New in Paperback: My Name Is Will by Jess Winfield

The subtitle offers a superb summary: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare. Based on that alone, it’s clear that Jess Winfield’s debut effort isn’t simply another biography of the Bard.

In cleverly wrought twinned threads we meet a young William Shakespeare teaching Latin to youngsters in the England of yore. In another thread, we’re introduced to William Shakespeare Greenberg, a grad student in Santa Cruz in the 1980s. The realities of these two Wills are connected, of course. Those connections are often amusing, sometimes startling but always sharply shared.

Readers who noted My Name Is Will when it came out in hardcover last year but who didn’t get around to it then might like to know that there’s an very good reading guide bound into the newly released paperback edition.