Taking What I Like: Stories

Exuberant and heartfelt at once, the stories in Taking What I Like deconstruct and reinvent some classic texts, including six Shakespeare plays. Like the best translations, Bamber’s stories exist independently even as they offer access to their source.  Lacing admiration with attitude, Bamber layers her plots with commentary on the present as well as the past. In “An Incarceration of Hamlets,” for instance, an actor in a prison production of Hamlet waits to meet with his parole board, and issues of mass incarceration become inextricable from the pleasures of the Bard.  Elsewhere issues of racism (Othello), gender (As You Like It), and the decline of empire (Antony and Cleopatra) put the plays squarely in a 21st century framework.  As thoughtful as they are funny, these stories are both high entertainment and fertile readings of the plays.

Praise & Reviews

An NPR “Best Forthcoming Fiction” selection for 2013

“Like the best and most memorable teachers Bamber brings the past to bear on the present in ways that inform and exhilarate.”
– The Harvard Review

“Exhilerating flights of intellectual fantasy.”
– Publisher’s Weekly

“…deeply insightful comments on some of Shakespeare’s major plays.”
– Sylvan Barnet, General Editor, The Complete Signet Shakespeare

“Playful, inventive and funny, these stories shake things up!  I’ve never seen anything like them.  Like a great production of a Shakespeare play, they make the work come alive.”
–Ben Fountain

“Linda Bamber inserts contemporary protagonists into Shakespearean plots, illuminating both in the process. Highly original, wonderfully readable and emotionally resonant!”
– Eva Hoffman