One of our best novelists here collects plays and adaptations he wrote before turning to fiction. His 1994 take on Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year is a powerful dramatic response to the AIDS epidemic. The one-man play Chesterfield to His Son, adapting that forbidding nobleman's famous Letters, is a hilariously antic--and painfully accurate--dissection of a father's love and hopes for his son. Dr. Knox and Mr. Banner examines same-sex...