she found herself dumped by her boyfriend and bombing out of graduate school. Then, one night, she crashed a Shakespeare recitation party. Loopy from vodka and never having read a single line of Shakespeare, she was transfixed. Shakespeare, she decided, was the lifeline she needed.
Green World is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of Ephraim’s quest to become a Shakespeare scholar and to find community and home. As she studies Shakespeare, Ephraim’s world uncannily begins to mirror the story of the Jewish daughter in The Merchant of Venice, and she finds herself in a Green World, an idyllic place where Shakespeare’s heroines escape their family trauma. Green World reckons with global, historical, and personal tragedy and shows how literature―comic and tragic―can help us brave every kind of anguish.
Shortlisted for the 2026William Saroyan International Prize for Writing • Shortlisted for the Story Circle Network Gilda Prize • Winner of the Wisconsin Library Association's Literary Award for Nonfiction • Shortlisted for the Rubery Book Award • A 2025 IPPY Awards Silver Medal Winner in Autobiography/Memoir • Winner of the 2025 Friends of American Writers Adult Literature Award • A 2024 Foreword INDIES Finalist • A 2025 Sophie Brody Medal Notable Book • A Jewish Women's Archive Summer Book Club Pick
About the Author
Michelle Ephraim is a Shakespeare scholar, a professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and a prolific writer. She’s also the co-host of The Everyday Shakespeare Podcast, which explores the uncanny (and often hilarious) ways that Shakespeare sheds light on our modern problems. Michelle lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with her husband and four children.
To learn more about Michelle Ephraim and her work, please see michelleephraim.com
