Download or read book The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 695 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “irresistible” collection of short fiction by an author who “has been likened to everyone from J. D. Salinger to Woody Allen” (The New York Times Book Review). Hailed by Newsweek as “a bona fide literary event,” The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman brings together dozens of the New York Times–bestselling author’s greatest stories, which originally appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, and other magazines. “Readers who feel short stories are too high-flown—too literary, arcane, and serious—will find counterbalance in Friedman, whose stories have uncomplicated structures, obvious gists, intelligible metaphors, and unambiguous endings and come wrapped in humor. This compilation of his output in the short story form between 1953 and 1995 has a thematic arrangement, with categories such as ‘Mother,’ ‘Crazed Youth,’ and ‘Sex.’ Some of the more outstanding pieces are ‘The Subversive,’ about the narrator’s air force buddy whom the narrator believed to be the most all-American guy he ever met until his friend commits a crazed act; ‘The Gent,’ concerning a man who succumbs to a seduction by his best friend’s daughter; and ‘The Night Boxing Ended,’ in which ringside heckling goes way out of bounds.” —Booklist “From poignant bildungsroman to sly satire, from wicked comedy to surrealistic farce, this virtuosic collection covers more than four decades’ worth of short stories . . . Friedman explores themes such as loneliness, aging, fear, parenthood and ethnicity, spinning tales in an expertly modulated voice.” —Publishers Weekly “Friedman [is] more interesting than most of Malamud, Roth, and Bellow . . . What makes him more important is that he writes out of the viscera instead of the cerebrum.” —Nelson Algren, The Nation “Pure delight.” —Newsday

Download or read book The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 695 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “irresistible” collection of short fiction by an author who “has been likened to everyone from J. D. Salinger to Woody Allen” (The New York Times Book Review). Hailed by Newsweek as “a bona fide literary event,” The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman brings together dozens of the New York Times–bestselling author’s greatest stories, which originally appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, and other magazines. “Readers who feel short stories are too high-flown—too literary, arcane, and serious—will find counterbalance in Friedman, whose stories have uncomplicated structures, obvious gists, intelligible metaphors, and unambiguous endings and come wrapped in humor. This compilation of his output in the short story form between 1953 and 1995 has a thematic arrangement, with categories such as ‘Mother,’ ‘Crazed Youth,’ and ‘Sex.’ Some of the more outstanding pieces are ‘The Subversive,’ about the narrator’s air force buddy whom the narrator believed to be the most all-American guy he ever met until his friend commits a crazed act; ‘The Gent,’ concerning a man who succumbs to a seduction by his best friend’s daughter; and ‘The Night Boxing Ended,’ in which ringside heckling goes way out of bounds.” —Booklist “From poignant bildungsroman to sly satire, from wicked comedy to surrealistic farce, this virtuosic collection covers more than four decades’ worth of short stories . . . Friedman explores themes such as loneliness, aging, fear, parenthood and ethnicity, spinning tales in an expertly modulated voice.” —Publishers Weekly “Friedman [is] more interesting than most of Malamud, Roth, and Bellow . . . What makes him more important is that he writes out of the viscera instead of the cerebrum.” —Nelson Algren, The Nation “Pure delight.” —Newsday

Download or read book A Father s Kisses written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ridiculously funny novel about a devoted single dad who becomes an international hit man from the author of A Mother’s Kisses After losing his job as a poultry distributor, William Binny spends his mornings at the local diner polishing off a cheap breakfast and perusing the local paper. A widower with an 11-year-old daughter who could pass for 14, Binny has plenty of reasons to worry about the future. Salvation soon walks through the diner doors, however, in the form of a redheaded Englishman named Valentine Peabody. Peabody makes an unlikely proposition: He will pay Binny thousands of dollars to kill the enemies of his mysterious billionaire boss. The victims are bad men guilty of myriad crimes, but does Binny have what it takes to commit murder? For the sake of his daughter’s future, he is willing to find out. When his first few assignments do not go as planned, however, Binny starts to wonder if there is more to his new job than meets the eye. The shocking truth that he eventually uncovers brings this rollicking thrill ride to a conclusion so dramatic, hilarious, tender, and absurd it could only have been imagined by author Bruce Jay Friedman. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Bruce Jay Friedman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Download or read book Three Balconies written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Biblioasis. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three Balconies brings together 17 new stories by the celebrated humorist, vintage Friedman all. In sumptuously simple language, the language of the street, the bar, the store, the office, Friedman gives us a collection of moral fables that explores friendship and faith and failure unswervingly, yet with compassion and, as always, tremendous humour.

