ASC’s 2026 Community Shelf: A Kaleidoscope of Reimagined Classics

Dr. Peter Kirwan
6 days ago
4 min read

The American Shakespeare Center is thrilled to curate a Community Shelf with Staunton Books & Tea - a reading list designed to deepen the conversation around the plays on the Blackfriars stage and to invite audiences into the rich, ongoing life of classic literature. As we bring together works from across centuries and genres throughout our 2026 season, we’re reminded that what keeps “the classics” alive isn’t just their survival on a syllabus - it’s their reinvention within new cultural contexts. A classic endures because each generation finds something new in it, reshapes it, reframes it, or challenges it. These texts speak to the

moment in which they were written, and they continue to speak to us today because artists and audiences keep asking them new questions. ASC’s Community Shelf celebrates that living dialogue, and aims to feature a little something for everyone in the Shenandoah Valley, from sci-fi and horror all the way to historical fiction and nonfiction.

We begin with Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s joyful, Queer-inflected comedy of identity, love, and disguise. Julia Drake’s The Last True Poets of the Sea offers a tender contemporary riff on the story, set on the coast of Maine and centering a young woman navigating grief, self-discovery, and unexpected romance. Judith Krummeck’s The Deceived Ones also revisits Twelfth Night, but from a striking new angle: the point of view of a Ukrainian refugee, allowing the play’s themes of displacement and longing for home to resonate in very present ways.

Those intrigued by the mysteries surrounding Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles will find a wry and wicked companion in Kim Newman’s Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles. Told from Moriarty’s perspective, it flips Conan Doyle’s iconic tale on its head with gleeful villainy.

We also invite readers to explore the world around Hannah Cowley’s A Bold Stroke for a Husband through Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s A School for Scandal, a witty, sparkling gossip comedy from the same era. To deepen the historical context even further, Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, gives voice to a real eighteenth-century life that sits in powerful counterpoint to the genteel theatrical worlds of Sheridan and Cowley. His extraordinary journey - from enslavement to abolitionist activist - offers an essential perspective on the Britain that produced these comedies.

Our staging of Shakespeare’s As You Like It this summer finds modern echoes in Chloe Gong’s Foul Lady Fortune, a glamorous 1930s Shanghai spy novel loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy. And for those following the thread that leads from the forests of Arden to the fields of Grover’s Corners, Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake provides a luminous, contemporary meditation on love, family, and performance featuring Thornton Wilder’s Our Town with surprising tenderness.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest inspires not one but three compelling selections on the shelf. Marina Warner’s Indigo offers a lush reworking centering colonization and its legacies. Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day relocates echoes of Prospero and Miranda to the Sea Islands of Georgia, infusing the story with African American history and folklore. And Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (Une Tempête), a cornerstone of postcolonial theatre, reframes Caliban as a revolutionary and demands that readers confront questions of race, empire, and resistance.

Finally, just in time for Spooky Season, Frankenstein opens a flurry of imaginative retellings. Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein is a Queer, speculative sci-fi take on Shelley’s classic that leaps between timelines to explore love, AI, gender, and the future of the human body. Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein revisits the origins of Mary Shelley’s Doctor through a gothic, introspective lens. And for the die-hard horror buffs out there, Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill offers a hair-raising return to the Hill House of Shirley Jackson’s imagination couched in a playwright’s struggle to adapt the early modern tragedy The Witch of Edmonton.

For those who want to dive even deeper, we have also included a list of the “Source Texts,” which includes the classics themselves - from Our Town to The Witch of Edmonton, from As You Like It to Frankenstein. Reading the originals next to their reimaginings can be a thrilling reminder of how stories evolve and endure.

We hope the 2026 Community Shelf invites you to wander widely - across centuries, continents, and interpretations - and to discover how classic stories continue to expand when new voices join the conversation. Whether you’re a seasoned reader or simply curious, these books offer many entry points into our season and into the ever-growing constellation of works inspired by the plays we bring to life at the Blackfriars Playhouse.