One of our best novelists here collects plays and adaptations he wrote before turning to fiction. His 1994 take on Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is a powerful dramatic response to the AIDS epidemic. The one-man play Chesterfield to His Son, adapting that forbidding nobleman’s famous Letters, is a hilariously antic–and painfully accurate–dissection of a father’s love and hopes for his son. Dr. Knox and Mr. Banner examines same-sex desire in 19th-century London and the stories people tell themselves about what makes them who they are.

More characters tell themselves more stories in five sparkling one-act plays set in locales ranging from the sidewalk of West 23rd Street to Seward, Alaska: The Old Agitator continues his lifelong mission, but with modified idealism; a new arrival in Alaska does what she must in order to stay; a grandmother exiled to a suburban lawn examines her life and is inspired to take action; a man explores the sexual temptation offered by a random encounter, and a casual philanderer finally meets a reckoning.

One of the country’s most interesting and accomplished novelists widens his vision with this collection.