Download or read book A Mother s Kisses written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An indefatigable, irresistible, and wildly inappropriate Jewish mother takes her 17-year-old son to school in this uproarious coming-of-age comedy Tall and scattered-looking, Joseph has just graduated from high school and is ready for college. But is college ready for him? Apparently not, judging by the rejection letter he receives from Bates and the deafening silence that greets his application to Columbia. While his friends pack their bags for schools across the country, Joseph mopes around the apartment in his bathrobe and checks the mailbox obsessively. It’s enough to make his mother fear for the boy’s sanity—so she resolves to take matters into her own hands. What follows is a sidesplitting series of misadventures as Meg, whom the New York Times Book Review called “the most unforgettable mother since Medea,” pulls out all the stops to get her boy what he wants. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Bruce Jay Friedman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Download or read book Stern written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-28 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1962, Bruce Jay Friedman’s acclaimed first fiction novel, Stern, tells the story of a young Jewish man who relocates his family from the city to the suburbs, where they are besieged by voracious caterpillars and a bigotry that ranges from the genteel snub to outright confrontation. “An iridescent tour de force...Mr. Friedman’s style is pure delight-supple, carnal, humorous and at times slightly surrealistic.”—The New York Times Book Review “What makes Friedman more interesting than most of Malamud, Roth and Bellow is the sense he affords of possibilities larger than the doings and undoings of the Jewish urban bourgeois... What makes him more important is that he writes out of viscera instead of cerebrum.”—Nelson Algren in The Nation “A strange and touching novel...funny and sad at the same time...in the tradition of a Charlie Chaplin movie.”—Time

Download or read book A Mother s Kisses written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-11-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Mother's Kisses" is the story of 17-year-old Joseph and his mother, Meg, in the summer after Joseph's high school graduation. Meg starts arranging his life for him, even going so far as to accompany him to college.

Download or read book Let s Hear it for a Beautiful Guy written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Dutton Books. This book was released on 1984 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Study Guide for Bruce Jay Friedman s Brazzaville Teen ager written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Peace Process written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant new collection from one of American literature’s most original and hilarious purveyors of dark comedy Silenced by the horrors of Nazi Germany, a Jewish satirist is inspired to write again by his biggest fan: Joseph Goebbels. A retired English teacher dies on the operating table and wakes up to an afterlife in which literature does not exist; he can claim any masterpiece as his own, from The Catcher in the Rye to Crime and Punishment—if only he can remember what actually happens in those stories. On his first trip to the Holy Land, a down-on-his-luck filmmaker reluctantly agrees to help a young Israeli Arab escape to New York, only to watch in dismay as the upstart lands a buxom, Yiddish-speaking girlfriend and a monster movie deal. Mario Puzo once said that the world of Bruce Jay Friedman’s short fiction is “like a Twilight Zone with Charlie Chaplin.” Ironic, clever, perceptive, and hysterical, The Peace Process is vintage Friedman—fourteen finely crafted tales that take dead aim at the sweet spot between pleasure and pain.

Download or read book The Dick written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pencil-pushing policeman becomes a badass sleuth in this off-the-wall detective story from one of America’s funniest writers Kenneth LePeters (née Sussman) is a “quasi-dick.” A public relations man for homicide bureaus, he carries a half-size badge and keeps his pearl-handled Smith & Wesson .38 locked in his desk drawer. Recently returned to the East Coast after 17 years in America’s heartland, he finds the cosmopolitan air of a big-city police department refreshing—the detectives treat him almost like a real member of the homicide family. Then everything goes horribly wrong. . . . A zoning quirk of their new neighborhood forces the LePeters’s 10-year-old daughter, Jamie, to go to the worst school in town. Blaming her husband, Claire LePeters starts an affair with Detective Chico, a cop turned underground filmmaker. To make matters worse, when his colleagues discover that LePeters is Jewish, their bonhomie dries up as fast as a false lead. To reclaim his manhood and get his family back, LePeters must become the full-fledged dick he never thought he could be. Bruce Jay Friedman’s twisted take on the cop novel is a hilarious, mordant, and wildly inventive portrait of a man daring to succeed in a world that has always expected him to fail. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Bruce Jay Friedman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Download or read book About Harry Towns written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic comic novel about a midlife man whose life is spiraling out of control is a “heartbreaking delight . . . Nothing less than a joy” (The Washington Post Book World). Screenwriter Harry Towns, a bicoastal playboy with a broken marriage and a child he rarely sees, has been reveling in the freewheeling atmosphere of the early 1970s. But when cracks start to appear in his perfectly constructed life, he has no option but to pick up the scattered pieces of his past and begin anew. From a New York Times–bestselling author and veteran Hollywood screenwriter, About Harry Towns is both a portrait of a particular era and a timeless look at the wrong turns that make up a life—featuring “ a character unique, haunting, and completely memorable” (The Washington Post Book World). “Brilliant.” —The New York Times Book Review

Download or read book The Lonely Guy and The Slightly Older Guy written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times–bestselling author finds the pulse of the aging American male in two ingeniously funny novels. “I just laughed myself sick” (Neil Simon). Two classic works of comic self-help fiction by “one of the funniest writers in America” available together for the first time in a single ebook edition (John Gregory Dunne). With its “sparkling . . . winsome and true” look at the single male in America—from his sad new apartment furnishings to his career struggles to the mystifying dating world—Bruce Jay Friedman’s The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life was as cringingly relatable to both men and women when it was first published in 1978 as is today (The New York Times Book Review). The inspiration for Steve Martin’s classic cult film comedy, The Lonely Guy, it was hailed as “the funniest book of this year, or most any other. You don’t close this book. You just start reading it again immediately. I loved every page–and laughed out loud on most of them” (Dan Jenkins, author of Semi-Tough and Dead Solid Perfect). Twenty years later, Friedman returned to the subject with The Slightly Older Guy, finding his quarry no longer alone, maybe a little less lonely, not so young anymore, faltering at fashion, pondering a new career, but just as resiliently witty. Featuring a new afterword, The Considerably Older Guy offers advice on such topics as divorce, grandchildren, exercise, diet, and insomnia. “If you believe in reading, then when a book comes along by Friedman, you have to read it. It’s as simple as that” (The Washington Post Book World).

