Trifles What Do I Read Next?
by Susan Glaspell

Trifles is an adaptation of ‘‘A Jury of Her Peers,’’ a short story based on an actual trial Glaspell covered as a reporter in Des Moines, Iowa.

Other Glaspell plays include The Outside, The Verge, Inheritors, and Alison’s House, which earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1931.

John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea is a well-written one-act mystery play. In Synge’s play, the women of the Aran Islands watch helplessly as their husbands and sons sacrifice their lives to the sea as fishermen.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg, is a novel chronicling the story of Idgie and Ruth, two women who fight sexism and racism in a small Alabama town in the 1930s.

Eugene O’Neill is one of the most recognized names in American drama, and certainly the most famous playwright to emerge from the Provincetown Players, the small amateur theater company Glaspell helped create in 1915. Like Glaspell, O’Neill wrote several one-act, ‘‘slice of life’’ plays that were first performed in Provincetown, including Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees.

Sandra Dallas’s The Diary of Mattie Spenser is the fictional account, told in diary form, of an Iowa woman who weds in 1865. After her marriage, she travels with her husband to the Colorado Territories, builds a sod house, raises children, and encounters all the hazards of the nineteenth-century American wilderness.