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

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.

MICHELLE EPHRAIM is professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, author of Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage, and coauthor of Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas. Her essays and humor pieces have appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Cleaver, the Washington Post, Tikkun, Lilith, and the Moth Radio Hour.