Download or read book About Harry Towns written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruce Jay Friedman has been hailed by critics as a comic genius, a writer whose vision confronts the malaise of contemporary life with a liberating deadpan humor. Grove Press is proud to reissue one of the classic novels by this acclaimed master of modern humor. About Harry Towns is the story of the eponymous screenwriter, a man reveling in the freewheeling atmosphere of the early 1970s, a bicoastal playboy with a broken marriage and a child he rarely sees. But when his perfectly constructed life begins to spin out of control, he must decide to pick up the scattered pieces of his past to begin anew. Praise for About Harry Towns: "A goddamn heartbreaking delight and you are a fool if you miss it. Friedman has created a character unique, haunting, and completely memorable in stories which tickle, depress, gouge below the belt and at second or third reading hold up as nothing less than a joy." -- The Washington Post Book World

Download or read book The Routledge Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century written by Sorrel Kerbel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 1394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

Download or read book Contemporary Jewish American Novelists written by Joel Shatzky and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1997-07-16 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since World War II, Jewish-American novelists have significantly contributed to the world of literature. This reference book includes alphabetically arranged entries for more than 75 Jewish-American novelists whose major works were largely written after World War II. Included are entries for both well-known and relatively obscure novelists, many of whom are just becoming established as significant literary figures. While the volume profiles major canonical figures such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Bernard Malamud, it also aims to be more inclusive than other works on contemporary Jewish-American writers. Thus there are entries for gay and lesbian novelists such as Lev Raphael and Judith Katz, whose works challenge the more orthodox definition of Jewish religious and cultural traditions; Art Speigelman, whose controversial ^IMaus^R established a new genre by combining elements of the comic book and the conventional novel; and newcomers such as Steve Stern and Max Apple, who have become more prominent within the last decade. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes, an overview of the novelist's critical reception, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. A thoughtful introduction summarizes Jewish-American fiction after World War II, and a selected, general bibliography lists additional sources of information. Since World War II, Jewish-American novelists have made numerous significant contributions to contemporary literature. Authors of earlier generations would frequently write about the troubles and successes of Jewish immigrants to America, and their works would reflect the world of European Jewish culture. But like other immigrant groups, Jewish-Americans have become increasingly assimilated into mainstream American culture. Many feel the loss of their heritage and long for something to replace the lost values of the old world. This reference book includes alphabetically arranged entries for more than 75 Jewish-American novelists whose major works were largely written after World War II. Included are entries for both well-known and relatively obscure novelists, many of whom are just becoming established as significant literary figures. While the volume profiles major canonical figures such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Bernard Malamud, it also aims to be more inclusive than other works on contemporary Jewish-American writers. Thus there are entries for gay and lesbian novelists such as Lev Raphael and Judith Katz, whose works challenge the more orthodox definitions of Jewish religious and cultural traditions; Art Speigelman, whose controversial ^IMaus^R established a new genre by combining elements of the comic book and the conventional novel; and newcomers such as Steve Stern and Max Apple, who have become more prominent within the last decade. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes, an overview of the novelist's critical reception, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. A thoughtful introduction summarizes Jewish-American fiction after World War II, and a selected, general bibliography lists additional sources for information.

Download or read book Tokyo Woes written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this laugh-out-loud travelogue, an average American man journeys to a country unlike any other: 1980s Japan Early one morning, Mike Halsey leaves his sleeping girlfriend and his house deep in the woods to go out and buy the morning paper. His favorite deli is closed, so he keeps driving and winds up on an unfamiliar lakeside road. Then it hits him: the old wanderlust. The last time it struck, he ended up on the coast of Finland. This time, Mike heads east—to Japan. He doesn’t like sushi all that much and has no idea what he’ll do when he arrives. Luckily, he makes a new friend on the plane. Bill Atenabe invites Mike to stay with his family in Tokyo—“We’ve got plenty of room by Japanese standards,” he claims—and the two pals are soon sampling all that makes the Land of the Rising Sun unique, from Peeping Tom tours to department store attendants who dust you off before you step into an elevator to computers with a sense of irony. Mike quickly discovers, however, that not all is as happy as it seems in the Atenabe household. Bill’s wife is having an affair with a bamboo salesman, his son wants to give up a promising academic career to become a talent scout for a modeling agency, and his war-hero father is being forced into retirement. When Bill contemplates an act of desperation, Mike talks some good old American common sense into his friend and discovers the real reason for his own journey to Japan. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Bruce Jay Friedman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.