Mark's books Opera's First Master: The Musical Dramas of Claudio Monteverdi, Electra and the Empty Urn: Metatheater and Role Playing in Sophocles and Shubert's Theater of Song are all available on amazon.com.

Of the Monteverdi book, Alan Rich of the LA Weekly wrote ". . . an uncommonly well-told accounting of Monteverdi’s operatic legacy . . . Trying to write about any kind of abstraction -- music, the visual arts, another writer’s style – should embody the urge to send the reader back to the source; Ringer’s triumph is that I sit here with my desk strewn with Monteverdi: L’Orfeo on a Virgin-Veritas CD with Ian Bostridge, The Return of Ulysses and The Coronation of Poppea in the René Jacobs discs on Harmonia Mundi, half-a-dozen DVDs. His book brings them marvelously to life, and by doing so recreates a marvelous era in the arts. Whether I know the music already or not, his kind of writing communicates a deep and honorable appetite for the music under his enthusiastic examination. . . . remarkably vivid, informed –and, I can well imagine, dedicated – writing . . . [an] exceptionally valuable book."