★ 05/20/2024

Brodesser-Akner (Fleishman Is in Trouble) easily avoids the sophomore slump with another incisive and witty portrait of New York Jewish life. In 1980, wealthy polystyrene manufacturer Carl Fletcher was kidnapped from his Long Island home and held for a week until his wife, Ruth, paid the $250,000 ransom. Now, 40 years later, he’s still traumatized, and is dutifully tended to by the controlling but loyal Ruth. Their three children also continue to live under the shadow of the kidnapping. There’s Beamer, a moderately successful screenwriter with a secret drug and BDSM addiction; Nathan, a lawyer who’s too timid for the partner track at his firm; and Jenny, a union organizer whose chief pleasure in life is pissing off her mother. Beamer is excited about an idea for a new project starring Mandy Patinkin when Jenny texts with troubling news: due to a series of financial reversals, the family fortune they’ve all depended on is gone. How the Fletchers respond to the crisis and finally put their shared past to rest forms the core of this entertaining saga. Brodesser-Akner’s latest combines the smarts of Sarah Silverman’s stand-up, the polymath verisimilitude of Tom Wolfe’s novels, and the Jewish soul of Sholem Aleichem’s stories. This is a comedic feast. Agent: Sloan Harris, CAA. (July)

Praise for Long Island Compromise

“The wizard Weisenheimer behind Fleishman Is in Trouble is back with a big, juicy, wickedly funny social satire. . . . As weird as this may sound—Brodesser-Akner has written probably the funniest book ever about generational family trauma.”—Oprah Daily

“As she did in Fleishman, Brodesser-Akner once again demonstrates a gift for capturing the dark, unforgiving things people do and say to the ones they are supposed to love the most.”—Vulture

“A great American Jewish novel whose brew of hilarity, heartbreak, and smarts recalls the best of Philip Roth. A triumph.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“Brodesser-Akner is a steady, imaginative, insightful writer, and there are riotous passages, haunting dybbuks, and unseen twists that make it thoroughly discussable. Readers will get lost and found in its universe of wealth, family, faith, and other fallible securities.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Easily avoids the sophomore slump with another incisive and witty portrait of New York Jewish life. . . . Brodesser-Akner’s latest combines the smarts of Sarah Silverman’s stand-up, the polymath verisimilitude of Tom Wolfe’s novels, and the Jewish soul of Sholem Aleichem’s stories. This is a comedic feast.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)


Praise for Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble

“Believe the hype. Fleishman Is in Trouble is even better than we were promised. . . . A feminist jeremiad nested inside a brilliant comic novel—a book that makes you laugh so hard you don’t notice till later that your eyebrows have been singed off.”—The Washington Post

“Brodesser-Akner has written a potent, upsetting and satisfying novel, illustrating how the marital pledge—build our life together—overlooks a key fact: There are two lives.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Brodesser-Akner . . . writes with a thrilling swagger. . . . She does not so much craft prose as notate brainwaves.”—The New Yorker

“Everybody I know loves reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner. . . . A maddening, unsettling masterpiece.”—NPR

“Enthralling . . . a cutting sociological dissection of the way we live.”—Rolling Stone