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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.
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 hum...
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
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"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.
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...
New York Times-Bestselling Author: A Jewish man struggles in midcentury suburbia in this dark comic novel “in the tradition of the Charlie Chaplin movie.”—Time The first novel by Bruce Jay Friedman, the author of such classics as The Lonely Guy and A Mother’s Kisses, 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. When his wife is accosted by a boorish neighbor, Stern begins hatching a plot to exact revenge—a painstaking, procrastination-filled process with hilarious consequences. “An iridescent tour de force…carnal, humorous, and at times slightly surrealistic.”—The New York Times Book Review “A strange and touching novel…funny and sad at the same time.”—Time “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 the viscera instead of the cerebrum.”—The Nation
"Like a Twilight zone with Charlie Chaplin"–Mario Puzo Writer, screenwriter, playwright, editor, actor, teacher: Bruce Jay Friedman has done it all, charming the glitziest industries of American golden-age culture for more than half a century. Lucky Bruce is his long-awaited memoir, and it's everything we'd expect and more: here is Friedman at his best, waltzing from Madison Avenue to Hollywood and back again, and reilluminating with brilliant clarity the dazzle of post-war American life. Self-effacing, wry, sharp, and laugh-out-loud funny, Friedman details with lovable candor his friendships and rivalries with the greatest writers, actors, publishers, directors and personalities of the la...
This collection of essays, published from the 1960s to the 1990s, relates Friedman's humorous yet scrutinizing thoughts on a variety of subjects, from a butler school in Houston to numerous personalities such as Castro and Clinton.
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