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Junk  By  cover art

Junk

By: Ayad Akhtar
Narrated by: Michael Crouch, Jay Snyder, Edoardo Ballerini, Fred Berman, Robert Fass, Graham Halstead
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Publisher's summary

Coming to Broadway this fall in the Lincoln Center Theater production starring Steven Pasquale

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced, a fast-paced economic thriller that exposes the financial deal making behind the mergers and acquisitions boom of the 1980s.

Set in 1985, Junk tells the story of Robert Merkin, resident genius of the upstart investment firm Sacker Lowell. Hailed as "America's Alchemist", his proclamation that "debt is an asset" has propelled him to a dizzying level of success. By orchestrating the takeover of a massive steel manufacturer, Merkin intends to do the "deal of the decade", the one that will rewrite all the rules. Working on his broadest canvas to date, Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar chronicles the lives of men and women engaged in financial civil war: insatiable investors, threatened workers, killer lawyers, skeptical journalists, and ambitious federal prosecutors. Although it's set 40 years in the past, this is a play about the world we live in right now - a world in which money became the only thing of real value.

Full cast of narrators includes Ryan Vincent Anderson, Therese Plummer, Lauren Fortgang, Sarah Franco, and Kevin T. Collins.

©2017 Ayad Akhtar (P)2017 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"With 17 characters, Junk is bigger in scale than Mr. Akhtar's previous plays, but it bears his signatures - it is fast, funny, ruthless, and dark." (Michael Sokolove, New York Times)
"Forget about all the TV pundits and op-ed columnists droning on about America's problems. Playwright Ayad Akhtar is the diagnostician the nation needs to interpret its faltering health.... In Junk: The Golden Age of Debt, his thrilling new play...Akhtar takes on the equally explosive subjects of modern finance and the new religion of money. And once again he provides an unflinchingly candid cross section of attitudes and positions in which our sympathies and antipathies keep shifting along lines that are too complex to be straightforwardly ideological.... What's most impressive about Junk is the brilliant way Akhtar crunches the social, political, and economic data of this greedy new world, a precursor to the way we live today." (Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times)

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exceptional play that dramatized the junk bond era

Exceptional play that dramatizes the junk bond use to take over companies while explaining the complex manipulations in a way that is clear and easy to understand. It also shows what it did to people in all sides of the "scam."

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2 people found this helpful