Bruce Jay Friedman - Böcker

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.

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.

In the foreword to his "The Collected Short Fiction", Bruce Jay Friedman wrote: 'In her late years, my mother confessed to me that she had dropped me on my head when I was two. As I've grown older, I've come to believe that her presumably innocent mistake resulted in the 'tilted' quality I've been accused of having in my work.'We can now add to the stories in "The Collected Short Fiction" the splendidly tilted fictions in "Three Balconies", vintage Friedman all. In these stories Friedman returns to the Jewish suburbs of New York he explored with his characteristic wit and charm in his earlier stories and novels, streets where Jew and Gentile duke it out time and again, though often each remains uncertain of the reason.In these pages you'll meet Jacob, who as a junior counselor at summer camp wakes up his young charges at midnight to tell them that their parents have been executed by the Nazis, and Alexander Kahn, a failed novelist turned journalist who breaks the law within site of the prison warden, so taken is he with the camaraderie he's discovered in the joint when compared with the thin gruel of companionship he's experienced outside.You'll meet Harry, the once famous screenwriter, and a moral man who 'lacks a moral follow through.' And in the title novella, the tragic and great Beau DeVyne, perhaps the most memorable of Friedman's characters to date.In sumptuously simple language - the language of the street, the bar, the store, the office - Friedman gives us a collection of moral fables that explore friendship and faith and failure unswervingly, yet with compassion and humor.