Bruce Jay Friedman – författare

A Mother's Kisses is the story of Joseph, a tall, scattered looking boy of seventeen and his wonderfully indomitable mother, Meg, who is resolved, in the summer after her son's high-school graduation to start arranging his life for him, even going so far as to accompany him to college. A work of roaring comedy and emotional honesty, A Mother's Kisses is a classic of modern fiction.

A few years ago, Christopher Buckley wrote of Bruce Jay Friedman in the New York Times Book Review that he "has been likened to everyone from J. D. Salinger to Woody Allen," but that "he is: Bruce Jay Friedman, sui generis, and no mean thing. No further comparisons are necessary." We are happy to report that he remains the same Bruce Jay Friedman in his unique, unblinking, and slightly tilted essays—collected here for the first time—in Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos. A butler school in Houston, a livestock auction in Little Rock, a home for "frozen guys" in California, JFK''s humidor in Manhattan—all are jumping off points for Friedman''s baleful and sharply satirical scrutiny of American life and behavior in the second half of the twentieth century. Travel with Friedman from Harlem to Hollywood, from Port-au-Prince to Etta''s Eat Shop in Chicago. In these pieces, which were published in literary and mass-circulation magazines from the 1960s to the 1990s, you''ll meet such luminaries as Castro and Clinton, Natalie Wood and Clint Eastwood, and even Friedman''s friends Irwin Shaw, Nelson Algren, and Mario Puzo. Friedman is a master of the essay, whether the subject is crime reporting ("Lessons of the Street"), Hollywood shenanigans ("My Life among the Stars"), or his outrageous adventures as the editor of pulp magazines (the classic "Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos"). We could sing his praises as a journalist, humorist, and social critic. But, as Buckley tells us, being Bruce Jay Friedman is enough. Bruce Jay Friedman is the author of seven novels (including The Dick, Stern, and A Mother''s Kisses), four collections of short stories, four full-length plays (including Scuba Duba and Steambath), and the screenplays for the movies Splash and Stir Crazy.

Bruce Jay Friedman is the reigning don of the ironic comic novel, a man of whom The New York Times has written, "His writing is so funny -- and deceptively effortless -- critics often liken it to a stand-up comedy routine." Now he triumphantly returns to the form with Violencia!, a crackling satire of show-business pomposity, flimflam, and dreck in the spirit of Mel Brooks's The Producers. Paul Gurney is a struggling civilian clerk working the desk at a major New York homicide precinct who runs a department newsletter, The Homicider, that covers the goings-on at the precinct, dispenses advice, and disseminates interoffice gossip. But Gurney is newly divorced and dissatisfied, and abruptly decides to retire from the force, not knowing exactly what he'll do next. When he meets a shady Broadway impresario who wants to create a stage musical from his newsletter, he soon finds himself plunging headlong into the world of actors, agents, singers, songwriters, hacks, hams, and con artists. As the show Violencia! moves from rounds of financing from suspect sources to questionable casting calls to a disastrous out-of-town opening (at each stage getting progressively -- and hilariously -- worse and worse), Gurney enjoys the high living, romantic flings, and glamour of the entertainment industry. But he also comes to realize that show people aren't that different from other people he already knows: the thugs, lowlifes, and cutthroats he's encountered during his career on the homicide squad. Packed with unforgettably reprehensible characters, unimaginably turgid lyrics, and unimpeachably funny dialogue, Bruce Jay Friedman's Violencia! is a sidesplitting farce about the dark underbelly of the Great White Way.

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.